Just as human history is often divided into B.C. and A.D., it’s not unreasonable to imagine the Internet’s story split between B.W. and A.W. — the “W” denoting Wikipedia.
Wikipedia went online on 15 January 2001, the brainchild of Jimmy Wales, an internet entrepreneur with a libertarian streak, and Larry Sanger, a philosopher who became its first editor-in-chief. Their collaboration lasted only a little over a year, but the tension between their visions still shapes the project.
Wales imagined Wikipedia as radically open: a place where “every single person on the planet” could contribute and freely access “the sum of all human knowledge.” Sanger, skeptical that openness alone could ensure neutrality, believed subject-matter experts were necessary to approach true impartiality.
From tomes to clicks
Before the web, accessing knowledge meant physical libraries and curated reference works, with experts and institutions as gatekeepers. Wikipedia inverted that hierarchy, creating a vast collaboratively edited platform where anyone with an internet connection can write or revise articles, while still citing expert-produced sources.
The growth became internet lore: by 2002 the English Wikipedia had around 25,000 entries; by 2006 it passed one million. Today it exceeds seven million.
Powered by people, divided by philosophy
As of January 2026 there are more than 300 active language editions of Wikipedia with contributions from thousands of volunteer editors. No one “owns” an article; contributions must follow core principles of neutrality, verifiability and reliance on reputable sources. Editors debate changes on “talk pages” and reach consensus; serious disputes can go to the community-run Arbitration Committee.
This model reflects Wales’ belief in a global commons of knowledge built collectively. “Wikipedia is not a very comfortable place for extremists,” he told The Guardian in 2025. “If you want to rant and be super biased, then go on, write your own blog.” For Wales, neutrality comes from grounding articles in facts: “The Hitler entry doesn’t have to be a rant against Hitler. You just write down what he did, and it’s a damning indictment right there.”
Sanger, who drafted Wikipedia’s early neutrality guidelines, argues openness cannot alone prevent bias; those writing articles should ideally be experts. “Neutrality is entirely possible,” he told DW, adding the gold standard is when “you cannot tell what the person thinks on any issues of controversy.” He doubts Wikipedia can approximate neutrality without experts committed to impartiality and has suggested that editors tend to be “global, academic, secular, progressive.”
Of gender gaps and doom spirals
The Wikimedia Foundation estimates female editors number between 10–20%. Entire categories of notable women and their works remain missing, spurring the 2015 “Women in Red” initiative to narrow the gap.
Each language edition is created separately, meaning an article in Hindi might never be written in English and vice versa. Tools like Wikidelta map these gaps by showing topics present in only one language.
Wikipedia now feeds many digital tools. Large language models (LLMs) are trained heavily on its content, and AI‑generated text and translations are flowing back into smaller Wikipedias. That loop can be fragile: in 2025 the Greenlandic edition was flooded with error-ridden AI content — a “doom spiral” some commenters called it — and its sole editor requested closure, citing risks to the Greenlandic language among other harms.
Used “more often than we pee”
Wikipedia’s quirks have spilled beyond the site. Its “citation needed” tag — originally a call for verification — has become shorthand for dubious claims. Online games like Wikiracing turn the encyclopedia into a sport: players navigate hyperlinks from one article to a target page as quickly as possible.
Besides research, Wikipedia settles dinner-table disputes, guides sports commentary, and sends readers down rabbit holes. Diane von Fürstenberg once joked to Jimmy Wales, “We all use Wikipedia more often than we pee.”
Grokipedia: a new challenger?
Even an entrenched platform faces disruption. In 2025 Elon Musk’s xAI launched Grokipedia, an AI-generated encyclopedia built on the Grok LLM. It debuted with nearly 885,000 articles and billed itself as a “truthful and independent alternative” to Wikipedia — derided by Musk as “Wokipedia” for alleged leftward bias. Some Grokipedia entries are generated entirely by Grok; others are lifted from Wikipedia, sometimes lightly edited, sometimes copied almost verbatim.
Sanger sees this shift as significant. “For the first time in history, you can actually talk to an LLM and it will turn around and make an edit to an encyclopedia article,” he told DW. “You’re not submitting the edit to a human being. You’re submitting it to a machine controlled by a corporation,” which can produce faster answers. He believes Grokipedia could eventually surpass Wikipedia: “There’s a very good chance Grokipedia will be a better encyclopedia than Wikipedia after some amount of time.”
Jimmy Wales expressed skepticism to Reuters in late 2025 about whether large language models can produce reliable encyclopedic content. “Whether it’s an important or meaningful competitor, remains to be seen.” Edited by: Tanya Ott