Probably March 2001 would be the earliest slashdotting:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/03/02/1422244
And right at the end it says:
Hector, who started the 'gnupedia' project recently wrote this on his mailing list:
"Now, the FSF's plans are give all the support to the Nupedia project. So Nupedia will become the official GNU encyclopedia."
-0) "Nupedia seems to be too centralized and slow moving for me. I understand the need for quality control, but wouldn't it make more sense to have a more bazaar-type free encyclopedia project?"
Maybe so! People who want to get started _today_ on contributing free texts to the world can do so at Wikipedia. All the content is released under the GNU FDL, and it already has over 1000 articles. Short, and maybe not the high quality of Nupedia, but with time? Who knows..."
On 13/04/2009, Fred Bauder fredbaud@fairpoint.net wrote:
What really made Wikipedia was free publicity from Slashdot and The New York Times during 2001. I don't know if I could find the initial Slashdoting, but here are the links to the two New York Times articles:
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/20/technology/fact-driven-collegial-this-site...
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/09/magazine/the-year-in-ideas-a-to-z-populist...
So I would say at least some of the credit goes to folks who recognized a good idea and alerted the rest of the intellectual and internet community to it.
Fred Bauder