Wikipedia marks 25 years, remains ad-free and draws over 7 billion monthly visits

Wikipedia celebrated its 25th anniversary on January 15 and remains ad-free while drawing over 7 billion visitors per month, Pcgamer reported. As Tom's Hardware noted, founder Jimmy Wales made the site's first edit on an iMac G3 on January 15, 2001.

The nonprofit, user-driven reference site allows anyone to edit, and the article credited volunteer editors' commitment to citing sources for keeping it a go-to starting point for amateur and professional research. The piece also said Wikipedia faces threats from AI and censorious repression in the US and UK.

In October the Wikimedia Foundation reported unusually high AI-related bot traffic and said human readership was down 8% amid AI chatbot usage and the proliferation of generated answers in search; the foundation said it is taking steps to combat this. The article's author said he donates $5 a month to Wikipedia and highlighted quirks such as the heavily edited Ship of Theseus page no longer containing words from the original version.

Key Topics

Tech, Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, Wikimedia Foundation, Ai Bot Traffic, User-generated Content