Wikipedia Is 25 and the Internet Hasn’t Replaced It

Wikipedia just turned 25. That’s long enough for most internet platforms to either collapse, get bought, get enshittified, or quietly disappear into a product sunset blog post. Wikipedia did none of that. It’s still here. Still weird. Still unpaid. Still somehow holding the internet’s collective memory together.

It launched in 2001, during the dial-up era, when the web was slower, smaller, and full of personal pages with questionable fonts. The original idea was simple and almost reckless: let anyone edit an encyclopedia. No gatekeepers. No paywalls. Just trust, revision history, and a belief that errors could be fixed faster than they spread.

Most people assumed it would fail. Too chaotic. Too vulnerable. Too open to nonsense. And yet, here we are.

From Punchline to Infrastructure

For years, Wikipedia was treated like a joke. Teachers warned students not to cite it. Journalists rolled their eyes. Experts complained about vandalism and bias. But quietly, something else happened. Everyone kept using it.

Search engines leaned on it. Voice assistants quoted it. Newsrooms checked it. Developers linked to it. Even people criticizing it relied on it to explain what they were criticizing. Wikipedia stopped being a site you visited and became something closer to background infrastructure.

Today, it’s one of the most visited websites on Earth, translated into hundreds of languages, maintained by a global community of volunteer editors. Not influencers. Not growth hackers. Just people fixing sentences at 2 a.m.

Why Nothing Replaced It

The obvious question is why no platform has replaced Wikipedia. The internet is bigger, richer, faster, and more automated now. We have AI summaries, knowledge graphs, and real-time everything. And yet, when people want a neutral starting point, they still land on the same white page.

Part of the answer is boring, and that’s the point. Wikipedia doesn’t optimize for engagement. It doesn’t chase virality. It doesn’t try to keep you scrolling. Its incentives are aligned with clarity, not attention.

Another part is governance. Wikipedia evolved rules, norms, and moderation systems over decades. Messy, imperfect, human systems. But systems that learned how to handle disagreement, bad actors, and edge cases without collapsing into chaos or corporate control.

The Internet Grew Up Around It

Wikipedia didn’t just survive the modern internet. It shaped it. Entire generations learned how to research, cross-check sources, and argue citations because of Wikipedia’s standards. Even the phrase “citation needed” escaped into culture.

While social platforms trained people to perform knowledge, Wikipedia trained people to verify it. That difference matters more now than it did in 2005.

At 25, Wikipedia feels almost out of time. No ads. No personalization. No algorithmic feed. Just text, sources, and edit history. And somehow, that restraint is exactly why it still works.

The internet tried many replacements. None stuck. Wikipedia didn’t win by being smarter or flashier. It won by being dependable.