Jimmy Wales made the first edit to Wikipedia on January 15, 2001, marking the start of the world’s best-known free online encyclopedia. Christie’s will auction this exact edit as an NFT.
The auction titled “The Birth of Wikipedia” will take place from December 3 to December 15. The highest bidder will be entitled to edit the work as they see fit.
A portion of the proceeds from the sale of the NFT will go to support WT.Social, a social network project based in Wales that aims to create an alternative to traditional social platforms. As this platform is ad-free and based on a donation model, any additional funding would help develop the project further.
“Wikipedia is the largest collection of human knowledge ever gathered,” said Peter Klarnet, Christie’s senior specialist for Americana, books, and manuscripts. “It is a testament to the power of what crowd-sourcing can achieve: allowing billions of people access to a vast trove of information — and all of it free of charge.”
‘When most people first saw the internet they didn’t think: “Great, I can get dog food delivered to my house!” They thought: “Wow, this is amazing, human minds can connect all around the world. We can get information, we can share our knowledge”. And Wikipedia is really all about that. It is still realizing that dream, if not perfectly — we’re not finished yet and we’ve got a lot of work to do,” Klarnet concludes.
