Wikipedia at 25: A Quarter-Century of Free Knowledge in a World of Paywalls

The Wikipedia service has turned 25 years old. The platform was launched on January 15, 2001, and since then has gained enormous popularity. Today, the platform ranks among the top ten most visited sites globally, periodically swapping places with Reddit and WhatsApp.

Aside from that, Wikipedia is the most successful non-commercial, non-social, and non-search online resource. It is also the largest encyclopedia in human history in terms of number of articles and breadth of topics. Recently, the platform reached a milestone of over 55 million articles across more than 300 languages, highlighting its incredible reach and diversity.

As before, articles on the site are written by ordinary users without any payment. Anyone can also edit articles, although over the years the portal has developed a system of rules, moderation, and arbitration. However, despite this, Wikipedia is often criticized for inaccurate data and the politicization of certain materials in some language versions of articles. Notably, Wikipedia recently faced challenges over its representations of global movements, requiring increased scrutiny from editors to maintain neutrality.

25 years ago, Wikipedia was a dream, ambitious and seemingly unattainable. Fast forward to today-and we see billions of readers, hundreds of thousands of editors: simple enthusiasts, writers, teachers, specialists in various fields, and scientists. Wikipedia has become the world’s number one information source. If you are looking for some information, you will most likely find it there. Wikipedia can share knowledge from various fields, from the history of small villages and biographies of individuals to show business, global politics, and cutting-edge scientific achievements. More recently, Wikipedia’s vast database has been crucial for training artificial intelligence, including advances in natural language processing.

In a world where paid subscriptions and advertisements seem normal, Wikipedia remains free, neutral, open, and humane. This is the internet promised to us: 25 years of knowledge, cooperation, consensus, and humanism at its best. All of this is driven by simple volunteers, editing articles, debating, and reaching agreement. You can participate in editing at any time. The preservation and development of knowledge depend on each of us.