Wikipedia arose from a failed, for-profit online encyclopedia

A conversation with Wikipedia’s cofounder

In the early 2000s, the nonprofit free encyclopedia Wikipedia launched and became one of the most visited sites on the internet. This lengthy interview with cofounder Jimmy Wales provides insight into how the encyclopedia originated, how it is funded, its plans for the future, and a number of other facts about the hugely influential resource.

The software for wikis—user-editable websites—was launched in 1995

Computer programmer Ward Cunningham created the WikiWikiWeb online application based on an offline system that helped track how ideas moved through his company. The application enabled users to collaborate and edit website content through a web browser, as well as link pages without requiring a structured navigation scheme.

Coverage of the 9/11 terrorist attacks helped shape Wikipedia's editorial policies

Launched nine months earlier, the site was featured on Yahoo's news page, attracting traffic from information seekers as dozens of new editors created hundreds of articles, including memorials, conspiracy theories, and donation and volunteer pages. Discussions between editors would begin establishing rules for handling breaking news events.

On average, about five edits are made on Wikipedia every second

As of 2024, the site is 90 times larger than the 120-volume Encyclopedia Britannica, but its automation tools can often catch and revert inaccurate edits within 60 seconds. Its low-bandwidth, adless pages have allowed it to handle millions of site visits daily, even during times of high internet traffic.

Research suggests articles on Wikipedia are about as reliable as 'accurate' sources

Studies from Nature, The Guardian, the Journal of Clinical Oncology, and the Canadian Library Association, among others, did not identify significant errors, particularly in articles related to academic topics. The site is still considered an exploratory, tertiary source subject to systemic biases from its human editors, especially within controversial topics.

In 2014, a Wikipedia monument was unveiled in Słubice, Poland

Created from fiber and resin, the $14,000 sculpture features four people holding the Wikipedia globe—the company's logo since 2003. An inscription on the monument pays homage to the anonymous editors who contributed to the site.

One person has made edits to a third of all articles on the English Wikipedia

As of 2025, Steven Pruitt—known online as Ser Amantio di Nicolao—has made over 6 million edits and created more than 33,000 articles since he began contributing to the site in 2004. The Virginia native was named one of Time magazine's 25 most important people on the internet in 2017.

Wikipedia's sister sites include directories of travel guides, species, and media

Like Wikipedia, volunteers around the world contribute to Wikivoyage, Wikispecies, and Wikimedia Commons to create freely accessible repositories of knowledge. Other projects include Wikibooks, a collection of e-books and annotated texts; Wikisource, which features source documents and historical texts; and Wiktionary, a dictionary covering over 170 languages.

Wikipedia edit wars often reflect a strong commitment to accuracy between editors

Battles over grammar and capitalization, names and nationalities, and British versus American spellings of words have taken place due to the collaborative editing nature of the site. The most seemingly trivial debates are catalogued on the site's "Lamest edit wars" page.

Wikipedia's puzzle globe logo was developed by a 17-year-old

In 2003, the site held a contest for its users to submit designs for a new logo. Paul Stansifer submitted the winning design, which used the incomplete puzzle as a symbol for the encyclopedia being a work in progress. Symbols and letters would later replace text within Stansifer's colorful design.

In late 2007, Wikipedia became the world's largest general encyclopedia

The record had been held for approximately six centuries by the Yongle Encyclopedia, which was commissioned by the Yongle Emperor of the Ming dynasty in 1403 to preserve information from ancient and imperial China. The text comprised 22,937 manuscript rolls in 11,095 volumes.

LonelyWiki compiles obscure Wikipedia articles with fewer than 2,000 annual readers

LonelyWiki calls itself a museum of forgotten knowledge. A "lonely article" features real prose, at least 500 characters, no stub placeholders, and under 2,000 annual views. Each one represents a person who decided something was worth documenting without editorial commission or trending news.

Grokipedia is Elon Musk's rival to Wikipedia

Developed by xAI—a company Musk founded in 2023 to compete with OpenAI and Google—the site features a search bar where users can type in queries, which reports suggest are then answered by the same xAI model powering the Grok chatbot. Grokipedia describes Wikipedia as having "systemic ideological biases" and a "left-leaning slant."

The unofficial theme song for Wikipedia is based on 'Hotel California'

Written by user Elf in 2004, the song's humorous lyrics highlight the efforts of volunteer editors and describe an evening spent by "wikipediholics" improving the site, set to the backdrop of the Eagles' 1976 song.

Yahoo acquired Paul Graham's former startup Viaweb in 1998

Viaweb was the web app tech startup that Paul Graham, Robert Morris, and Trevor Blackwell cofounded before they started Y Combinator. The company sold for $49M and Viaweb was rebranded as the Yahoo Store.

The history of the commercialization of the internet, from ARPANET to NSFNET and beyond

NSFNET was launched in 1986 by the National Science Foundation as the first network available to all researchers, connecting them to a system of supercomputer facilities. Despite growing from 2,000 computers in 1985 to 2 million by 1993, the rapid expansion of commercial internet services led to NSFNET's decommissioning by 1995.

'The Million Dollar Homepage' is a snapshot of a dead internet

In 2005, 21-year-old Alex Tew set out to make $1M by selling $1 pixels on his website, effectively creating a standalone internet billboard. The gambit worked, and because the advertisements were one-time payments, the site looks the same as it did in 2005, despite many of the advertised sites going defunct since.

‘Nipple-gate’ helped spark the creation of YouTube

After Justin Timberlake exposed Janet Jackson during Super Bowl XXXVIII, frustrated viewers searching for clips inspired Jawed Karim and his partners to build YouTube as a platform for sharing missed moments.

Sears once tried to become a tech company

In 1984, Sears arguably created one of the first online retail services, called “Prodigy,” in 1984 alongside IBM and CBS. But it was more of a WeChat than an Amazon, offering a variety of other services to users a few years before the dot com era.

Peter Norton, for whom Norton Antivirus is named, questioned the threat of viruses

The software author was among several computer experts in 1988 who suggested that reports on the threat of computer viruses were exaggerated, referring to testimonials of infections and their spread as "urban legends."

Steve Bannon was made CEO of the company in charge of Biosphere 2 in 1994

After providing $200M to launch and upgrade B2 before its second mission, billionaire philanthropist Ed Bass appointed the future political strategist and then financial consultant to help find new investments and bring costs under control. Fearing interference from non-science experts, Biospherians from the first mission vandalized the project.

Memes emerged in the 1980s and 1990s

Today's Internet users might think of memes as references spread online through images, videos, and audio clips. But the merger between memes and the internet didn't happen until the 1980s and 1990s—years after the term meme was first coined to describe a different phenomenon.

Sophia Amoruso's company Nasty Gal was worth $100M at its peak

In 2006, Sophia Amoruso started an eBay shop that would later transform into the clothing company Nasty Gal. However, Amoruso’s rags-to-riches success with Nasty Gal didn’t last. After multiple rounds of layoffs and employee complaints, the company filed for bankruptcy in 2016.

How literary agent Scott Meredith invented the modern book auction

Prior to the 1964 auction of "The Night Action" for $13,500 to New American Library, a gentleman's code persisted in the literary world: no manuscript should be shared with more than one publisher at a time. Meredith—the agent behind Norman Mailer, Carl Sagan, and Arthur C. Clarke—leveraged his deep knowledge of the talent pool to publishers, sending around manuscripts to 19 different publishers to generate a bidding war. The Beat-influenced novel eventually flopped and is now out of print.

Craigslist intentionally avoided user reviews

Although its competitors expanded their sites by adding user reviews and comments, Craigslist avoided them, recognizing that it would compromise the integrity of the site.

Elk Cloner, the first computer virus to spread in public, was written as a practical joke by Richard Skrenta, a Pittsburgh high school student.

The name 'Silicon Valley' arose from the founding of Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Fairchild Semiconductor in 1956-57, founded near Stanford University in Palo Alto

How Amazon operates a 'flywheel' business model, a self-reinforcing cycle that drives continuous growth

Venture capital is a form of funding provided to early-stage companies with high growth potential, typically in exchange for an equity (or ownership) stake

A Yale student wrote a profound essay about the consulting industry's influence on elite college students that was published in a book of her writing after she died in a post-graduation car accident.

How the most famous Ebola book, The Hot Zone, which sold 3.5 million copies and was translated into 30 languages, got aspects of the disease so wrong.

Netflix profits when you're not watching, and its movies are designed that way—read a detail-rich critical essay exposing lesser-known Netflix takes

Children are now three times more likely to say they want to be a YouTuber when they grow up than an astronaut, with some even attending 'YouTube camps' that teach kids how to create content for the platform.

In 2018, 26-year-old missionary John Allen Chau was killed by tribesmen after attempting to reach and evangelize on India's isolated North Sentinel Island

How fusion—which releases energy when two lighter atoms combine to form a heavier atom—differs from fission

The US first hosted the World Cup in 1994, a tournament that lives in soccer infamy for its poor planning and the murder of Colombian player Andres Escobar, who'd accidentally scored on his own net.

The Beatles' US label rejected the band's first two singles, 'Please Please Me' and 'From Me to You,' with one executive calling the band 'dead in the water.'

Search a massive database of over 4 decades of clues from the TV quiz show 'Jeopardy!'

This site reaches millions of visitors who are tired of AI chatbots and seeking human connection. Pretend to be an AI chatbot and ask questions, provide answers, and draw for people in real time.

Stanford built a Google Maps for the Roman Empire, revealing how much it cost to travel in the ancient world

Budweiser stores yeast derived from the original 1800s strain in a secret bunker, which only the Head of Yeast Management can access—not even the CEO

Frank Lloyd Wright's houses are historically hard to sell because they're old, subject to local landmark commissions, and often unfashionable

'Shogun,' a 1980s TV series, helped popularize sushi in the US by stimulating an American interest in Japanese culture.

Learn more about the history of fireworks, which dates back to an accidental invention during an alchemist's quest for information about immortality.

Trace how the Bill of Rights, inspired by centuries of political theory, took shape between 1774 and 1789.

Astronauts have repaired genetic damage in space using CRISPR—a molecular tool that can make precise changes to DNA and is used in single-celled organisms to attack invasive viruses.

Memecoins are a type of cryptocurrency—a form of digital currency with a wide variety of uses—created around popular 'memes,' or viral internet jokes.

For centuries, Niagara Falls has been a magnet for daredevils seeking to conquer one of nature's most powerful wonders, with its 200-foot drop and water rushing at 32 feet per second with 280 tons of force.

About 2,000 US babies are born annually without some portion of their limbs, potentially leading to a lifetime of pricey prosthetics.

The first image of a black hole was captured by creating an Earth-sized virtual observatory from a network of eight radio telescopes.