25 years of Wikipedia
On 15 January 2001, a Monday exactly 9131 days ago, Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, was launched.
In the last 25 years Wikipedia developed from being a curiosity of odd Internet optimists, from being something ridiculed and disparaged, from being a hope and a dream, to the most widely used encyclopedia of today.
A quarter of a century in, a quarter of a million monthly active editors work on 65 million articles in 300 languages, directly accessed more than 15 billion times every month through more than a billion devices. But beyond these direct page views, Wikipedia is also being accessed in many other ways, be it through voice assistants, search engines, printouts in schools, and chatbots using artificial intelligence. Wikipedia is the backbone of knowledge on the Internet.
Throughout the year, Wikipedia will celebrate this anniversary. Two months after the English Wikipedia launched, on 16 March 2001, the first two non-English language editions joined it, German and Catalan. French followed a week later; Italian and Portuguese on 11 May; and on 20 May Spanish, Russian, and the first non-European language, Japanese. By the end of its first year, 18 language editions had launched. Today the number has grown to 342, of which 11 are on Incubator.
The language editions of Wikipedia started as independent projects. They had their own rules and processes, their own logins and administrators. Images were uploaded to the individual projects, and articles had to individually link to their corresponding articles in different languages.
Over the years, the Wikipedias started growing together. Already in 2001, Meta-Wiki was launched, offering a place to discuss and agree common principles and a common vision. In 2004, stewards were introduced, a kind of global administrator, and Wikimedia Commons launched, a global repository for images and other multimedia files, which could be used from any of the local Wikipedias. From 2008 to 2015, logins were unified, and eventually contributors needed only a single login for all Wikimedia projects, instead of having one login for each language edition of Wikipedia. In 2013, Wikidata allowed wikis to centralize the links between the different articles about the same topic in different languages, removing hundreds of millions of lines of wikitext, and in the years later, more and more data was made available to be used from Wikidata. In 2020, a Universal Code of Conduct was ratified. In 2025, Wikifunctions allowed for use of functionality from a shared, global repository, which has been rolled out to more than a hundred Wikimedia projects so far.
In Wikipedia’s Silver Jubilee year, we will make Wikifunctions accessible from many more Wikipedias and other wikis, and introduce Abstract Wikipedia, both major steps in further bringing the many Wikipedia language communities closer together.
Abstract Wikipedia will enable communities to work together on the content of articles which will be made available to any Wikipedia that is lacking an article on a given topic. Like on Commons, Wikidata, and Wikifunctions, contributors can each work in their own language, and yet work together on shared knowledge. With Abstract Wikipedia, we will help solve the problem of cross-lingual collaboration in a way that not only respects the autonomy of the individual language communities, but also is fully aligned with the values that made Wikipedia what it is.
Abstract Wikipedia fully recognizes that knowledge is curated and edited by humans. Errors and omissions can quickly be fixed, the wiki way. But every article that is created and maintained in Abstract Wikipedia will have the potential to be reflected in hundreds of languages. Local communities can choose to rely on Abstract Wikipedia for a given article, or to write their own, allowing each community to focus on the topics they care about most.
Join us in celebrating 25 years of Wikipedia, the way that Wikipedia has always been: by evolving and growing, by becoming better, and by being guided by our vision: working towards a world in which everyone can share in the sum of all knowledge.
(This text was published as the main topic in the Abstract Wikipedia Newsletter 232)
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