According to online sources, Jimmy Wales, the founder of the famous online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, is reportedly launching a non-fungible token or NFT. The founder will be selling the NFT on the Ethereum blockchain, and he described this as the first Wikipedia edit. The auction of the NFT will take place in the auction house called Christie’s from December 3 to December 15, 2021. The NFT, which will be called the ‘Birth of Wikipedia’ will be offered along with the Strawberry iMac that was used by Jimmy Wales for launching Wikipedia.
The auction house has informed that the buyer of the ‘Birth of Wikipedia’ non-fungible token will be given a recreation of the first moments in the existence of Wikipedia. This will be based on the code which was found on the earliest backup of the website. There is a feeling of nostalgia associated with this NFT as it harks back to the early days of the internet. The earlier Wikipedia page came with a basic homepage and a plain text interface. According to the information provided in the auction listing, the buyer of the NFT will be given a digital sculpture. This will be comprised of ‘Hello, World’ database files, digital rendering, Perl CGI-script, and the URL to the live website.
Notably, a similar sale was conducted by the World Wide Web inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, who came out with a non-fungible token that represented the source code of the first web browser. This NFT was reportedly sold for around $5.4 million. The auction house Christie’s expects that the Wikipedia NFT will also sell for a few million dollars.
