Before Wikipedia moved to wikipedia.org, what domain did it use?
Answer
wikipedia.com
Answer
wikipedia.com
Before Wikipedia moved to wikipedia.org, it used the domain wikipedia.com.
Wikipedia launched on January 15, 2001, as a new collaborative project connected to Nupedia, the earlier encyclopedia project founded by Jimmy Wales and supported by Larry Sanger. The wikipedia.com and wikipedia.org domains were registered in January 2001, but the site initially operated under the commercial-sounding .com address.
In August 2002, Wales announced that Wikipedia would not carry advertising, and the project changed its main domain from wikipedia.com to wikipedia.org. The move reflected Wikipedia’s increasingly nonprofit, public-service identity, although the Wikimedia Foundation itself was not founded until June 2003.
A common mix-up is confusing Wikipedia’s original domain with Nupedia.org or Wikimedia.com. Nupedia was the predecessor project, while Wikimedia later became the name of the nonprofit foundation and the broader family of projects. The .org address became the familiar home for Wikipedia and its language editions.
Source: Wikipedia · fact-checked Sept. 2026