Wikipedia at 25: Ode to The Incredible Teacher

On the night of January 15, 2001, the internet was quieter than it would later become. Social media had not yet taught people to shout. Search engines were still clumsy. Most websites were static places where information sat behind glass, written by someone else, somewhere else, and rarely updated. On that night, a new website went live with a blank page and a premise so fragile it barely looked like an idea. It asked strangers to write an encyclopedia together, trusting that they would not ruin it.

The site was called Wikipedia.

It did not launch with fanfare or marketing or even a clear sense of what it wanted to become. It had no offices, no paid employees, no business model worth describing, no reason to believe the internet would treat it kindly. It had software that allowed anyone to edit a page instantly, and a small group of people willing to see what would happen if knowledge stopped asking for permission.

Twenty five years later, Wikipedia contains more than 65 million articles in over 300 languages. It is visited billions of times every month. It is cited by students, judges, journalists, engineers, doctors, and politicians. It is one of the first places curiosity lands, and one of the last places many arguments end. It remains free. It remains imperfect.

The idea did not begin with Wikipedia.

In 2000, Jimmy Wales was running an online finance portal and thinking about something far more ambitious. He wanted to build a free encyclopedia written by experts, rigorously reviewed, and polished to academic standards. He called it Nupedia. Larry Sanger, a philosopher with a precise way of speaking and a deep respect for intellectual structure, became its editor in chief. They recruited scholars and designed a formal peer review system. Their insistent on credentials was persistent.

Progress was glacial.

By early 2001, after months of work, Nupedia had produced fewer than two dozen finished articles. The experts they relied on were busy, making their reviews take time. Revisions took even more time. The internet, meanwhile, moved with a different rhythm. Wales and Sanger began looking for ways to accelerate the process without abandoning their ideals.

They stumbled onto wiki software.

A wiki allowed anyone to create or edit a page using a simple browser interface. Changes appeared instantly. Mistakes could be corrected by the next reader. The system assumed that openness would invite chaos, but also that chaos could be managed by collective attention. Wales proposed using a wiki as a staging ground for Nupedia articles. Sanger agreed, cautiously.

Wikipedia went live as a side project.

Within weeks, it was obvious that something unexpected was happening. Articles multiplied at a pace Nupedia could not match. People wrote about topics scholars would never prioritize, local history, niche science, pop culture, obscure biographies. Arguments broke out in public. Edits were reversed. Pages evolved visibly, sentence by sentence. many saw the mess as failure, but in hindsight, it was the engine of great.

By the end of its first year, Wikipedia had produced around 18,000 articles. By 2002, hundreds of people were editing the site daily. Many of them had no formal credentials. Some were teenagers. Others were retirees. Some wrote in the middle of the night, at work, after work, during games, after children were asleep, after curiosity refused to allow the reader rest.

The site did not collapse under vandalism, though vandalism came early and often. Instead, it developed antibodies. Editors learned to watch pages. They reverted bad edits. They argued about sources. They invented policies. Neutral point of view became a principle. Verifiability mattered more than truth. Citations became the currency of legitimacy.

In 2003, the Wikimedia Foundation was created to give the project legal and institutional shape. It was structured as a nonprofit. Wikipedia would not run ads. It would not sell data. It would not place its survival in the hands of markets and capitalism. Its funding would come from readers, in small amounts, from people who used it and wanted it to remain available.

Most donations averaged around $11.

This decision shaped everything that followed. Without advertisers, Wikipedia had no incentive to maximize outrage or keep readers scrolling as we have seen with the social media giants. Without shareholders, it had no mandate to extract value. Its success would be measured by endurance rather than growth curves.

That endurance was tested repeatedly.

Wikipedia became a battleground for ideology, nationalism, and personal grievance in ways that were impossible to ignore. Editors clashed over how to describe the Iraq War, whether it should be framed as an invasion or a liberation, and which civilian death counts deserved prominence. Pages related to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict were edited thousands of times, sometimes changing minute by minute during moments of real-world escalation, as editors argued over maps, terminology, and historical timelines. Articles about climate change became arenas where scientific consensus faced coordinated campaigns of doubt, with fossil fuel interests repeatedly attempting to soften language or elevate fringe views.

Governments noticed. In 2007, changes to articles related to American foreign policy were traced back to computers inside the US Congress. Similar patterns emerged elsewhere. Edits linked to Chinese state networks quietly altered pages about Tibet and Tiananmen Square. Russian-linked editors massaged entries on Ukraine and Soviet history. These were not dramatic hacks but careful adjustments, small shifts in wording that accumulated over time.

Corporations learned the system too. Public relations firms were caught editing pages to remove scandals. One investigation revealed paid editors working across dozens of corporate pages, polishing reputations under the guise of neutrality. Public figures responded with fury. Politicians complained that Wikipedia was biased against them. Some filed lawsuits, arguing defamation, only to discover that there was no editor in chief to subpoena, no single author to confront.

The site did not respond with crackdowns or central decrees. It responded with process. Arguments spilled onto talk pages that stretched for tens of thousands of words, dense with citations and counter-citations. Arbitration committees emerged to handle the most toxic disputes, sometimes banning editors who had devoted years of their lives to a single article. Many of these decisions were not easy, or even popular.

Now, understand that this work was unpaid. Volunteer administrators, unpaid and often exhausted, learned to de-escalate conflicts that mirrored the world’s deepest fractures, knowing that no final victory was possible, only temporary balance.

Yet people stayed.

By the late 2000s, Wikipedia had become one of the most visited websites on the planet. Students were warned not to cite it, while quietly using it anyway. Journalists checked it before filing stories.

Its scale was staggering. Articles appeared in languages spoken by millions and languages spoken only by thousands. Some editions flourished. Others struggled. Gender imbalance among editors became a persistent problem. Coverage reflected the interests and blind spots of those who showed up.

Wikipedia did not fix these issues quickly. Often, it did not fix them at all. What it did was document them publicly.

The internet changed around it.

Social platforms rose and fell. Algorithms were developed to reward provocation. Information fractured into feeds and factions. Wikipedia remained stubbornly unfashionable. Pages loaded fast. Design barely changed. Editing still required patience. Consensus remained slow.

That slowness became a kind of shield.

Today, Wikipedia publishes hundreds of new articles daily and receives nearly 15 billion visits each month. But the nature of its audience is shifting. Human traffic declined by about 18% last year. Automated traffic surged. With the rise of Artificial Intelligence around 65% of the most intense activity now comes from bots, many of them scraping articles to train artificial intelligence systems, that produce tools like ChatGPT and Gemini.

Wikipedia has become a silent teacher to machines.

This presents new challenges. The site was built on the assumption of human readers and human editors. Now its content fuels systems that do not donate. The Wikimedia Foundation has begun asking whether companies that profit from this knowledge commons should contribute to its maintenance.

The question has no easy answer.

Wikipedia was never designed to win. It was designed to persist. It survives not because people agree, but because enough of them care to correct one another. It survives because someone notices a typo or a misleading sentence, and decides it is worth fixing.

There are no offices where history is decided. There are no editors in chief shaping narratives from above. There are volunteers, guidelines, and endless conversations about what belongs on a page and what does not.

On its 25th anniversary, Wikipedia remains an experiment that refuses to conclude. It is not finished. It is not neutral in the way myths suggest. It is shaped by power, absence, effort, fatigue, and attention. It reflects the world not as it is, but as people argue it to be.

That argument, open to anyone with time and care, may be its greatest achievement.

Happy birthday to Wikipedia, arguably my most important teacher.