Wikipedia Celebrates Its 25th Anniversary
Credit: Wikimedia
Wikipedia is celebrating 25 years since its launch on January 15, 2001. Since then, this modest site with just a few hundred pages has grown into one of the largest sources of knowledge on the internet. Today, the platform hosts over 65 million articles in numerous languages, receiving approximately 15 billion views monthly.
To mark the occasion, the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that supports Wikipedia, released a series of short documentaries dedicated to its eight core editors. Among them are Hurricane Hank, who began editing Wikipedia in 2005 and made significant contributions to the Hurricane Katrina article, and Netha, a physician from India who used her medical expertise to combat misinformation surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic.
As Wikipedia itself notes, its prototype was Nupedia, created by high-brow experts. However, at some point, a very democratic decision was made to give “ordinary people” a voice, inviting every user to become an author, editor, and reviewer. The logic is simple: no one person, even the smartest, can know everything, but together we are powerful, and if we take a sliver from each person—that is, from the facts—we get comprehensive material.
The project was so popular that Wikipedia quickly became a global, international project. A telling fact: as of early 2026, it contains over 66 million articles in over 340 languages, and the project’s website, although non-commercial, is one of the most visited on the Internet.
However, to date, attitudes toward this source of information remain rather ambiguous. And while some continue to visit, read, and believe everything written there, others, on the contrary, use the phrase “taken from Wikipedia” as a sign of utter amateurism. And for others, this resource represents an opportunity to deliberately sow misinformation, especially when entire groups and organizations take on the task.
