Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales has been called the last decent tech baron. It's sounds like a flattering label, although one I usually associate more with yacht-dwelling meatheads who feed their herds of cattle homegrown macadamia nuts; the kind of person who can most recently be found wining and dining with the President of the United States and his coterie of MAGA sycophants.
The online crowdsourced encyclopedia revealed that it has signed up AI companies, including Amazon, Meta Platforms, Perplexity, Microsoft, and France's Mistral AI. Wikipedia is one of the last bastions of the early internet, but that original vision of a free online space has been clouded by the dominance of Big Tech platforms and the rise of generative AI chatbots trained on content scraped from the web.
The missive demanded that the free online encyclopedia remove the FBI's logo from an entry about the agency, claiming that reproducing the emblem was illegal and punishable with fines, imprisonment, "or both." Rather than back down, a lawyer for the Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts Wikipedia, shot back a sharp refusal outlining how the FBI's interpretation of the relevant statute was incorrect and saying that Wikipedia was "prepared to argue our view in court."
In January 2026, Wikipedia will turn 25 years old, a reminder that one of the internet's most‑visited sites began as an experiment many experts assumed would fail. It grew from a simple idea to more than 65 million articles in over 300 languages not by ignoring criticism, but by listening: adding quality controls, building policies, and keeping humans at the center of oversight and content creation.
Beyond that, the feature focuses on providing an annual overview of activity on Wikipedia as a whole, but in a pretty graphical format, not dissimilar to Spotify's Wrapped. A list of the most-read English language articles is topped by Charlie Kirk and "deaths in 2025," proving that humans are incurably morbid. Wikipedia also says that editors made over 66 million changes across the site this year.
To start with, the guide confirms what we already know: automated tools are basically useless. Instead, the guide focuses on habits and turns of phrase that are rare on Wikipedia but common on the internet at large (and thus, common in the model's training data). According to the guide, AI submissions will spend a lot of time emphasizing why a subject is important, usually in generic terms like "a pivotal moment" or "a broader movement."
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has jumped into a conflict over the online encyclopedia's page on "Gaza genocide." Just days after a Wikipedia editor froze changes to the article, Wales posted a statement on a page dedicated to discussing edits, saying the article "requires immediate correction" and is part of a broader neutrality problem on the site, where "there is much more work to do."
So, picture a moment when a new source of information comes online, turns into a go-to for people everywhere, sometimes to the chagrin of professors and bosses, but becomes a household name and really changes the internet. So we're doing AI again. Actually I am talking about Wikipedia, the online crowdsourced encyclopedia, which for a long time generated a lot of skepticism, but today is actually seen as a pretty trusted source of information. It's an example of an organization that actually created something positive on the internet.
Since 2001, Wikipedia has been the backbone of knowledge on the internet. Hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, it remains the only top website in the world run by a nonprofit. Unlike newer projects, Wikipedia's strengths are clear: it has transparent policies, rigorous volunteer oversight, and a strong culture of continuous improvement. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, written to inform billions of readers without promoting a particular point of view.
Wikipedia is one of those rare digital miracles that feels like it live up to the vast promise of the web: a vast online encyclopedia, written and maintained by millions of volunteers across the world, in arguably the most extraordinary single repository of knowledge in human history. But of course, because any unverified user can edit Wikipedia, it's often become subject to vandalism.
Wikipedia, which was originally intended to democratize information, has shifted towards partisanship, with a noticeable bias against conservatives, particularly evident in its treatment of Vice President JD Vance.
