Wikipedia

» go to wikipedia.org now (it still works)

~ what it is ~

Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia. anyone can edit it. it currently has about 60 million articles across 300 plus languages. it runs on donations. it has been online since january 2001. it should not work, by every theory of how internet things are supposed to work. it works anyway.

i started using wikipedia in around 2003 when i was at university in turkey. before wikipedia my reference was a paper encyclopedia and a small set of bookmarked sites for specific topics. wikipedia replaced both of those almost immediately. by 2005 i was checking it for almost everything. by 2010 i was occasionally fixing typos in turkish articles. that is how it gets you.

the project was started by jimmy wales and larry sanger in january 2001. they had been running an earlier project called nupedia, which was traditional encyclopedia model with experts writing articles. nupedia was slow. wikipedia was meant to be a feeder project where anyone could write a draft and experts would review it. the experts could not keep up. anyone editing turned out to be the actual product.

~ why it should not work ~

imagine pitching this in 2001. anyone can edit, including teenagers, including people who do not know what they are talking about, including people who deliberately want to mess it up. the editors are mostly anonymous. there is no professional staff writing anything. the funding model is "we will ask for donations once a year and hope that works." the goal is to compete with encyclopaedia britannica.

no investor would have funded this. no committee would have approved it. it ran on the founders' belief that it would self-correct, plus the belief that more people would want to make the encyclopedia better than would want to vandalise it. that belief turned out to be correct. for some topics, by enormous margins.

~ how it actually works ~

the magic is in the speed of correction. when an article gets defaced, you can watch it get fixed in under a minute by a stranger. there are bots that detect obvious vandalism and revert it automatically. there are humans who watch the recent-changes feed all day. there are subject matter experts who follow specific topics. the combination means that bad edits do not stay up long, even though anyone can make them.

for accurate, neutral information, this works really well. wikipedia is now the standard reference for almost any topic with a stable consensus. for topics that are politically charged or in active dispute, it works worse. there is constant edit warring on articles about contemporary politics. wikipedia's neutrality policies handle this better than you would expect, but not perfectly.

the funding model also works. the wikimedia foundation is a non-profit. they do an annual fundraiser with banner ads on wikipedia itself. they raise about 150 million dollars a year. that is enough to run the servers, pay a small staff, and keep going. they have refused multiple offers to monetize the site. the servers run. the encyclopedia stays free. people keep donating.

~ what almost killed it ~

the most serious threat was the rise of generative AI in 2023. for a while it looked like ChatGPT and similar tools would replace wikipedia as the first stop for casual lookups. wikipedia traffic actually did dip in 2023 to 2024. but two things happened. first, AI tools were getting facts wrong often enough that wikipedia stayed useful as the source-of-truth check. second, the AI tools themselves were trained on wikipedia, which means wikipedia has new value as the input to AI, even if it has less direct human traffic.

the foundation is actively grappling with this in 2026. there is real concern about what happens to volunteer editor motivation when fewer people read the articles directly. there is discussion about whether to charge AI companies for training data access. nothing is settled. but the project is still alive and the editor community is still active.

~ why it still matters ~

wikipedia is the largest collaborative human project in history that is not a religion or a state. it is run by volunteers. it produces a public good that is genuinely useful to almost everyone with internet access. it survives on the goodwill of about a million people who edit at all and a few hundred thousand who edit regularly.

this is one of the few miracles of the modern internet that has not been corrupted. nobody has bought wikipedia. nobody has stuffed it with ads. nobody has used it to push a product. it remains, against everything that has happened to similar projects in the same era, just an encyclopedia that anyone can edit. if you grew up with the internet you might find it easy to take wikipedia for granted. you should not. it is one of the actually good things.

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