Wikipedia allows users to vote for what the last article on the site will be

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.

As of January 2026, 500 new articles are added to the English Wikipedia daily

The largest Wikipedia language edition features over 7 million articles, followed by the Cebuano edition (over 6 million) and the German edition (over 3 million). The longest article is the "2025 in women's road cycling" page, and the most edited is the list of personnel from World Wrestling Entertainment.

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.

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.

The Wiki Game: get to one Wikipedia topic to another as fast as you can

Wikipedia, the free, community-built encyclopedia, uses hyperlinks so users can explore topics within topics. This tool often leads readers to go down endless rabbit holes, from one topic to another, endlessly. Now, you can make a game of it by...

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.

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 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.

China has blocked the Wikipedia domain since 2015

The Chinese language version of the site had been blocked intermittently since 2004 due to pages featuring topics deemed controversial by the Chinese communist party, including the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and Taiwan. Once Wikipedia switched to an HTTPS protocol—making it impossible to block individual pages—all Wikipedia pages were blocked.

In 2013, an asteroid was named after Wikipedia

A main-belt asteroid previously labeled 274301 was renamed "Wikipedia" by the Committee for Small Body Nomenclature. First observed in 2008 by astronomers at the Andrushivka Astronomical Observatory, the asteroid was renamed based on a suggestion from a member of the Wikimedia Foundation in Ukraine.

Imagine thousands of alternate histories of the world

AlternateHistory.com has hosted fan-written "what if" timelines, discussions, and speculative fiction since 2000, making it the largest online gathering of alternate history enthusiasts, with over 10,000 active members and a wiki cataloging hundreds of user-created scenarios. Two highlights to pique your interest: what if the Vikings had settled North America? What would have had to happen for the storyline of George Orwell's "1984" to come true?

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."

Time magazine ran a cover story titled 'The End of the World as We Know it?' in January 1999

In January 1999, Time published a dramatic Y2K cover with apocalyptic imagery and dire headlines. The portrayal likely exacerbated public fear and magnified the crisis in the popular imagination, turning a technical issue into a cultural panic.

Tracing the history of the philosophy of human extinction

Global catastrophe is at the center of much contemporary debate over climate, war, science, technology, and more, and our period is marked by a lurking sense everything we know—including the human species—could end overnight. It wasn't always...

Using scientific bets, Hawking challenged and highlighted major physics ideas

Hawking famously placed wagers on high-stakes questions in theoretical physics—such as the Higgs boson—for fun and to draw attention to science. When Hawking lost a bet about Cygnus X-1 being a black hole, he paid up with a magazine subscription.

Google reveals the top searches of 2023

Google Search remains the world's most popular online search engine, and the tech behemoth reveals the most common searches from at the end of every year. See global as well as more local trends in most common searches for people, films, and more.

10 controversial World Cup moments

If you're expecting a staid back-and-forth, then you'll be surprised by the World Cup, which is often filled with high drama and even higher tensions. This list highlights how controversy has been a constant on soccer's biggest stage, influencing outcomes, sparking debates, and sometimes leading to rule changes.

Learn about the Linux contingency plan for when its creator retires or passes away

Authored 34 years after the software was coded by Linus Torvalds, the plan dictates that if the maintainers of the code's repository are unable to facilitate a transition to Torvalds' successor, an Organizer will chair a meeting with the invitees of the most recently concluded Maintainers Summit, which will consider options for the ongoing management of the repository.

See when the last case of wild poliovirus was found in each country

This chart shows when wild polio cases were last reported in each country worldwide. Beyond wild poliovirus, rare outbreaks can occur related to mutated strains of oral polio vaccine.

See hilarious photos from the Comedy Wildlife Awards 2025

Napping frog princes, annoying lion husbands, and kung fu sea eagles are just some of the charming shots you'll find among the finalists for the award.

You can draft a will designed to block AI resurrection—but the request may be ignored

Ars Technica spoke with legal experts about how—and if—people could design their wills to prevent AI resurrection. Though this is not yet a common request, one lawyer suggested that people worried about living on in an AI format can draft a power of attorney and a will that prevents those in charge of one's estate from submitting any texts, voice, image, writings, or other personal information to any AI tools.

Why a 'Simpsons' super fan believes the show should end

In 2025, Fox renewed "The Simpsons" through 2029 and announced a new movie. But one super fan echoes what many of the legendary show's audience have been saying for years: The series' best days are in the very distant past.

Dawkins believes cultural memes have mutated into internet memes

The world's creations fall into two categories: those that look designed but whose appearance or function came about due to random mutation and natural selection, such as birds, and those whose designs and mutations are knowingly crafted, such as airplanes.

In 2012, the Pulitzer Board chose not to award a prize for literature

The literary world was shocked in 2012 when, for the first time in more than three decades, the Pulitzer Board decided not to award a prize for literature. The jury had selected three finalists (Karen Russell's "Swamplandia!," David Foster Wallace's "The Pale King," and Denis Johnson's "Train Dreams) but no winner.

Kurt Vonnegut's satire embraced dark humor

Books like "Cat’s Cradle" and "Slaughterhouse Five" satirized the international appetite for war, which the 20th-century writer found both horrifying and hilarious. It’s a combination that some called “gallows humor,” a classification Vonnegut himself remembered Sigmund Freud describing. “One of the examples Freud gives is a man about to be hanged,” Vonnegut once recalled, “and the hangman says, ‘Do you have anything to say?’ The condemned man replies, ‘Not at this time.’”

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.

Discover the catastrophic consequences of a failure of the US electrical grid—something that is more likely than many Americans think.

Explore a list of the 100 best novels of all time, compiled by some of the world's best living writers, including Salman Rushdie, Stephen King, and Jennifer Egan.

As of 2025, the most cited papers in science include a review of graphene, methods to improve image recognition, streamlining electron density calculations, and optimizing protein studies.

Watch how algorithms can be designed to train themselves and self-improve without human input, to the point where the optimized code is too complex for programmers to understand.

A century of Billboard issues documenting the evolution of popular music.

The use of fungi to detoxify land and water—a process known as mycoremediation—has been used to clean up natural resources affected by the 2025 California wildfires.

Indefinite cloning of some endangered species may not sustain their longevity because cloning success rates decrease as genetic mutations accumulate.

In 2026, Finland was named the world's happiest country for the ninth consecutive year based on its wealth, social safety network, and high life expectancy, among other factors.

Existentialist writer Jean-Paul Sartre coined the famous phrase 'Hell is—other people' in his play 'No Exit'

In 1939, baseball star Lou Gehrig delivered his inspirational 'Luckiest Man' speech after retiring due to the health condition that now bears his name.

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

Three Ebola species are responsible for most large outbreaks of the disease, yet the only approved Ebola vaccine is known to work against just one of them.

The US Constitution is widely regarded as the longest-standing written national constitution still in force—see how it has influenced rights worldwide.

Apeirophobia is an overwhelming fear of living forever, perhaps stemming from the brain's inability to conceptualize an infinite life.

Volcanoes 'die' when their supply of magma runs out, if they are shifted away from their underlying magma reservoir, or if they get clogged by collapsing or their magma cooling back into rock.

Apollo astronauts left items in the moon's 'toss zone,' including golf balls, family photos, and bags of human waste, to make room for lunar rocks.

The tragic Pulitzer Prize-winning image 'The Vulture and the Little Girl' (1993) generated controversy, raised concerns about ethics in photography, and eventually led to the photographer's death.

A 2019 Facebook event called on attendees to "Storm Area 51, They Can't Stop All of Us," resulting in countless memes, the creation of a music festival, and eventually the arrests of those who did try to approach the area.

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.

Chaos theory—informally known as the butterfly effect—is the reason why weather forecasts are presented with probabilities rather than certainties.

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

Most of the observable universe's volume consists of voids and supervoids—enormous regions of space with little to no galaxies, stars, or light.

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

Explore the history, structure, and species of Australia's Great Barrier Reef with this interactive journey narrated by Sir David Attenborough.