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Wikipedia: the story on HearLore | HearLore
Wikipedia
On the 15th of January 2001, a single English language website launched with the domain name www.wikipedia.com, marking the beginning of the largest reference work in human history. This project began as a complementary effort to Nupedia, a free online encyclopedia that required expert authors and a formal peer review process, but that model proved too slow to scale. Jimmy Wales, the CEO of the web portal company Bomis, envisioned a publicly editable encyclopedia, while Larry Sanger, the editor-in-chief of Nupedia, proposed the use of wiki software to achieve this goal. The name Wikipedia itself was a portmanteau of wiki and encyclopedia, coined by Sanger to protect the Nupedia brand from potential damage. Within the first year, the site adopted its integral policy of neutral point of view, though initially there were relatively few rules and it operated independently of its parent project. By 2003, Nupedia was shut down permanently, and its text was incorporated into Wikipedia, which had already begun expanding into other languages. The site was hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American nonprofit organization funded mainly by donations from readers, since 2003. The English Wikipedia, with over 6.8 million articles, remains the largest of the editions, which together comprise more than 60 million articles and attract more than 1.5 billion unique device visits and 13 million edits per month. The democratization of knowledge was the driving force, yet the site would soon face challenges that would test its very existence.
The Crisis of Growth and Community
By the 9th of September 2007, the English Wikipedia passed the mark of 2 million articles, surpassing the Yongle Encyclopedia made in China during the Ming dynasty in 1408, which had held the record for almost 600 years. However, the exponential growth of the early years began to slow, and by 2013, the average number of daily articles added had dropped from 1,800 to roughly 800. A team at the Palo Alto Research Center attributed this slowing of growth to increased coordination and overhead costs, exclusion of newcomers, and resistance to new edits. In November 2009, a researcher at the Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid found that the English Wikipedia had lost 49,000 editors during the first three months of 2009, compared to only 4,900 in the same period of 2008. The Wall Street Journal cited the array of rules applied to editing and disputes related to such content among the reasons for this trend. Wales disputed these claims in 2009, denying the decline and questioning the study's methodology, but by 2011, he acknowledged a slight decline, noting a decrease from a little more than 36,000 writers in June 2010 to 35,800 in June 2011. The number of active English Wikipedia editors has since remained steady after a long period of decline, but the culture of the site had shifted from anarchy to a semi-formal hierarchy. The community had developed a complex system of policies and guidelines, with 383 policy pages and 449 guideline pages by 2013, creating a baffling culture rich with in-jokes and insider references that new editors often struggled to navigate.
Wikipedia launched on the 15th of January 2001. Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger founded the project to create a publicly editable encyclopedia.
How many articles does the English Wikipedia have and when did it reach 2 million articles?
The English Wikipedia has over 6.8 million articles. It passed the 2 million article mark on the 9th of September 2007.
What happened during the John Seigenthaler biography incident in 2005?
An anonymous editor inserted false information into the biography of John Seigenthaler in May 2005. The error remained uncorrected for four months, leading to policy changes regarding biographical articles of living people.
Why does Wikipedia face gender and geographical bias according to academic studies?
Academic studies show the average contributor is an educated, technically inclined white male aged 15 to 49 from a developed country. This demographic results in cultural bias, gender bias, and geographical bias against regions like Africa.
How many languages does Wikipedia support and which editions are the largest?
Wikipedia exists in over 340 languages. The six largest editions by article count are English, German, French, Dutch, Italian, and Spanish.
What challenges does Wikipedia face regarding AI and data scraping in 2024 and 2025?
The Wikimedia Foundation reported an 8 percent decline in traffic in October 2025 compared to 2024. Since January 2024, bandwidth use increased by roughly 50 percent due to automated programs collecting data for training large language models.
In May 2005, an anonymous editor introduced false information into the biography of American political figure John Seigenthaler, falsely presenting him as a suspect in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It remained uncorrected for four months, leading Seigenthaler to describe Wikipedia as a flawed and irresponsible research tool. The incident led to policy changes at Wikipedia for tightening up the verifiability of biographical articles of living people. Despite such high-profile failures, a peer review in 2005 of forty-two scientific entries on both Wikipedia and Encyclopædia Britannica by the science journal Nature found few differences in accuracy, concluding that the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies, while Britannica had about three. The findings by Nature were disputed by Encyclopædia Britannica, and in response, Nature gave a rebuttal of the points raised by Britannica. Over time, the reliability of Wikipedia has improved, receiving greater praise from the late 2010s onward. Articles on breaking news are often accessed as sources for up-to-date information about those events. However, the open structure inherently makes it an easy target for Internet trolls, spammers, and various forms of paid advocacy. In June 2014, changes in Wikipedia's terms of use required anyone paid to edit articles to disclose that arrangement, addressing a sentiment among volunteer editors that they were not an advertising service. The site has been praised for enabling the democratization of knowledge, its extensive coverage, unique structure, and culture, yet it has also been criticized for systemic bias, such as a gender bias against women and a geographical bias against the Global South.
The Architecture of Anonymity
Wikipedia does not require that its editors and contributors provide identification, creating a battle between the right to be anonymous in cyberspace and the right to be anonymous in real life. In January 2006, a German court ordered the German Wikipedia shut down within Germany because it stated the full name of Boris Floricic, aka Tron, a deceased hacker. On the 9th of February 2006, the injunction against Wikimedia Deutschland was overturned, with the court rejecting the notion that Tron's right to privacy or that of his parents was being violated. The site has a system that uses Znuny, a free and open-source software fork of OTRS to handle queries without having to reveal the identities of the involved parties. This is used, for example, in confirming the permission for using individual images and other media in the project. In late April 2023, the Wikimedia Foundation announced that Wikipedia will not submit to any age verifications that may be required by the UK's Online Safety Bill legislation. Rebecca MacKinnon of the Wikimedia Foundation said that such checks would run counter to the website's commitment to minimal data collection on its contributors and readers. The community has developed a semi-formal dispute resolution process, where editors can raise issues at appropriate community forums, seek outside input through third opinion requests, or initiate a more general community discussion known as a request for comment. The Arbitration Committee presides over the ultimate dispute resolution process, though it explicitly refuses to directly rule on the specific view that should be adopted. Instead, the committee focuses on the way disputes are conducted, functioning not so much to resolve disputes and make peace between conflicting editors, but to weed out problematic editors while allowing potentially productive editors back in to participate.
The Gender Gap and Cultural Bias
A comprehensive 2008 survey, published in 2016, by Julia B. Bear of Stony Brook University's College of Business and Benjamin Collier of Carnegie Mellon University found significant gender differences in confidence in expertise, discomfort with editing, and response to critical feedback. Women reported less confidence in their expertise, expressed greater discomfort with editing, and reported more negative responses to critical feedback compared to men. In May 2018, a Wikipedia editor rejected a submitted article about Donna Strickland due to lack of coverage in the media. Five months later, Strickland won a Nobel Prize in Physics for groundbreaking inventions in the field of laser physics, becoming the third woman to ever receive the award. Prior to winning the award, Strickland's only mention on Wikipedia was in the article about her collaborator and co-winner of the award Gérard Mourou. Her exclusion from Wikipedia led to accusations of sexism, but Corinne Purtill writing for Quartz argued that it's also a pointed lesson in the hazards of gender bias in media, and of the broader consequences of underrepresentation. Academic studies of Wikipedia have shown that the average contributor to the English Wikipedia is an educated, technically inclined white male, aged 15 to 49, from a developed, predominantly Christian country. The corresponding point of view is over-represented, resulting in cultural bias, gender bias, and geographical bias on Wikipedia. Research conducted by Mark Graham of the Oxford Internet Institute in 2009 indicated that the geographic distribution of article topics is highly uneven, with Africa being the most underrepresented. Across 30 language editions of Wikipedia, historical articles and sections are generally Eurocentric and focused on recent events.
The Global Reach and Local Limits
Wikipedia exists in over 340 languages and is one of the world's most visited websites. The English Wikipedia, with over 6.8 million articles, remains the largest of the editions, which together comprise more than 60 million articles. The six largest, in order of article count, are the English, German, French, Dutch, Italian, and Spanish Wikipedias. The Swedish and Cebuano Wikipedias owe their position to the article-creating bot Lsjbot, which had created about half the articles on the Swedish Wikipedia, and most of the articles in the Cebuano and Waray Wikipedias. The latter are both languages of the Philippines. The top 10 editions represent approximately 85% of the total traffic, with the English Wikipedia receiving 48% of Wikipedia's cumulative traffic. Since Wikipedia is based on the Web and therefore worldwide, contributors to the same language edition may use different dialects or may come from different countries. These differences may lead to some conflicts over spelling differences, such as colour versus color, or points of view. Though the various language editions are held to global policies such as neutral point of view, they diverge on some points of policy and practice, most notably on whether images that are not licensed freely may be used under a claim of fair use. The content of articles on the same subject can differ significantly between languages, depending on the sources editors use and other factors. Jimmy Wales has described Wikipedia as an effort to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language.
The Future of Shared Reality
In October 2025, the Wikimedia Foundation reported an estimated 8 percent decline in traffic as compared to the same months in 2024 in human page views. They speculate it reflects the use of generative AI and social media on how people tend to search for information. Since January 2024, the Wikimedia Foundation has reported a roughly 50 percent increase in bandwidth use from downloads of multimedia content across its projects, largely attributed to automated programs, or scraper bots, that collect large volumes of data from Wikimedia sites for use in training large language models and related applications. In January 2023, Wikipedia debuted a new website redesign, called Vector 2022, which featured a redesigned menu bar, moving the table of contents to the left as a sidebar, and numerous changes in the locations of buttons like the language selection tool. The update initially received backlash, most notably when editors of the Swahili Wikipedia unanimously voted to revert the changes. By the end of December 2016, Wikipedia was ranked the fifth most popular website globally. As of January 2023, 55,791 English Wikipedia articles have been cited 92,300 times in scholarly journals, from which cloud computing was the most cited page. The site has been censored by some national governments, ranging from specific pages to the entire site, sometimes due to its criticism of the government or by content otherwise considered blasphemous. In 2008, Wikipedia rejected an online petition against the inclusion of images of Muhammad in the English edition of its Muhammad article, citing this policy. The presence of politically, religiously, and pornographically sensitive materials in Wikipedia has led to the censorship of Wikipedia by national authorities in China and Pakistan, among other countries.