Wikipedia

In March 2000 Jimmy WalesJimmy WalesJimmy Wales is an American-born internet entrepreneur who launched Wikipedia with Larry Sanger in 2001, founded the Wikimedia Foundation in 2003, co-founded Wikia, later renamed Fandom, in 2004 and launched the social network WT:Social in 2019.Open the full entry founded NupediaNupediaNupedia was a free online encyclopedia project publicly launched in March 2000, funded by Jimmy Wales’s Internet company Bomis with Larry Sanger as editor-in-chief; its articles were written by experts and had to pass a multistep peer review. Because the process was cumbersome and output slow, the project stalled after its companion wiki took off, and it was never restored after its server crashed in September 2003.Open the full entry, a free online encyclopedia, with Larry SangerLarry SangerLarry Sanger is an American philosopher by training and founder of online encyclopedia projects; as Nupedia’s editor-in-chief he proposed building an encyclopedia as a wiki in 2001 and named Wikipedia, later founding Citizendium and the Knowledge Standards Foundation and becoming a longtime critic of Wikipedia’s neutrality.Open the full entry as editor in chief. Nupedia was organized like traditional encyclopedias, with an advisory board of experts and a lengthy review process; it was terminated in 2003 and its articles moved into Wikipedia.⁠[1]

Sanger recalled that after Ben Kovitz explained WikiWikiWeb to him in early January 2001, he proposed building the encyclopedia as a wiki; the Nupedia wiki went live on January 10 and launched as a separate project on January 15.⁠[2]

In 2005 the Wikipedia biography of John Seigenthaler falsely identified him as a potential conspirator; the claims survived Wikipedia’s community policing for 132 days.⁠[1]

On December 14, 2005, Nature published an article by Jim Giles comparing Wikipedia with Encyclopaedia BritannicaEncyclopædia BritannicaEncyclopædia Britannica is a general English-language encyclopedia first published in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1768; the name also refers to its publisher, Chicago-based Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. (which presents itself as The Britannica Group). The print edition ended in 2012, and the company’s main businesses since then have been the online encyclopedia Britannica.com, digital education products for schools and libraries, and Merriam-Webster dictionaries.Open the full entry, finding that Wikipedia came close to Britannica in the accuracy of its science entries; Britannica disputed the results and Nature responded.⁠[3]

In March 2008 Wikipedia’s article count across 250 languages reached ten million, the ten-millionth being a Hungarian biography of the 16th-century painter Nicholas Hilliard; the English edition then had 2.3 million articles, having passed two million in September 2007.⁠[4]

On May 13, 2010, Wikipedia introduced a new look with better search and navigation and a refreshed puzzle-globe logo, originally created in 2003; the design had been beta-tested by 635,000 people with an 83% retention rate, and logged-in users could switch back to the old MonoBook skin.⁠[5]

At Wikipedia’s tenth anniversary in January 2011, the English edition had more than 3.5 million articles (up from roughly 500,000 in March 2005), and all languages together had more than 17 million.⁠[6]

From 05:00 UTC on January 18, 2012, the English Wikipedia went dark worldwide for 24 hours to protest the US Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Editors made the decision through a consensus process; more than 1,800 Wikipedians took part over 72 hours, which Executive Director Sue Gardner called the largest participation in a community discussion ever seen on Wikipedia.⁠[7]

In June 2015 Wikipedia received Spain’s Princess of Asturias Award for International Cooperation, the jury calling it an important example of “international, democratic, open and participatory cooperation”; the ceremony was set for October 23 in Oviedo, with Wikimedia Foundation board chair Jan-Bart de Vreede accepting on behalf of the community.⁠[8]

In April 2017 Turkey blocked Wikipedia entirely over entries claiming ties to ISIS and other terrorist groups, under a law aimed at online security threats. The Wikimedia Foundation challenged the ban from May 2017, and in December 2019 Turkey’s Constitutional Court ruled 10–6 that it violated freedom of expression.⁠[9]

On September 7, 2019, Wikipedia was hit by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that left it intermittently unavailable in parts of Europe and the Middle East from shortly before 7 p.m. BST; Wikimedia said its Site Reliability Engineering team was working to stop the attack and restore access.⁠[10]

In January 2020 the English Wikipedia passed six million articles; the six-millionth, written by longtime editor Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight, was about Maria Elise Turner Lauder, a 19th-century Canadian schoolteacher and travel writer. The English edition then averaged about 255 million pageviews a day.⁠[11]

In September 2022 the Wikipedia page of Indian cricketer Arshdeep Singh was edited to falsely say he had been selected to play for Khalistan; the edits were reversed, and India’s IT ministry summoned Wikipedia executives for clarification.⁠[12]

In January 2023 Wikipedia’s desktop site received its first makeover in over a decade, Vector 2022, adding search with image previews, a sticky header, a table of contents that stays visible while scrolling and a collapsible sidebar; three years in development with more than 30 volunteer groups, it was live on 94% of the 318 active language editions and was rolling out to the English edition.⁠[13]

On February 1, 2023, Pakistan’s telecom regulator degraded access to Wikipedia because it had not removed content the regulator deemed sacrilegious, and on February 3 the site was blocked nationwide; on February 6 Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif ordered it unblocked, calling the ban not a suitable way to restrict access to some objectionable content.⁠[14]

Indian news agency Asian News International (ANI) sued Wikipedia for defamation in the Delhi High Court, seeking to identify contributors who allegedly called it a propaganda tool; Justice Navin Chawla dismissed Wikipedia’s plea for more time and warned of contempt proceedings if it did not comply with orders to disclose user information. In November 2024, after India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting questioned the encyclopedia’s intermediary status, the Wikimedia Foundation said it had received no official notice and stood behind its community of volunteers.⁠[15]

In April 2025 the Wikimedia Foundation said bandwidth for multimedia downloads from Wikimedia Commons had grown 50% since January 2024, driven mainly by scrapers collecting data to train AI models; bots accounted for about 35% of pageviews but about 65% of the most resource-intensive traffic.⁠[16]

In June 2025 Wikipedia tested AI-generated summaries, shown at the top of articles with a yellow “unverified” label, for opted-in users of a browser extension; after editors objected that it could damage Wikipedia’s credibility the pilot was paused, though the platform indicated continued interest in AI summaries for uses such as accessibility.⁠[17]

In October 2025 Marshall Miller of the Wikimedia Foundation said that after an update to bot detection, much of the unusually high traffic in May and June turned out to come from bots built to evade detection; human pageviews over recent months were down about 8% year on year, which he attributed to generative-AI answers in search engines and younger people seeking information on social video platforms.⁠[18]

On January 15, 2026, Wikipedia turned 25; its more than 65 million articles in over 300 languages were viewed nearly 15 billion times a month.⁠[19]

In February 2026 Wikipedia editors reached consensus to immediately deprecate the web-archiving service Archive.today and add it to the spam blacklist, after it was alleged to have used its CAPTCHA page to direct a DDoS attack at a blogger’s site; it had been linked more than 695,000 times across the encyclopedia.⁠[20]

In March 2026 Wikipedia editors voted 40–2 for a policy stating that “the use of LLMs to generate or rewrite article content is prohibited,” while still allowing editors to use them to suggest basic copyedits to their own writing, provided a human reviews the changes and no new content is added.⁠[21]

Wikipedia: Official website: https://www.wikipedia.org/ (opens in a new window)⁠[22]

Wikimedia Foundation: Official website: https://wikimediafoundation.org/ (opens in a new window)⁠[22]