A 2008 study found that Wikipedians were less agreeable, open, and conscientious than others, although a later commentary pointed out serious flaws, including that the data showed higher openness and that the differences with the control group and the samples were small. In 2008, a Slate magazine article reported that “one percent of Wikipedia users are responsible for about half of the site’s edits.” This method of evaluating contributions was later disputed by Aaron Swartz, who noted that several articles he sampled had large portions of their content (measured by number of characters) contributed by users with low edit counts. An editor is considered active if they have made one or more edits in the past 30 days.W 34 Editors who fail to comply with Wikipedia cultural rituals, such as signing talk page comments, may implicitly signal that they are Wikipedia outsiders, increasing the odds that Wikipedia insiders may target or discount their contributions. Wikipedia does not require that its editors and contributors provide identification. Complete bans from Wikipedia are generally limited to instances of impersonation and antisocial behavior.W 32 When conduct is not impersonation or anti-social, but rather edit warring and other violations of editing policies, solutions tend to be limited to warnings.
Launch and growth
Due to Wikipedia’s increasing popularity, some editions, including the English version, have introduced editing restrictions for certain cases. Wales’ book The Seven Rules of Trust was published in October 2025 by Penguin Random House. Both Sanger and Wales gave public interviews in late 2025 about their reflections about the status and state of Wikipedia, leading up to its 25 years of operation on January 15, 2026; Wales appeared on the PBS television news show GZERO World interviewed by Ian Bremmer and Sanger has appeared on the Fox News Channel, interviewed by Ashley Rindsberg. It 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.W 18 The update initially received backlash, most notably when editors of the Swahili Wikipedia unanimously voted to revert the changes. Jeff Loveland and Joseph Reagle argue that, in process, Wikipedia follows a long tradition of historical encyclopedias that have accumulated improvements piecemeal through “stigmergic accumulation”. In 2012, Wikivoyage, an editable travel guide, and Wikidata, an editable knowledge base, launched.W 15
History
There were nearly 7,000 COVID-19 related Wikipedia articles across 188 different Wikipedias, as of November 2021.update During the COVID-19 pandemic, Wikipedia’s coverage of the pandemic and fight against misinformation received international media attention, and brought an increase in Wikipedia readership overall. About 47 percent of Wikipedia readers do not realize that Wikipedia is a non-profit organization.W 117 As of February 2023,update Wikipedia attracts around 2 billion unique devices monthly, with the English Wikipedia receiving 10 billion pageviews each month.W 1
In the news
The Wikipedia Library is a resource for Wikipedia editors which provides free access to a wide range of digital publications, so that they can consult and cite these while editing the encyclopedia. The publication covers news and events from the English Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Foundation, and Wikipedia’s sister projects.W 87 Wikimedia’s online newspaper The Signpost was founded in 2005 by Michael Snow, a Wikipedia administrator who would join the Wikimedia Foundation’s board of trustees in 2008. At the 2013 level of contributions for Wikimedia presently documented as 45 million dollars,W 85 the computed budget level recommended by Jaffe for reinvestment into internal research and development is between 1.8 million and 11.3 million dollars annually. The estimates for reinvestment by industrial organizations into internal research and development was studied by Adam Jaffe, who recorded that the range of 4% to 25% annually was to be recommended, with high-end technology requiring the higher level of support for internal reinvestment.
Obtaining the full contents of Wikipedia for reuse presents challenges, since direct cloning via a web crawler is discouraged.W 108 Wikipedia publishes “dumps” of its contents, but these are text-only; as of 2023,update there is no dump available of Wikipedia’s images.W 109 Wikimedia Enterprise is a for-profit solution to this. Wikimedia has created the Wikidata project with a similar objective of storing the basic facts from each page of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia Foundation projects and make it available in a queryable semantic format, RDF.W 105 As of February 2023,update it has over 101 million items.W 106 WikiReader is a dedicated reader device that contains an offline copy of Wikipedia, which was launched by OpenMoko and first released in 2009.W 107 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 kinbet casino en ligne in confidence in expertise, discomfort with editing, and response to critical feedback. The Wikimedia Foundation’s privacy policy states, “we believe that you shouldn’t have to provide personal information to participate in the free knowledge movement”, and states that “personal information” may be shared “For legal reasons”, “To Protect You, Ourselves & Others”, or “To Understand & Experiment”.W 54 Articles depicting what some critics have called objectionable content (such as feces, cadaver, human penis, vulva, and nudity) contain graphic pictures and detailed information easily available to anyone with access to the internet, including children.W 52 The site also includes sexual content such as images and videos of masturbation and ejaculation, illustrations of zoophilia, and photos from hardcore pornographic films in its articles.
Policies and content
Wikipedia currently runs on dedicated clusters of Linux servers running the Debian operating system.W 78 By January 22, 2013, Wikipedia had migrated its primary data center to an Equinix facility in Ashburn, Virginia.W 79 A second application data center was created in 2014 in Carrollton, Texas, to improve Wikipedia’s reliability. Bots are able to indicate edits from particular accounts or IP address ranges, as occurred at the time of the shooting down of the MH17 jet in July 2014 when it was reported that edits were made via IPs controlled by the Russian government. Additionally, there are bots designed to automatically notify editors when they make common editing errors (such as unmatched quotes or unmatched parentheses).W 75 Edits falsely identified by bots as the work of a banned editor can be restored by other editors. Computer programs called bots have often been used to perform simple and repetitive tasks, such as correcting common misspellings and stylistic issues, or to start articles such as geography entries in a standard format from statistical data.W 74 One controversial contributor, Sverker Johansson, created articles with his bot Lsjbot, which was reported to create up to 10,000 articles on the Swedish Wikipedia on certain days. She stated that one of her focuses would be increasing diversity in the Wikimedia community.
Impacts of generative AI on Wikipedia views
According to the rules on the English Wikipedia community, each entry in Wikipedia must be about a topic that is encyclopedic and is not a dictionary entry or dictionary-style.W 28 A topic should also meet Wikipedia’s standards of “notability”, which generally means that the topic has been covered extensively in reliable sources that are independent of the article’s subject. Originally, rules on the non-English editions of Wikipedia were based on a translation of the rules for the English Wikipedia. The rules developed by the community are stored in the Wikipedia namespace, and Wikipedia editors write and revise the website’s policies and guidelines in accordance with community consensus. Wikipedia is composed of 11 different namespaces,needs update with its articles being present in mainspace.
Vandalism
Vandals can introduce irrelevant formatting, modify page semantics such as the page’s title or categorization, manipulate the article’s underlying code, or use images disruptively.W 25 Less common types of vandalism, such as the deliberate addition of plausible but false information, can be more difficult to detect. Sometimes editors commit vandalism by removing content or entirely blanking a given page. The most common and obvious types of vandalism include additions of obscenities and crude humor, but it can also include advertising and other types of spam. Any change that deliberately compromises Wikipedia’s integrity is considered vandalism. In 2003, economics PhD student Andrea Ciffolilli argued that the low transaction costs of participating in a wiki created a catalyst for collaborative development, and that features such as allowing easy access to past versions of a page favored “creative construction” over “creative destruction”.
Two projects of such internal research and development have been the creation of a Visual Editor and the “Thank” tab in the edit history, which were developed to improve issues of editor attrition. Following growing amounts of incoming donations in 2013 exceeding seven digits, the Foundation has reached a threshold of assets which qualify its consideration under the principles of industrial organization economics to indicate the need for the re-investment of donations into the internal research and development of the Foundation. In 2017, Wikipedia installed a caching cluster in an Equinix facility in Singapore, the first of its kind in Asia.W 80 In 2022, a caching data center was opened in Marseille, France.W 81 In 2024, a caching data center was opened in São Paulo, the first of its kind in South America.W 82 As of November 2024,update caching clusters are located in Amsterdam, San Francisco, Singapore, Marseille, and São Paulo.W 83W 84
Content policies and guidelines
This is used, for example, in confirming the permission for using individual images and other media in the project.W 56 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. Critics, including Wikipediocracy, noticed that many of the pornographic images deleted from Wikipedia since 2010 have reappeared. Wikimedia Foundation spokesman Jay Walsh strongly rejected Sanger’s accusation, saying that Wikipedia did not have “material we would deem to be illegal. If we did, we would remove it.” Following the complaint by Sanger, Wales deleted sexual images without consulting the community. That law bans photographic child pornography and cartoon images and drawings of children that are obscene under American law.
Wikipedia articles on breaking news are accessed as sources for up-to-date information by many. Initially available only in English, Wikipedia has grown to over 300 languages and is one of the world’s most visited websites as of 2026update. It is understood either as a neutral middle ground between the two or as a rejection of their shared assumption that knowledge is attainable.
