![Wikipedia Is Now 25 Years Old [Citation Not Needed]](https://i.pcmag.com/imagery/articles/049MdyIFdJljyUAmPAlOvjy-1.fit_lim.size_1200x630.v1768514228.jpg "Wikipedia Is Now 25 Years Old [Citation Not Needed]")
The site that’s become the quasi-permanent record of so many politicians’ misdeeds is now old enough to run for Congress itself: Wikipedia turned 25 years old on Thursday.
The collaboratively written and edited free online encyclopedia has grown immensely from its Jan. 15, 2001, beginning as an English-language offshoot of an earlier collaborative effort called Nupedia. As of Thursday afternoon, it spans 7,122,479 articles in English alone (when I started writing this Thursday morning, the total was 7,122,404), plus active editions in another 341 languages that run from Abkhazian (6,484 articles) to Zulu (11,855 articles).
Wikipedia is celebrating the occasion with a Wikipedia 25 timeline site that features some recollections of its early days from co-founder Jimmy Wales (“you got in touch with a local internet service provider and they had cages and you could go and install your equipment there”) and, of course, requests for donations.
The San Francisco-based nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation’s flagship project reaching the quarter-century mark is impressive enough just considering how many online properties have flopped since 2021. But Wikipedia overcoming some high-profile mistakes to become a generally accurate encyclopedia based on volunteer contributions from often-anonymous editors seems even more exceptional after so many other social platforms—notably Usenet—have crumbled from their inability to manage toxic user interactions.
(Disclosure: I do not have a Wikipedia entry myself, but I do have a Wikipedia account I haven’t done anything with in years; my work has also been cited in several dozen articles, while a few photos I’ve posted under Creative Commons licensing have been used to illustrate articles.)
And yet Wikipedia’s core principles about its content—anyone can write it but they must do so “from a neutral point of view,” and editors “should treat each other with respect and civility”—have somehow held up despite “edit wars” over particularly divisive topics.
When Wikipedia was new, computer desktops looked like this. (Credit: Wikimedia Foundation)
Wikipedia has become one of the most-referenced works in human history. Even Microsoft’s money could not prevent its Encarta CD-ROM encyclopedia from being known today mainly via its Wikipedia entry. Likewise, Elon Musk’s fortune doesn’t seem to have helped his AI-edited Grokipedia make much headway against Wikipedia either.
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Wikipedia has also become a part of the online culture it chronicles: Its tag “[citation needed],” for a fact advanced without a supporting link, has become an internet meme in its own right.
As Wikipedia’s reach and influence has grown, it has itself become a target. Publicists and propagandists have been caught paying editors to edit articles to their liking while political leaders in democracies and authoritarian regimes have accused Wikipedians of one bias or another in its writing and sourcing. Some of the world’s least-free countries have outright blocked Wikipedia, notably Russia, China, and North Korea.
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The Human Rights Foundation found a creative response to North Korea’s censorship: smuggling donated flash drives and SD cards into the country preloaded with, among other things, offline copies of the Korean-language edition of Wikipedia.
The last several years have seen Wikipedia challenged by a different external factor: the rise of AI. Crawlers seeking content to feed into large language models have come to put a serious dent into Wikipedia’s bandwidth costs, while Wikipedia tried adding AI summaries of articles but editors rejected that idea after a brief trial.
The platform has introduced machine-readable access to its content for AI developers and has added paid, enterprise-tier plans. On Thursday, the Wikimedia Foundation announced a new set of these “Enterprise Partners” that include Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, the French AI firm Mistral, and Perplexity, joining such earlier partners as Google and its far smaller German search rival Ecosia.
That kind of resilient, adaptive response can provide a useful example to other content sites wrestling with how to deal with AI–and it should serve Wikipedia well for the next 25 years [citation needed].
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Rob Pegoraro writes about interesting problems and possibilities in computers, gadgets, apps, services, telecom, and other things that beep or blink. He’s covered such developments as the evolution of the cell phone from 1G to 5G, the fall and rise of Apple, Google’s growth from obscure Yahoo rival to verb status, and the transformation of social media from CompuServe forums to Facebook’s billions of users. Pegoraro has met most of the founders of the internet and once received a single-word email reply from Steve Jobs.
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