What just happened? On January 15, 2001, Jimmy Wales made his first edit on Wikipedia, marking the launch of the virtually famous free online encyclopedia in the world. Now, Christie's volition exist auctioning this aforementioned edit as an NFT alongside the strawberry-colored iMac computer he used to create the site.

The auction titled "The Birth of Wikipedia" will run from December 3 to December 15. The highest bidder volition be allowed to edit the work as they run across fit. Wales said making the work modifiable seem similar the right style "to express artistically what [he thinks] was meaningful about that moment of potential and excitement — that you lot might brand something amazing, or you might make something that doesn't work at all."

Part of the proceeds from the auction of the NFT volition support WT.Social, a social network project from Wales that aims to create a good for you and safe alternative to traditional social media platforms. This platform is ad-gratuitous and uses a donation-based model, so any extra money would be welcome to further develop the projection.

The first edit on Wikipedia was made by co-founder Jimmy Wales on January 15, 2001: "Hello, World!"

"Wikipedia stands every bit the largest aggregation of human knowledge always assembled," said Peter Klarnet, Christie'southward senior specialist for Americana, books and manuscripts. "It'south a testament to the power of what oversupply-sourcing can achieve: allowing billions of people access to a vast trove of information — and all of information technology gratuitous of charge."

NFTs have been making headlines lately, as some are willing to pay $650,000 for a yacht only available in the metaverse, buy the very first tweet always made for $iii meg, or fifty-fifty spend $5.4 million for the source code of the World wide web. The electric current record-holder for the most expensive NFT is a collage of digital art named "Everydays: The Start 5000 Days," which sold for $69 million.

Images credit: Christie's