The Human Backbone of the Internet: Wikipedia Marks 25 Years
Wikipedia officially hit the quarter-century mark today, January 15, 2026. What began as a radical experiment in decentralized information has evolved into the "backbone of knowledge on the internet," according to co-founder Jimmy Wales. To mark the milestone, the Wikimedia Foundation is turning the spotlight away from its vast database and onto its most essential, invisible asset: the 250,000 volunteer editors who keep the project alive.
While the site serves over 1.5 billion unique devices monthly, a remarkably small global community handles the actual curation. To humanize the labor behind the interface, the Foundation released a new mini-docuseries profiling eight contributors who maintain the site’s seven million English-language articles. These aren't just faceless usernames; the series features "Hurricane Hank," a Californian who has documented storms since 2005, and Netha, an Indian medical doctor who spent the pandemic purging COVID-19 misinformation from the platform.
The anniversary highlights a stark friction between unpaid human labor and the multi-billion-dollar companies that rely on it. As "AI slop" and proprietary models threaten to degrade the quality of online information, Wikipedia is leaning into its identity as a human-powered sanctuary. Wales noted that the platform’s survival depends on a collaborative spirit that many skeptics predicted would have been hollowed out by bad actors years ago.
The "Five Pillars" vs. the AI Era
This 25th anniversary arrives as the encyclopedia faces an existential "tragedy of the commons." Large language models (LLMs) aggressively scrape Wikipedia to train their systems—frequently without attribution or compensation. Internal data reveals that while bots now handle roughly 40% of all edits, performing technical chores like fixing broken links, the intellectual heavy lifting remains a strictly human domain.
This human-centric model relies on "Five Pillars" established in 2001, including a commitment to a neutral point of view and a "free to use" mandate. Today, these pillars are under unprecedented strain. LLMs do not respect a neutral point of view; they mirror the inherent biases of their training data. Furthermore, editors are now battling "synthetic citations"—a circular reporting nightmare where AI generates fake citations that point to Wikipedia articles which were, in turn, unknowingly updated with AI-generated text.
To fight back, the Foundation has moved beyond mere volunteerism. Through the "Wikimedia Enterprise" API, the Foundation now forces Big Tech companies to pay for high-volume, real-time access to its data, creating a financial defense against the "scraping" economy. Meanwhile, volunteer initiatives like "WikiProject AI Cleanup" have emerged to scrub the site of plausible-sounding hallucinations and fraudulent references.
Scaling Knowledge for the Next Quarter Century
Wikipedia’s survival isn’t an accident of history; it’s a result of high-frequency maintenance. The site is currently edited an average of 5.7 times every second, a relentless pace that has allowed it to outlast nearly every other "Web 2.0" pioneer.
As the platform enters its next 25 years, the central conflict is clear: the "anarchist commons" must defend its borders against the "capitalist neighbor" of Big Tech. Wikipedia’s longevity suggests that while AI can process information, it cannot care about it. The future of the internet’s most trusted source now depends on whether humans are still willing to do the unpaid work of being right.