Wikipedia turns 25, still boasting zero ads and over 7 billion visitors per month despite the rise of AI and threats of government repression
As reported by Tom’s Hardware, the ubiquitous, nonprofit, user-driven reference site Wikipedia celebrated its 25th anniversary on January 15. Though threatened by AI and censorious repression in the US and UK, Wikipedia remains a staggering achievement and a rare bright spot on the modern internet.
As Tom’s Hardware pointed out, Wikipedia founder and public face Jimmy Wales made the site’s first edit on a deliciously era-appropriate iMac G3 on January 15, 2001. That’s the really cute, all-in-one Apple with a CRT display and translucent Game Boy plastic.
Equally famous to Wikipedia’s free access is the fact that anyone can edit it—I recall elementary school teachers cautioning us from trusting it too much for this reason. All the same, Wikipedia’s enthusiastic editors and commitment to citing sources make it the place to start any amateur research project, as well as plenty of professional ones. If you want to sound smart—like in a PC Gamer article, say—just go to the sources cited by Wikipedia and cite them. I don’t think they mind.
Nothing seems to have directly come of Martin’s threats, and he has since been promoted to be the US Pardon Attorney, overseeing the administration’s questionable clemency for figures like Changpeng Zhao, a crypto billionaire who coincidentally struck a business deal with the Trump family crypto start-up, World Liberty Financial, around the same time. Wikipedia does remain a bit of a bête noir for American conservatives however, much like trans women, immigrants, and the population of Minneapolis, Minnesota.
In October, the Wikimedia Foundation revealed it was experiencing unusually high AI-related bot traffic, even as human readership was down 8% due to AI chat bot usage and the proliferation of generated answers in search. The foundation said it is taking steps to combat this, and I started kicking five bucks a month to Wikipedia a few years ago so I can click away from those fundraising requests guilt-free.
But let’s end on a fun note: Did you know that the Wikipedia page for the Ship of Theseus philosophical exercise has been edited so much, it does not contain any words or phrases from the original version of the article? Neat.
