18 Years of Wikipedia Website Design History - 17 Images

Wikipedia is undisputedly the internet's most popular crowdsourced reference site. It went live in January 2001, and for its first year it was incredibly spartan. No logo, no sidebar, no color. What follows is two decades of an encyclopedia slowly gaining momentum, but staying true to its roots.

A fun way to trace the evolution of Wikipedia in this page is to watch the article counter in the homepage images as you scroll down. It starts at six thousand!

Humble Beginnings (2001)

The earliest image capture we have shows a site that runs on UseModWiki, a single Perl script, and it shows. The page title is the literal filename, HomePage, rendered as a large underlined link. Hallmarks were default browser blue on white, horizontal rules for page structure, and a search box parked at the very bottom of the page.

The welcome text rewards a close read. "We started in January 2001 and already have over 6,000 articles. We want to make over 100,000." Below it sits a category list arranged like a library card catalog, and beneath that a line giving the server's opinion of the date: "Today is Friday, [July 27]?, 2001, servertime (Pacific Standard Time)." That question mark after the date is a red link in disguise. Even the calendar had gaps back then.

The list of international Wikipedias is already there, though. Catalan, Chinese, German, Esperanto, French, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish. Twelve languages, six thousand articles, one Perl script.

Wikipedia homepage (2001)
Source: web.archive.org

The Encyclopedia Gets A Logo (2002)

A year later the page is almost unrecognizable, and the first logo has arrived: a scan of an antique book page, all serif text, with WIKIPEDIA set beneath it in small caps. A bookish choice that lasted about eighteen months.

Interestingly, nearly everything structural about modern Wikipedia turns up in this one screenshot. A left sidebar with Main Page, Recent changes, Random page. Page meta-info links at the top, along with a search box. Look at the top right corner and you will find the user's bare IP address, which is how the software greeted anyone who hadn't logged in.

The article counter now reads 48,152. There is also a Press coverage section listing three pieces, two from the New York Times (September 20th, 2001 / December 9th, 2001) and one from MIT's Technology Review, which tells you roughly how novel the whole idea still was.

Wikipedia homepage (2002)
Source: web.archive.org

The Front Page Becomes A Newspaper (2003)

By March 2003 the Main Page has split into two columns and grown a Selected Articles box, and the effect is that of a newspaper front page. In the news reads Shock and awe, SARS, Elizabeth Smart, Djindjic. Ongoing events lists the Iraq war and the North Korea crisis. Historical anniversaries runs from Henry V to My Lai.

It makes for a precise time capsule. The page is stamped March 22nd, 2003, two days into the invasion of Iraq, and the front page is already covering it. The article counter reads 111,151.

Wikipedia homepage (2003)
Source: web.archive.org

Red Links And Missing Articles (2003)

The Biology article from the same period shows the encyclopedia from the inside, and it is mostly a list of links. No infobox, no table of contents, no photographs.

Scan the Major Branches of Biology block and you will spot the red ones. Palaeobotany, Palaeozoology, Phylogeography, History of biology. Red meant the article did not exist yet, and in 2003 the red links were everywhere. The encyclopedia advertised its own holes and invited you to fill them.

Wikipedia biology entry (2003)
Source: web.archive.org

Color Arrives, And So Does The Globe (2003)

Later that same year comes the biggest single visual jump in the set. The puzzle globe appears, incomplete at the top, its pieces lettered with glyphs from a dozen writing systems. Color arrives with it: a pink band for Selected Articles, a blue Encyclopedia column, a yellow Community column.

The best detail hides in one line of small text above the pink band. "Join the ratification process to vote on the new logo. Unhappy with the winner? Submit your own new variations of the winning logo." This screenshot caught the encyclopedia in the middle of deciding what it would look like, with the ballot still open.

Wikipedia homepage, now with color (2003)
Source: web.archive.org

The Main Page Format Settles (2004)

The November 2004 capture is where the Main Page reaches the shape it still holds today. Images are present in the main content area for the first time. Today's featured article on the left with a photograph. In the news on the right. Did you know underneath. Selected anniversaries for the date, which happens to be November 22nd: Blackbeard killed off North Carolina in 1718, Kennedy in Dallas in 1963, Juan Carlos declared King of Spain in 1975, Mike Tyson becoming the youngest heavyweight champion in 1986.

In the news is following the Ukrainian election run-off between Yanukovych and Yushchenko, days before the Orange Revolution. 401,591 articles.

Wikipedia homepage (2004)
Source: web.archive.org

The Globe Gets Its Own Front Door (2005)

Somewhere along the way wikipedia.org became a doorstep rather than a destination, and by 2005 it is the globe and almost nothing else. Ten languages orbit it with their article counts underneath, English leading at 883,000 and Español bringing up the rear at 81,000.

Just above the search box, the word search is repeated in ten languages in tiny gray type. Below the fold, every remaining Wikipedia is listed in bands by size, down to the ones with a hundred articles.

Wikipedia homepage (2005)
Source: web.archive.org

MonoBook And The Money (2005)

MonoBook, the skin that would define Wikipedia for six years, is in place by 2005: tabbed folders reading article, discussion, view source, history, and a sidebar broken into labeled groups.

The row worth pausing on runs across the top. A green progress bar, the words "You can give the gift of knowledge by donating to Wikipedia!", and a running total of $153,217.63 for the quarterly fundraiser. The slogan has hardened into its final form by now too, the one still in use two decades later: the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.

889,624 articles in English. The Biology entry has picked up a proper lead paragraph, and by the 2006 capture below the Main Page is simply doing more of the same, at a larger size.

Wikipedia English language homepage (2005)
Source: web.archive.org

Wikipedia biology entry (2005)
Source: web.archive.org

Wikipedia English language homepage (2006)
Source: web.archive.org

Articles in Full Bloom (2008)

Set the 2008 Biology page beside the 2003 one and the difference is an encyclopedia learning to behave like an encyclopedia.

There is a table of contents with a hide toggle. There are numbered footnotes. There is a Greek etymology in the opening line. There is a photo montage in the top right corner: E. coli, a tree fern, a gazelle, a Goliath beetle. The sidebar has grown labeled sections and a language list long enough to run off the bottom of the screen. Remember those four photographs.

Wikipedia biology entry (2008)
Source: web.archive.org

The Portal At Full Size (2010)

Five years on, the front door is laid out exactly as it was, with much bigger numbers on it. English has gone from 883,000 articles to 3,512,000. The row of translated search labels has swollen from ten words to roughly forty, wrapping across three lines of gray type.

Wikipedia homepage (2010)
Source: web.archive.org

Vector Arrives (2011)

Vector replaced MonoBook as the default skin in 2010, and the 2011 Biology article is the first capture here to show it. The tabs have flattened into plain labels, the borders have thinned out, and the whole page breathes more.

The picture box went travelling, too. The muted four from 2008 have been replaced by six in saturated color: Salmonella, a koala, a lady fern, a cluster of fly agaric mushrooms, a red-eyed tree frog, and a tarantula. It is the most colorful this article ever gets.

Wikipedia biology entry (2011)
Source: web.archive.org

A Decade Of Holding Still (2014)

From here the Main Page stops changing in major ways you'd notice. The green featured article panel, the blue In the news panel, On this day beneath it, the portal links across the top. Compare this 2014 capture with the 2019 one at the bottom of the page and the layout is effectively identical across five years.

What changed was the number. 4,680,404 articles. Continued massive growth.

Wikipedia English language homepage (2014)
Source: web.archive.org

The Portal, Cleaner (2016)

The 2016 front door drops the long language bands in favor of ten languages around the globe and a row of sister project cards along the bottom: Commons, Wikivoyage, Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikinews, Wikidata, Wikiversity, Wikiquote, MediaWiki. The search box picks up a modern language selector and a blue button.

Wikipedia homepage (2016)
Source: web.archive.org

The Pictures Come Home (2019)

Look at the top right of the 2019 Biology article, then scroll back up to 2008.

E. coli. A gazelle. A Goliath beetle. A tree fern. The same four photographs, eleven years and one colorful detour later, rearranged slightly and given a tidier caption. The type has grown and an infobox has appeared beneath them, but the pictures went away and came back.

The 2019 Main Page shows 5,877,787 articles in English. The 2001 page hoped for 100,000 someday. The design took twenty years to settle and then largely stopped moving, while the encyclopedia it was built to hold grew by a factor of a thousand.