The video sharing website, YouTube, is founded.

"Once the project nears completion, Professor Lessig will take the contents of this wiki and ready it for publication. The resulting book, Code v.2, will be published in late 2005 by Basic Books. All royalties, including the book advance, will be donated to Creative Commons."

At the Plenary Session of the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO held at Georgetown University, Librarian of Congress James H. Billington offers a Proposal for a World Digital Library."The invention of the printing press with movable type fanned religious wars in the 16th century. The onset of telegraphy, photography, and the power-driven printing press in the 19th century created mass journalism that fulminated nationalistic passions and world wars in the 20th century. The arrival in the late 20th century of instantaneous, networked, global communication may well have facilitated the targeted propaganda, recruitment, and two-way communication of transnational terrorist organizations more than it has helped combat them.

We are now discovering—painfully and much too slowly—that deep conflict between cultures is in many ways being fired up rather than cooled down by this revolution in communications, as was the case in the 16th and 19th centuries. Whenever new technology suddenly brings different peoples closer together and makes them aware of certain commonalities, it seems simultaneously to create a compensatory psychological need for the different peoples to define—and even assert aggressively—what is unique and distinctive about their own historic cultures."

Wikimania 2005: The First International Wikimedia Conference is held in Frankfurt am Main.

"The Internet is wide-ranging, but the bulk of the information needed for scholarly study and research is not freely available and cannot be found in a Google search. The UC Merced Library acquires and manages subscriptions to millions of scholarly articles in electronic journals, tens of thousands of electronic books, and hundreds of databases. Thanks to the Library, UC Merced students and faculty can access these scholarly electronic resources at any time with a connection to the Internet.

"The collection has what you want.

"The Library has many books and DVD movies on the shelves to support study in the areas of UC Merced specialization and to also provide a break from study with recreational reading and viewing. If what you need is not in the building, then use the University of California systemwide library catalog to request free, overnight courier delivery for any of the 32 million volumes at the other UC campuses."

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) selects Lockheed Martin Corporation to build the Electronic Records Archives (ERA) system, a permanent electronic archives system to preserve, manage, and make accessible the electronic records created by the federal government. The ERA system will capture electronic information – regardless of its format – save it permanently, and make it accessible on whatever future hardware or software is currently in use. Development of the system will continue over the next six years, and cost $308,000,000.

Second International Conference of the Preservation of Digital Objects takes place in Gottingen. Conference proceedings are posted as video files and PDFs. (The first international conference in this series took place in 2004 in Beijing.) The "Glossary" section of the website contains a list of national and international relevant organizations and their websites.

The Open Content Alliance in association with Yahoo and the Internet Archive announce plans to build a universally accessible digital archive of published information.

"Of the approximately 5 million terabytes of information out in the world, only about 170 terabytes have been indexed, he said earlier during his speech."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation decodes printer tracking dots.

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) announces that the BlueGene/L supercomputer built by IBM performs at 280.6 trillion operations per second (teraflops) on the Linpack benchmark, the standard by which major supercomputers are measured. This shatters the previous high mark of performing at 135.3 teraflops. "IBM said in a statement that if every person in the world had a handheld calculator it would still take decades to perform the number of calculations Blue Gene performs every single second."

At the UC Berkeley School of Information Mitch Kapor delivers an address entitled Content Creation by Massively Distributed Collaboration. "The sudden and unexpected importance of the Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia created by tens of thousands of volunteers and coordinated in a deeply decentralized fashion, represents a radical new modality of content creation by massively distributed collaboration. This talk will discuss the unique principles and values which have enabled the Wikipedia community to succeed and will examine the intriguing prospects for application of these methods to a broad spectrum of intellectual endeavors."