Wikipedia is 25 years old, and the thing that started as a scrappy side project with about a hundred pages has quietly become the nervous system of the internet. It is the site you rarely think about but constantly lean on, whether you are winning a bar quiz, checking a filmography mid‑stream, or—if you are an AI model—learning how the world fits together.​

The origin story feels almost too modest for what it became. In January 2001, Jimmy Wales and a small group of collaborators spun up a free, open encyclopedia on the then‑tiny domain Wikipedia.org, an experiment in letting strangers build something together with almost no central control. Early on, it was chaotic: just over a hundred articles, frequent arguments over what counted as “notable,” and a lot of very 2001‑era design. But the core bet—that if you give people good tools and a few ground rules, they will document the world for one another—turned out to be right on a scale nobody predicted.​

Fast‑forward to 2026, and the raw numbers are frankly absurd. Wikipedia now hosts more than 65 million articles across over 300 language editions, updated constantly, branching into everything from obscure fungal taxa to last night’s playoff game. Across all Wikimedia projects, those pages are part of a much larger ecosystem of roughly 370 million content pages, powered by tens of millions of registered users and hundreds of thousands of active editors. While you are reading this sentence, the site is seeing thousands of pageviews and around 18 edits per second from people all over the world.​

What tends to get lost behind those big stats is that Wikipedia is, at its core, a volunteer project. Almost a quarter of a million people regularly write, edit, and fact‑check articles, arguing in talk pages, reverting vandalism at 3 am, and quietly polishing prose no one will ever know they touched. The Wikimedia Foundation likes to frame this as “humanity at its best,” and in this particular case, it is hard to disagree: a global, messy, multilingual conversation gradually hardening into something resembling shared knowledge.​

One thing that has changed over 25 years is what “using Wikipedia” actually means. In 2006, it meant typing the URL into a browser or clicking a blue link from a search engine and landing on a page with the iconic puzzle‑globe logo. In 2026, a growing share of Wikipedia’s influence happens upstream, inside systems you never see. Its content is continuously scraped and ingested by search engines, assistants, and large language models, so even when people are not loading a Wikipedia page directly, they are still consuming its distilled knowledge in answers, snippets, and AI‑generated paragraphs.​

That shift comes with a twist: human traffic to the site is actually down, even as its indirect reach is arguably higher than ever. One recent analysis put the drop in direct visits at roughly 8 percent as users lean more on AI‑powered search and chat interfaces. Inside the Wikimedia movement, there is a real-time rethinking of what “success” looks like: is the job still to get you to click through to an article, or to make sure that whenever you ask a question anywhere online, the underlying facts have been vetted by a community that cares about citations and talk‑page debates?​

The 25th birthday celebrations lean heavily into that human side. The official anniversary hub features short profiles of volunteers like Andrew, who has spent two decades documenting hurricanes, and Netha, a medical editor who quietly fights misinformation by improving health articles that millions of people read during anxious late‑night searches. There is also Jimmy Wales himself, repositioned not as the genius founder but as the guy who “dreamed up Wikipedia and watched other people turn it into a global public good.” It is a subtle narrative shift from “visionary” to “caretaker,” and it matches the way the community usually thinks about power on the site.​

And yes, there is merch. For its 25th, Wikipedia has developed a birthday‑themed collection ranging from puzzle‑piece pillows to a “carrying the internet” tote bag, plus sticker sheets that try to translate that distinctly nerdy pride of editing into something you can actually hold. There is even a new mascot, a wide‑eyed “Baby Globe” character appearing in collabs like a limited‑run plushie with Makeship—part fundraising tool, part attempt to give the world’s biggest reference work a friendlier face. It is a reminder that this isn’t just a database; it is a culture that is trying, sometimes a little awkwardly, to celebrate itself.​

Money, famously, is not the primary language Wikipedia speaks, but it is a constant background concern. The site still runs without ads or paywalls, relying mostly on millions of small donations, often in the range of just a few dollars. Those banners that pop up asking for the “price of a coffee” are not just marketing copy; individual contributions are the bulk of the Wikimedia Foundation’s budget, underwriting servers, legal defense, product teams, and support for communities editing in languages that do not have big donor bases.​

The anniversary is also a good moment to remember that Wikipedia is not a monolith, but one project in a wider family. Behind the main site sit Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, Wikisource, Wikiquote, Wikivoyage and others, each filling a different niche: structured facts, images and media, public‑domain texts, notable quotations, travel guidance. Together, they form a kind of shadow infrastructure for the web, quietly feeding into research, journalism, digital humanities projects, and the increasingly hungry models that power today’s AI.​

Of course, the last 25 years have not been controversy‑free. Wikipedia has wrestled with biased coverage, editor demographics skewed toward certain geographies and genders, and the classic “anyone can edit” problem that sometimes lets hoaxes or bad information slip through. The flip side is that every article is a living document, open to challenge, re‑sourcing, and revision, with contentious topics often protected by multiple layers of policy and community‑agreed process. That culture of constant self‑correction is messy, but it is also the reason Wikipedia has become one of the most trusted starting points for fact‑checking in an era of deepfakes and viral misinformation.​

If anything, the AI moment has thrown Wikipedia’s strengths and vulnerabilities into sharper relief. Large language models lean heavily on their content, but do not always inherit its habits of flagging disputed claims or showing their work. Meanwhile, Wikipedia’s own community is experimenting with how (and whether) to use AI for tasks like copyediting or vandalism detection without letting machine‑generated text wash out the human editorial judgment that made the project useful in the first place.​

Wikipedia at 25 still feels disarmingly simple. You type a word, you click a link, and you land on a page that tries—however imperfectly—to explain something, with sources at the bottom and talk‑page arguments just one tab away. Behind that simplicity is one of the strangest and most successful social experiments on the internet: a quarter century of people who did not know each other agreeing, line by line, on what the world looks like.​