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ZDNET's key takeaways

• Wikipedia is the world's most popular online encyclopedia.
• It is the most successful open data project of all time.
• However, AI brings new challenges and long-term threats.

Today, when people ask, 'Where was Madonna born?' 'Who won the 1999 Super Bowl?' or 'Who's the current world classical chess champion?' (Bay City, Michigan, the Denver Broncos, and Gukesh Dommaraju), they turn to Wikipedia. Or, to be more exact, if they Google the answer, Wikipedia is the top source, but Google's AI Overview is what they'll see at the search results page. It's Wikipedia writers, however, who did the research for the answers.

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Twenty-five years ago, it was another story. Before 15 January 2001, if you did a Google search, your answers to those earlier questions would have come from a Madonna fan site, ESPN, and the Internet Chess Club. On that day, a small nonprofit launched what seemed like a utopian idea, an encyclopedia that anyone could edit. Today, it's one of the top 10 websites in the world, cited in court rulings, academic papers, and journalism. And yet, volunteers and donations still run it, without a single ad in sight.

Growing pains

Wikipedia started as a side project of Nupedia. This obscure project was Jimmy Wales' and Larry Sanger's first attempt to create a peer-reviewed encyclopedia. Nupedia was launched in March 2000 as a free online encyclopedia, written and peer-reviewed by subject-matter experts through a seven-step approval process. It failed badly.

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In its first months of existence, Nupedia, a free, online encyclopedia written and peer-reviewed by subject-matter experts under a seven-step approval process, produced a mere two dozen articles. Wikipedia, which allows anyone to write and edit articles, was intended to serve as a feeder for Nupedia. 

By bypassing the tedious seven-step process, Wikipedia immediately drew far more contributions than Nupedia, reaching hundreds of articles within weeks and thousands within a year. Nupedia was closed down and replaced by Wikipedia. Thus, Wikipedia quickly became the most successful open collaboration experiment ever. 

Today, Wikipedia boasts over six million English-language articles and content in over 320 languages.

Early skeptics doubted it would last. How could a website that anyone could change produce reliable facts? In 2005, Nature famously compared Wikipedia's accuracy to Encyclopedia Britannica and found surprisingly little difference. Two and a half decades later, Wikipedia remains fallible, but self-correcting. Errors get fixed faster than they'd be noticed in print. Its openness, paradoxically, is also its safeguard. As Wales said at the time, Wikipedia was both self-policing and self-cleaning.

That's not to say Wikipedia is perfect, far from it. Wikipedia has spent 25 years walking a tightrope between openness and abuse, and most of its growing pains come from that contradiction. The biggest challenges have been maintaining reliability at scale, keeping a small volunteer community from burning out, and defending the project against political and legal attacks.

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There are some areas, Wikipedia editors admit, they've been found lacking. The site's open-edit model has encouraged systemic biases (gender, racial, national, and ideological), especially since most editors are male and concentrated in North America and Europe. New and minority editors often report a hostile climate of harassment, cliques, and "ownership" of articles that drives people away and feeds long-running "editor retention" efforts.

Battles and successes

Even setting these issues aside, that doesn't mean the platform's immune to abuse. Edit wars, coordinated disinformation campaigns, and cultural bias persist. The Wikimedia Foundation has had to double down on anti-manipulation policies, while editors wage daily battles to keep political and corporate spin in check. Still, the community itself, with over 250,000 active editors, remains its greatest defense.

Despite their best efforts, corporations, governments, and PR firms have repeatedly attempted to launder reputations through undisclosed paid editing, sockpuppet networks, and conflict-of-interest campaigns. For example, in 2012, a pair of senior Wikipedia editors was found to be writing and editing articles at the request of their clients for a fee. Since then, numerous other instances of Wikipedia editors collaborating to profit from writing and editing biased articles have emerged. It's an ongoing problem.

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The site also suffers from a long history of "edit wars" and politicized editing around topics like biographies, climate, and geopolitics, which can turn article pages into battlegrounds instead of neutral references. Indeed, controversial pages, such as those on the Arab-Israeli conflict, caste topics in India, and Donald Trump, can't be touched by most editors.

That said, Wikipedia also helped to birth some key open technologies. The MediaWiki engine that powers Wikipedia also runs countless internal wikis, from NASA to Mozilla. Its open API and structured data project, Wikidata, quietly underpins parts of modern AI and search indexing. When you ask your phone a factual question, odds are the answer traces back, in part, to Wikipedia's structured metadata.

Unlike social media platforms fueled by outrage and engagement metrics, Wikipedia thrives on consensus and transparency. Its talk pages are messy democratic forums -- more C-SPAN than TikTok. And that's precisely why Wikipedia has lasted. It resists the dopamine economy.

Long-term challenges

Wikipedia's future is another matter. Donations fund its servers and staff, but editor participation is aging. Recruiting new contributors, especially from outside the English-speaking world, remains a challenge. The Wikipedia Foundation, now led by Maryana Iskander, is experimenting with partnerships, mobile tools, and even AI-assisted editing while insisting that human judgment stays central.

However, AI is also hurting Wikipedia. After cleaning up AI bot noise in 2025, Wikimedia reported that genuine human page views declined by about 8% year-on-year in recent months. Wikipedia traffic analysis indicated that nearly all of the multi-year decline was attributable to people no longer clicking on Wikipedia search links. According to SimilarWeb, ChatGPT is now the world's fifth-favorite website, while Wikipedia has dropped to ninth.

Could Wikipedia die? That question might sound alarmist, but it was only a few years ago that Stack Overflow was everyone's favorite programming website. Stack Overflow's traffic began to fall when ChatGPT arrived. As AI programming has become commonplace, Stack Overflow's decline has accelerated. In December 2025, only 3,862 questions were posted on Stack Overflow, representing a 78% drop from the previous December.

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At 25, Wikipedia embodies what the internet could have been: user-powered, open, and accountable. Wikipedia may have its warts, and it's far from perfect, but it's transparent about its imperfections. That's more than can be said for many tech giants. Wikipedia's quiet resilience proves that trust earned collectively can scale.

The encyclopedia anyone can edit has outlived the dot-com boom, Web 2.0, and the first wave of AI hype. Whether it can survive the AI-enabled web of the next 25 years remains an open question; one that, fittingly, anyone can edit.