It looks like everything can be sold as an NFT these days—even the very first edit ever made on Wikipedia. The online chronicler of history, Wikipedia’s first edit that reads “Hello, World!” was sold for a whopping $750,000 (or P37 million) by the website’s co-founder Jimmy Wales through Christie’s auction house.
The NFT was aptly named The Birth of Wikipedia and was sold alongside the Strawberry iMac used by Wales to create Wikipedia. The old school iMac was sold for $187,500 (or P9.3 million).
Almost 20 years since Wikipedia first launched, the online encyclopedia has now become the “largest and most-read reference work in history,” says Christie’s. While some might mock Wikipedia for its inaccuracy and open source system, the online encyclopedia has gathered a large and loyal community that’s managed to improve the site’s reliability and authority.
After pocketing $937,500 (or P46.7 million) from the sale, Jimmy Wales will be allocating a portion of the proceeds to his alternative social media project WT.Social, which he hopes will develop into a nontoxic, ad-free social media platform, if such a thing is possible. But hey, he did manage to create the world’s biggest encyclopedia, so never say never.
