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

Wikipedia openly displays edit history and editorial disputes to assess trustworthiness

Unlike a journal article, which may be reviewed by up to three people before publication, popular Wikipedia pages may be reviewed thousands of times by editors, potentially enhancing their reliability. Less reviewed articles still require reliable third-party sources and remain subject to verification by bots and administrators who can undo edits.

Wikipedia articles are read more than 16 billion times every month

Nearly 300,000 volunteers worldwide help write, edit, and fact-check articles on the site in real-time, striving to ensure content is authored from a neutral point of view. All pages are freely accessible and must include citations to reliable, published sources.

A 15-year bibliographic analysis identified systematic gender bias across Wikipedia

A 2024 study by the University of Barcelona found that 71.4% of all English biographies that appear on the front page are about men, and approximately one in five editors are women. Researchers suggest systemic imbalances in society further diminish women's contributions to the site by leaving them with less time to defend edits during editorial disputes.

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.

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

Labeled as "humorous" on the site, the "Last topic pool" page lists various conditions where Wikipedia's final article would be written, including various end-of-the-world scenarios, instances where humanity might cease to exist, cases of Wikipedia becoming corrupted or uneditable, and the possibility of all possible knowledge having been written about.

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.

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.

Wikipedia arose from a failed, for-profit online encyclopedia

Nupedia was launched in 2000 by internet entrepreneur Jimmy Wales and internet project developer Lawrence Sanger, only publishing articles written by experts after a cumbersome seven-step review process. The two developed Wikipedia to allow the public to write articles for future review, but shifting to self-moderation contributed to Sanger's departure in 2002.

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.

A pediatric journal ran 138 fictional case studies, and 61 were cited as real stories

The Canadian journal Paediatrics & Child Health issued corrections to 138 case studies published since 2000, acknowledging the cases were entirely fictional—a practice intended to protect patient privacy that was never disclosed to readers. At least 61 of the fabricated reports were cited as fact in other peer-reviewed journals a combined 218 times, including a 2006 Lancet article alleging an infant died from opioid-laced breast milk.

AI scraping for LLM training data has significantly strained Wikipedia's infrastructure

From January 2024 to April 2025, the site's bandwidth increased by 50% as automated bots downloaded terabytes of data for the large language models powering AI tools. The Wikimedia Foundation found that bots accounted for 65% of the highest demand requests (e.g., videos) despite representing just 35% of page views.

Philip Roth once tried to correct details on one of his novel's Wikipedia pages

The Wikipedia entry for Roth's 2000 novel "The Human Stain" alleges that the book was based on the life of Anatole Broyard, a Black American writer who "passed" for white, something he shared in common with the main character in Roth's novel, though Roth said that wasn't true. When Roth tried to correct the error, Wikipedia editors told him he would need a secondary source to back up his claim.

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.

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.

Search this citation-heavy database of nutrition and supplement research

Explore a reference site that aggregates and summarizes peer-reviewed studies on hundreds of supplements and dietary interventions. It is ad-free and funded by subscriptions, making it a health resource without a financial stake in what you buy.

Explore Wikipedia, but TikTok-style

Wikipedia's vast trove of information can be a bit dull to navigate. This homemade website takes real Wikipedia pages and places them in a swipeable format similar to TikTok, so you can learn about very random things in a similar mode as the culture-shifting TikTok app. Check it out here.

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.

As of 2025, Wikipedia is one of the top 10 most-visited sites in the world

Alphabet Inc.'s Google search engine and YouTube received nearly 150 billion combined visits in November, followed by Facebook, ChatGPT, and Instagram, which each received over 5 billion visits during the same span. With 4.42 billion visits for the month, Wikipedia ranked just behind Reddit's 4.85 billion.

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.

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."

Six Degrees of Wikipedia, where any two articles connect in six clicks or fewer

Enter any two topics (or use suggestions) and find the shortest path of links between them. The game playfully illustrates the vast interconnections of human knowledge.

As of 2025, the Wikimedia Foundation funds 14 open-source, free knowledge projects

Since its founding in 2003, the nonprofit has provided financial, legal, and infrastructure support to Wikipedia and its sister projects (e.g., Wikinews), primarily by managing donations, which average $11, from readers. Additional funding comes from gifts exceeding $1,000, the Wikimedia Endowment, and providing Wikipedia content for commercial use.

Researchers found that by mid-2025, around 35% of newly published websites utilized AI for language generation

The study also found that pages using AI narrow the range of ideas and perspectives and skew more positively, though the measurable impacts on factual accuracy and writing style variation remain unclear.

On social media, satire is often mistaken for news

A 2018 study found that satire was often mistaken for legitimate fact, with stories from outlets like The Onion being shared widely without any understanding of their satirical intent. Likewise, the study found that media outlets often mislabeled satire as "fake news," a label that implies disinformation rather than social commentary.

Each scientific study adds incremental knowledge to existing understanding

On its own, no study serves as a source of truth or solves an existing problem indefinitely, though many can be analyzed collectively in a systematic review to build more confidence—the result of more data—in a conclusion. Studies can explore knowledge gaps or test an existing theory, which is always subject to refinement and improvement.

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.

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.

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.

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...

Find connections between Wikipedia articles utilizing a node mapping tool

Multiple Wikipedia articles can be placed on the map, each with its own node, and expanded to reveal related articles. The goal is to expand as many subsequent nodes as needed to connect articles and identify related concepts. Any node can be double-clicked on to open its respective Wikipedia page.

Here are some tips from Pew Research to help you distinguish between a good poll and an unreliable one.

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.

See this searchable resource about herbal therapies, including evidence and drug interactions

Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center has created this searchable resource of herbal supplements to inform the public about the purported uses of herbal therapies, the existing evidence about them, their mechanism of action, and any concerns about potential herbal supplement and drug interactions.

Critics of New Journalism believe the form shares unreliable information

After Gay Talese’s 2016 book on Gerald Foos was found to lack factual accuracy, criticism of New Journalism returned to the limelight. Some believe the narrative focus requires abandoning the facts and leaves too much room for writers to make up material rather than present what actually happened.

How to read the news on TikTok

There's plenty of news on TikTok, but that doesn't mean it's all reliable. This guide, written by a communication technology professor, breaks down the ways the app's algorithm delivers news. It also covers how users can determine whether or not a story is factual or misleading. Most strikingly, the professor warns readers that if they didn't search for a TikTok video, then "it probably found you."

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.

This interactive website features nearly 40,000 photos from Wikipedia for you to create visual mosaics with.

Social media can be a valuable public health tool, combating misinformation, advancing health research, boosting social mobilization, and raising awareness of health services and events.

Watch these Canadian doctors critique medical accuracy on television shows

Drs. Paul Zalzal and Brad Weening are orthopedic surgeons and members of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada. In this episode, they discuss which television shows they think are the most medically accurate. "Grey's Anatomy" did not fare well in their review.

Bad Ancient: a site to fact-check claims about the ancient world

Peruse popular questions about ancient Rome, Egypt, Greece, and more, from whether Greek boxers were ripped or to what extent Alexander the Great conquered the world.

Hear why one author thinks college rankings may be irrelevant

For more than three decades, US News & World Report has released an annual ranking of the country's best colleges. An extremely influential list that can determine application volume, funding decisions, and more, the rankings have been compiled by a secret algorithm indecipherable to many on the opposite side of the table. Author Malcolm Gladwell attempts to unpack the calculation, ultimately raising the question: How relevant is the list?

Wikiracing involves moving between two articles in the fewest clicks

The quirky pastime has evolved into a competitive event at yearly Wikimedia conferences, highlighting the interconnectedness of human knowledge. Neuroscientific research suggests lateral thinking is a crucial skill found in successful Wikiracers.

Read the main paper criticizing the concept of blue zones, which argues recordkeeping errors, pension fraud, and natural disasters likely explain the high numbers of purported healthy centenarians in certain locations.

Google Search trends reveal truths about society that traditional surveys miss

Studies of human behavior show that survey respondents may lie to present themselves more favorably. By studying anonymous search data, researchers have uncovered hidden racism, mental health struggles, and interest in taboo or stigmatized topics.

Balancing free speech while curbing misinformation has destroyed content moderation

Accusations of censorship and bias have led social media companies like Meta and X to scale back or abandon moderation tools—just as foreign propaganda surges. Researchers say their ability to track manipulation online has become severely limited.

Explore the National Cancer Institute's archive on cancer treatments, including complementary and alternative medicine.

True crime fans can derail lives with misguided accusations

In the wake of four stabbing deaths at the University of Idaho in November 2023, online sleuths, without any supporting evidence, were quick to point accusatory fingers at potential perpetrators. Poring over news reports, social media pages, and internet interactions can reveal viable information that can help solve crimes. Such (sometimes monetizable) behavior can also easily give rise to rumors and threats while impeding official investigations.(Some readers may experience a paywall.)

Truman Capote's 'In Cold Blood,' a pioneer of the true crime genre, isn't wholly accurate

The nonfiction novel "In Cold Blood" influenced true crime's narrative and investigative bend and was supposedly only 92% accurate. Journalist Ben Yagoda reflects on its accuracy after finding the fact-checking file for the four-part series published before the story was converted into hardback. Yagoda says the inaccuracies are "especially striking" because the story was originally published in one of the magazines credited with establishing fact-checking as a practice. (Some users may experience a paywall.)

Explore a database of generic drugs to trace their origins and identify any safety concerns.