Wikipedia

Launched

Jan 15, 2001^[3][15]

Articles, all languages

More than 65 million in over 300 languages^[1]

English articles

7,257,230^[2]

Monthly views

Nearly 15 billion, from over 1.5 billion devices^[1]

Monthly editors

Nearly 250,000 across languages^[1]

Foundation revenue

$208.6 million in the year to June 30, 2025, of which $189.5 million was donations^[8]

Operator's chief executive

Bernadette Meehan, since January 2026^[10]

Origins

Wikipedia grew out of a slower project. In March 2000, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger started Nupedia, a free encyclopedia on the Internet whose articles passed through expert review; it produced only two articles in its first six months.^[3][15] Wikipedia, which let anyone write without prior checks, opened on Jan 15, 2001. Sanger supplied the name, joining "wiki," a Hawaiian word for quick, with "encyclopedia."^[3] It passed 20,000 articles in 18 languages by the end of that year.^[3] Sanger resigned in March 2002.^[15] The total across languages passed 1 million in September 2004, and the English edition reached that mark in March 2006.^[15]

0:17 Jimmy Wales on the vision Wales describes a very strong vision of a high-quality encyclopedia, and how to sustain it.

How it works

Each page can be changed by readers, and past versions are kept, so a bad edit can be undone. Nobody owns an article. The project's five founding principles say that it is an encyclopedia, that it is written from a neutral point of view, that its content is free to reuse, that editors should treat one another civilly, and that its rules are not fixed.^[4] Claims are meant to rest on reliable published sources rather than on an editor's own authority.^[4]

The work happens at surprising scale. The foundation reported 324 edits per minute across its editions in early 2026.^[1] The English edition alone had recorded over 1.37 billion page edits and more than 270,000 registered users active in the previous 30 days by Oct 31, 2026, along with 818 administrators, who hold extra powers, and 313 automated bots.^[2] Those active users are a small fraction of the more than 55 million accounts ever registered.^[2]

0:16 People who learn to work together Contributors in Wikipedia's own video on why the work matters.

Funding and governance

The site is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit in the United States created on June 20, 2003, which says Wikipedia is the only top ten global website run by a nonprofit.^[1][16] It carries no advertising and lives mainly on donations, with $189.5 million of the $208.6 million it took in during fiscal 2024-25 coming that way. Reader appeals on the site itself brought in 30% of total revenue. Expenses were $190.9 million.^[8]

0:32 Why Wikipedia has no advertising In a 2012 video from Wikipedia's channel, Wales calls the site a place of quiet reflection and says he takes no salary from the foundation.

A paid service, Wikimedia Enterprise, sells reliable access to Wikipedia data to large reusers. It earned $8.3 million that year, 4% of revenue, and had its first profitable year.^[8] Amazon, Google and Meta were already partners, and the foundation named Ecosia, Microsoft, Mistral AI, Perplexity, Pleias and ProRata as newer ones in 2026.^[1] Bernadette Meehan, a former U.S. ambassador to Chile, became chief executive in January 2026, following Maryana Iskander.^[10] Editorial decisions rest with the volunteer community, under its own policies.^[4]

Reliability

Whether an encyclopedia open to anyone could be trusted was the first question it faced. In December 2005, Nature sent experts 50 pairs of science entries from Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Britannica and got 42 usable reviews. They found 162 errors, omissions or misleading statements in Wikipedia and 123 in Britannica, averaging about four against three per entry, with four serious errors in each. The journal judged the gap modest, and Britannica's editors disputed the study.^[5] The sample was small, limited to science and two decades old, so it says little about Wikipedia's quality on other subjects or today.

Who writes it

The foundation has said for years that its contributors do not reflect its readers. In March 2024 it reported that only 13% of active editors on its projects identify as women, against 49% of readers, and that 19% of Wikipedia's biographies are about women, up from about 10% in 2010. The same article also describes the share of women among editors as having risen from 10% to 20%, and it does not reconcile the two editor figures.^[9] Both come from the foundation's own reporting, and neither is recent.

Artificial intelligence

No change has touched the site as sharply as artificial intelligence, which both draws on Wikipedia and competes with it. In October 2025, the foundation said human page views were down roughly 8% over several months against the same months in 2024, and pointed to search engines answering questions directly, often from its own content, and to shifts in social media. It reached that figure only after reclassifying traffic: bots built to pass as people had inflated earlier numbers from May and June, and the foundation warned that comparisons across periods need care.^[6]

Automated collection adds cost. In April 2025 the foundation said bandwidth for multimedia had risen about 50% since January 2024, mostly from scrapers, and that bots were responsible for at least 65% of its most expensive traffic while making up about 35% of page views.^[7] Meehan told Reuters in December 2025 that attribution back to Wikimedia sites is often missing when generative systems reuse its content.^[10]

Editors have resisted machine-written text on the site itself. A foundation test of AI summaries was paused in June 2025 after editors protested that it would harm readers and the project's reputation.^[14] In March 2026, press reports said editors on Wikipedia had voted 40 to 2 for a policy barring large language models from generating or rewriting article text, with narrow room for basic copyediting of an editor's own writing.^[12]

Rivals and legal pressure

Wikipedia has critics who claim it leans politically, and one of them built an alternative. Elon Musk's company xAI launched Grokipedia, written by its Grok model, in October 2025. A critical Salon commentary marking Wikipedia's 25th anniversary said most Grokipedia articles were largely copied from Wikipedia and that users could only propose edits rather than make them; those are the writer's characterizations, not an audit.^[13]

Laws written for commercial social networks have also posed problems. The foundation challenged rules under the Online Safety Act in the United Kingdom, arguing that the strictest category could force it to verify contributors' identities, endangering their privacy. The High Court dismissed the claim on Aug 11, 2025, but the judge said the ruling gave regulators no green light to impose a regime that would significantly impede Wikipedia, and that the foundation could return to court if the site were placed in that category.^[11]

Timeline

1. March 9, 2000 Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger found Nupedia.^[15]
2. Jan 15, 2001 Wikipedia launches.^[3][15]
3. June 20, 2003 The Wikimedia Foundation is created.^[16]
4. Sept 20, 2004 The article count across languages passes 1 million.^[15]
5. December 2005 Nature publishes its comparison with Britannica.^[5]
6. March 1, 2006 The English edition gains its millionth article.^[15]
7. Aug 11, 2025 A High Court in the United Kingdom dismisses the foundation's Online Safety Act challenge.^[11]
8. Oct 17, 2025 The foundation reports an 8% drop in human page views.^[6]
9. Jan 15, 2026 Wikipedia marks 25 years.^[1]
10. March 2026 Editors adopt a policy against text generated by large language models, press reports say.^[12]