Wikipedia Turns 25 Today

Published January 15, 2026

Happy birthday, Wikipedia. The internet’s most-clicked reference tool officially turns 25 years old today, and its journey started with one very simple sentence.

The first Wikipedia entry was posted on January 15, 2001 at 2:27 p.m. Eastern, just two days after the domain was registered. The entire article read, “This is the new WikiPedia!” Co-founder Jimmy Wales has since said the very first post may have actually been “Hello, World!”, but it was deleted along the way.

From that modest beginning, Wikipedia has grown into the largest encyclopedia ever created.

Why Wikipedia Was Different From the Start

Wikipedia was not the first online encyclopedia. That title belongs to Nupedia, which launched in 2000 but faded quickly because only credentialed experts were allowed to contribute.

Wikipedia flipped that model completely. Anyone could write or edit an article, while the community reviewed changes and locked in verified facts. That openness helped the platform grow rapidly, even if it also sparked ongoing debates about accuracy. Depending on the topic, estimates place Wikipedia’s accuracy anywhere from about 80 percent to nearly 99 percent.

In its first year, fewer than 20,000 articles were published. By 2008, Wikipedia had surpassed two million entries, officially becoming the largest encyclopedia in human history and breaking a record held for more than 600 years by a massive Chinese encyclopedia dating back to 1408.

Wikipedia Today By the Numbers

Fast forward to 2026, and Wikipedia’s scale is staggering:

More than 65 million articles
Available in over 300 languages
Nearly 15 billion page views every month
Accessed on more than 1.5 billion devices
Edited roughly 324 times per minute
Supported by nearly 250,000 volunteer editors worldwide

It is also the only website in the global top ten for traffic that is run by a nonprofit organization.

Celebrating 25 Years of Human-Powered Knowledge

To mark its silver anniversary, the Wikimedia Foundation has launched a year-long Wikipedia 25 campaign celebrating the people behind the platform.

That includes a new video docuseries spotlighting volunteer editors from around the world. Their stories range from a Californian who has spent decades documenting hurricanes, to a medical doctor in India who shared critical COVID-19 information, to an elderly librarian in Tokyo preserving knowledge in Japanese. The message is clear: even in the age of artificial intelligence, knowledge is still human.

The Foundation has also released a digital 25 Years of Wikipedia time capsule, featuring reflections from Jimmy Wales, historic moments that nearly crashed Wikipedia’s servers, and some of the site’s most delightfully strange articles. There is even an interactive quiz inviting users to explore different visions of Wikipedia’s future.

Wikipedia in the Age of AI

While Wikipedia remains one of the most visited websites on the planet, it is not immune to change. Traffic dipped by about eight percent last year as more people turned to AI tools for quick answers.

Ironically, many of those tools rely heavily on Wikipedia data. The platform is one of the highest-quality datasets used to train large language models, making it more relevant than ever behind the scenes.

To protect its future, Wikipedia has expanded partnerships with major tech companies through Wikimedia Enterprise, ensuring content is used responsibly while supporting the nonprofit mission. At the same time, the Foundation’s AI strategy focuses on helping human editors work more efficiently rather than replacing them.

From One Line to a Global Resource

Since 2001, Wikipedia has endured shifting technology, misinformation battles, and changing internet habits. What has remained constant is its core idea: free knowledge, created by people, for everyone.

As Jimmy Wales put it, Wikipedia’s success proves what is possible when people come together to build trust and share information openly.

Twenty-five years in, that first sentence has turned into a digital wonder of the world, and one many of us still click on every single day.