"
Wikipedia was founded as an offshoot of Nupedia, a now-abandoned
project to produce a free encyclopedia. Nupedia had an elaborate
system of peer review and required highly qualified contributors,
but the writing of articles was slow. During 2000, Jimmy Wales,
founder of Nupedia, and Larry Sanger, whom Wales had employed to
work on the project, discussed ways of supplementing Nupedia with a
more open, complementary project. Multiple sources suggested that a
wiki might allow members of the public to contribute material, and
Nupedia's first wiki went online on January 10, 2001.
There was considerable resistance on the part of Nupedia's
editors and reviewers to the idea of associating Nupedia with a
website in the wiki format, so the new project was given the name
"Wikipedia" and launched on its own domain, wikipedia.com, on
January 15 (now called "Wikipedia Day" by some users). The
bandwidth and server (in San Diego) were donated by Wales. Other
current and past Bomis employees who have worked on the project
include Tim Shell, one of the cofounders of Bomis and its current
CEO, and programmer Jason Richey. The domain was eventually changed
to the present wikipedia.org when the not-for-profit Wikimedia
Foundation was launched as its new parent organization, prompting
the use of a ".org" domain to denote its non-commercial
nature."
from the 'about' section on the wikipedia home page, hope it
helps
