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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Explore a comprehensive encyclopedia of all known bird species and families.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A collaborative map lets anyone rename the entire world in real time

Rename.world is a playful, community-driven project where users discover, claim, and rename locations across a live global map. It's kind of like Wikipedia meets Google Maps, filtered through the internet's love of chaos and whimsy.

The Internet Archive is a nonprofit digital library of the Web

Founded in 1996, the Archive promotes open access and the digital preservation of online information and, as of 2026, contains more than 200 petabytes of content, including over one trillion web pages, 56 million books and texts, 13 million audio recordings, 1.3 million software programs, and other digital content.

An encyclopedia of anthropology

This online database offers articles and additional resources for all things anthropology. This free resource is filled with peer-reviewed entries that cover topics ranging from addiction to writing, and offers anthropological insight into more...

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.

An overview of the World Wide Web, which is often confused with the internet

When users create a website, they organize content and store it on a web server—one of various types of hardware that make up the internet—in web languages, such as HTML and JavaScript. When visiting the site, a web browser translates these languages into text and other media for consumption.

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."

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.

Explore the world of fan fiction

This guide to the genre's major platforms breaks down their strengths and weaknesses, offering an excellent primer for the uninitiated newcomers.

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.

Explore the full list of over 1,000 UNESCO World Heritage sites, broken down by country.

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.

View the ecosystem of global services, organizations, and agencies behind the internet

Through an open, transparent, and collaborative model built on open standards development and shared global ownership, the internet is kept freely accessible amid evolving international policies. Key organizations, such as IANA, which allocates IP addresses and fulfills administrative functions for the Domain Name System, function as non-profit organizations.

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.

Search set lists from more than 10 million live concerts, added and edited by fans

Taking cues from Wikipedia, this Setlist wiki allows fans and concertgoers to share which songs were actually played at live concerts, across genres. The database makes this niche information about what performers choose to play year-round available for the curious.

Explore over 46,000 pages of Charles Darwin's manuscripts

The American Museum of Natural History hosts almost 35,000 digitized folios related to evolution within the fields of botany and zoology from Darwin's Beagle voyage. High-resolution color images, geological findings, and annotated books from Darwin's personal library are also viewable.

Explore a database of more than 220,000 shipwrecks, the largest compilation to date.

A collection of fascinating facts about the planet and its creatures

You may have already heard that cheetahs are the fastest animals on land, but did you know that Savannah elephants are the strongest? This page on the World Wildlife Fund's UK website features a diverse range of articles on mammals, underwater creatures, birds, reptiles, insects, and landscapes. Discover captivating information about Earth and the creatures you share it with.

Explore more than 7,000 of the world's languages

Google collects open-source data on languages, detailing how many known speakers each language has, whether its endangered, and where in the world it is spoken.

A massive list of wildly specific museums

The definition of a museum varies depending on who you ask and where you find yourself. Need proof? Check out this list of over 80 museums—dedicated to niche interests like hand fans, hovercrafts, and celebrity leftovers (really).

Get lost in these historical libraries

The internet has changed a lot about how we learn, explore new ideas, and conduct research, particularly when it comes to the spaces we learn in. While few of us would trade our smartphones for a walk in a historical library, a walk through some of the beautifully designed cathedrals of learning could remind us to put them down sometimes. Explore 10 of the world's magnificent libraries with this quick video survey.

Virtually all public libraries in the US offer free internet access

Beyond providing internet access, libraries have also expanded into broad digital hubs for communities. Ninety percent offer basic digital literacy training, 76% help patrons navigate online government services, and 73% assist people with job applications.

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.

As of 2023, there are about 1.1 billion objects stored in 73 of the world's largest natural history museums, but only about 16% of specimens are available in digital archives.

A database of grape varieties

All wines are defined in part by the type of grapes used, whether a single grape or a blend. This encyclopedic archive of grape varieties and their respective attributes is an easy way to become acquainted with just about any wine grape out there—from Albariño to Zweigelt. It also includes brief introductions to non-wine alcoholic beverage categories like beer and hard seltzer.

Give your memories a place to live and explore the personal stories left by strangers, tied to specific locations, in this interactive map of the world.