The domains wikipedia (later redirecting to wikipedia) and wikipedia were registered on January 12, 2001, and January 13, 2001, respectively, and Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001 as a single English-language edition at .wikipedia, and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list. Its policy of "neutral point-of-view" was codified in its first few months. Otherwise, t were initially relatively few rules, and it operated independently of Nupedia. Bomis originally intended it as a business for profit. Wikipedia gained early contributors from Nupedia, Slashdot postings, and web search engine indexing. Language editions were also created, with a total of 161 by the end of 2004. Nupedia and Wikipedia coexisted until the er's servers were taken down permanently in 2003, and its text was incorporated into Wikipedia. The English Wikipedia passed the mark of two articles on September 9, 2007, making it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, surpassing the Yongle Encyclopedia me during the Ming Dynasty in 1408, which h held the record for almost 600 years. Citing fears of commercial vertising and lack of control, users of the Spanish Wikipedia forked from Wikipedia to create Enciclopedia Libre in February 2002. Wales then announced that Wikipedia would not display vertisements, and changed Wikipedia's domain from wikipedia to wikipedia. Though the English Wikipedia reached three articles in August 2009, the growth of the edition, in terms of the numbers of new articles and of editors, appears to have peaked around early 2007. Around 1,800 articles were ded daily to the encyclopedia in 2006; by 2013 that average was roughly 800. A team at the Palo Alto Research Center attributed this slog of growth to the project's increasing exclusivity and resistance to change. Others suggest that the growth is flattening naturally because articles that c ould be ed "low-hanging fruit"—topics that clearly merit an article—have alrey been created and built up extensively. In November 2009, a researcher at the Rey Juan Carlos University in Mrid found that the English Wikipedia h lost 49,000 editors during the first three months of 2009; in comparison, it lost 4,900 editors during the same period in 2008. The Wall Street Journal cited the array of rules applied to editing and disputes related to such content among the reasons for this trend. Wales disputed these in 2009, denying the decline and questioning the study's methodology. Two years later, in 2011, he ackledged a slight decline, noting a decrease from "a little more than 36,000 writers" in June 2010 to 35,800 in June 2011. In the same interview, he also claimed the number of editors was "stable and sustainable". A 2013 MIT Technology Review article, "The Decline of Wikipedia", questioned this claim, revealing that since 200 7, Wikipedia h lost a third of its volunteer editors, and that those remaining h focused increasingly on minutiae. In July 2012, The Atlantic reported that the number of ministrators was also in decline. In the November 25, 2013, issue of New York magazine, Katherine Ward stated, "Wikipedia, the sixth-most-used website, is facing an internal crisis.In January 2007, Wikipedia first became one of the ten most popular websites in the US, according to comscore Networks. With 42.9 unique visitors, it was ranked #9, surpassing The New York Times (0) and Apple (1). This marked a significant increase over January 2006, when Wikipedia ranked 33rd, with around 18.3 unique visitors. As of March 2020, it ranked 13th in popularity according to Alexa Internet. In 2014, it received eight page views every month. On February 9, 2014, The New York Times reported that Wikipedia h 18 page views and nearly 500 unique visitors a month, "according to the ratings firm comScore". Loveland and Reagle argue that, in process, Wikipedia follows a long trition of historical encyclopedias that have accumulated improvements piecemeal through "stigmergic accumulation". On January 18, 2012, the English Wikipedia participated in a series of coordinated protests against two proposed laws in the United States Congress—the Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA)—by blacking out its pages for 24 hours. More than 162 people viewed the blackout explanation page that temporarily replaced its content.