Wikipedia Marks 25 Years, Reinforces Its Role as the Backbone of Global Knowledge
Wikipedia, the world’s largest online encyclopedia, on Thursday marked its 25th anniversary, celebrating a quarter century of providing free, reliable and human-powered knowledge to people around the globe.
To commemorate the milestone, the Wikimedia Foundation—the nonprofit organisation that operates Wikipedia—launched a Wikipedia 25 campaign inviting users to explore the platform’s evolution, honour its global volunteer community and engage with its vision for the future.
“Wikipedia is a digital wonder of the world, unlike anything else,” said Wikimedia Foundation Chief Executive Officer Maryana Iskander. “It has overcome countless challenges and changes thanks to the people behind it and their unwavering commitment to sharing free, reliable knowledge with the world.”
She noted that with billions of monthly visits and growing reliance by institutions worldwide, Wikipedia has become a core pillar of the internet’s information ecosystem.
As part of the anniversary celebrations, the Foundation unveiled its first-ever video docuseries, offering a behind-the-scenes look at the lives and motivations of Wikipedia’s volunteer editors across the world. The series highlights eight contributors and their unique passions for building and preserving knowledge.
Among those featured is Nigerian editor Goodness Ignatius, whose work focuses on documenting Nigerian and Igbo culture from the perspective of those who live it. A librarian by profession, Ignatius contributes to multiple Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia, Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons, and is a member of the Igbo Wikimedians User Group. She also co-founded the Ig Wiki Librarians Hub to strengthen collaboration among information professionals within the Igbo community.
The Foundation said her story underscores the enduring importance of human-curated knowledge, even in the age of artificial intelligence.
To further mark the anniversary, Wikimedia also launched a “25 Years of Wikipedia” digital time capsule, allowing users to explore the platform’s past, present and future. The capsule revisits major global moments, including the surge in traffic that nearly overwhelmed Wikipedia’s servers following the death of pop icon Michael Jackson in 2009, as well as some of the site’s more unusual entries, such as the article on Paul the Octopus.
Looking ahead, an interactive quiz released as part of the celebrations invites users to discover which imagined version of Wikipedia’s future best reflects them. The future scenarios were developed by a diverse group of contributors, including editors, children, futurists and artists.
Over the past 25 years, Wikipedia and its volunteer community have navigated technological disruption, regulatory challenges and growing mistrust in the information space. Today, the platform ranks among the world’s top 10 most-visited websites and remains the only one in that category run by a nonprofit organisation.
Wikipedia hosts more than 65 million articles in over 300 languages, attracting nearly 15 billion views each month. Its content underpins search engines, voice assistants and generative AI tools, making it one of the most valuable and trusted datasets used in training large language models.
The Foundation said Wikipedia’s journey over the last quarter century highlights its expanding relevance as the backbone of the internet—and its continued commitment to ensuring that knowledge remains free, reliable and human at its core.
