25 Years of Wikipedia
Wikipedia turns 25 this year. Its success was not a given and reveals much about our changing relationship with information online.
In July 2026, 25 years after Wikipedia’s launch, the New York Times ran an article titled ‘Wikipedia Is Battling for the Soul of the Internet’. It argued that, in an age of misinformation, ‘the grande dame of collective online fact-gathering is under threat on every front’, citing pressures from both the Trump administration and Elon Musk, who have respectively framed the online encyclopaedia as politically biased and launched an alternative ‘Grokipedia’. The huge amount of crowd-sourced knowledge at the heart of Wikipedia is now also fodder for AI services.
In 25 years Wikipedia has transformed from a new and provocative innovation to a stalwart of the internet age. That journey reflects persistent anxieties about credibility, expertise, and user-generated content that have continually haunted our relationship with the online. Wikipedia’s status as a ‘grande dame’ stands in contrast to the controversies that marked its debut and use in the early 2000s, a period when the internet offered dramatically less than it does today, and when concepts of online misinformation were just beginning to take form.
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