Wikipedia turns 25, still boasting zero ads and over 7 billion visitors per month despite the rise of AI and threats of government repression

As reported by Tom’s Hardware, the ubiquitous, nonprofit, user-driven reference site Wikipedia celebrated its 25th anniversary on January 15. Though threatened by AI and censorious repression in the US and UK, Wikipedia remains a staggering achievement and a rare bright spot on the modern internet.

As Tom’s Hardware pointed out, Wikipedia founder and public face Jimmy Wales made the site’s first edit on a deliciously era-appropriate iMac G3 on January 15, 2001. That’s the really cute, all-in-one Apple with a CRT display and translucent Game Boy plastic.

According to Wikimedia Statistics, the free encyclopedia saw 27 billion page views in December from seven billion unique visitors, just a few decades worth of population growth behind the current estimated human population of eight billion. Those are the sort of traffic numbers to make any digital media executive salivate, but famously, Wikipedia remains one of the few places on the internet that won’t inundate you with ads and trackers, just a few donation requests per year like a public radio station or something.

The Guinness Book of World Records crowned Wikipedia the largest encyclopedia in the world in 2020 when it was sitting at the 50 million article mark across all languages, but that recognition was more than a little belated. It’s generally agreed that Wikipedia became the largest single encyclopedia in human history in 2007, just six years after it began.

As referenced in the 2007 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica and reported by the China Daily in 2014, 2007 was the year Wikipedia exceeded the reported original size of the Ming Dynasty Yongle Encyclopedia, formerly the largest such accumulation in human history and only existing today in partial form. But a 600-year run as top dog isn’t too shabby.

Equally famous to Wikipedia’s free access is the fact that anyone can edit it⁠—I recall elementary school teachers cautioning us from trusting it too much for this reason. All the same, Wikipedia’s enthusiastic editors and commitment to citing sources make it the place to start any amateur research project, as well as plenty of professional ones. If you want to sound smart⁠—like in a PC Gamer article, say⁠—just go to the sources cited by Wikipedia and cite them. I don’t think they mind.

Wikipedia’s triumph is somewhat dampened by recent challenges the site has faced. Wikipedia suffered an ambiguous defeat in its challenge of the UK’s invasive Online Safety Act in August. Earlier in 2025, the Trump-appointed acting attorney for the District of Columbia, “Eagle” Ed Martin, threatened to revoke the Wikimedia Foundation’s nonprofit status over spurious accusations, including that it is “allowing foreign actors to manipulate information and spread propaganda to the American public.”

Nothing seems to have directly come of Martin’s threats, and he has since been promoted to be the US Pardon Attorney, overseeing the administration’s questionable clemency for figures like Changpeng Zhao, a crypto billionaire who coincidentally struck a business deal with the Trump family crypto start-up, World Liberty Financial, around the same time. Wikipedia does remain a bit of a bête noir for American conservatives however, much like trans women, immigrants, and the population of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

In October, the Wikimedia Foundation revealed it was experiencing unusually high AI-related bot traffic, even as human readership was down 8% due to AI chat bot usage and the proliferation of generated answers in search. The foundation said it is taking steps to combat this, and I started kicking five bucks a month to Wikipedia a few years ago so I can click away from those fundraising requests guilt-free.

But let’s end on a fun note: Did you know that the Wikipedia page for the Ship of Theseus philosophical exercise has been edited so much, it does not contain any words or phrases from the original version of the article? Neat.