Twenty-five years is a long time, and yet one is inclined to respond to this anniversary by asking “only?!” to react. The online reference tool is so essential for many people that it feels as if it has always been there as soon as the Internet was available. The website became a popular and reliable reference for almost every subject area. The recipe for success: volunteers write contributions and discuss changes; Server infrastructure, software development and organization are financed by donations – no funding through advertising, featured sponsors or government support. The international organization looks back on its first quarter of a century with an interactive microsite. Anyone who visits the retrospective is greeted by an introductory video that combines contributions, debates and events relating to Wikipedia into an entertaining report. It can also be viewed on YouTube – since the video portal plays an automatic, AI-generated German audio track, we recommend manually switching to the original audio track using the gear icon in the bottom right corner. A live stream will also start in these minutes – it represents the online reference work’s “virtual birthday party”.
The video is supplemented by nine short portraits of Wikipedia editors from all over the world. The entry “Scroll to the past” switches to an interactive journey through history. It ends with a humorous personality test with which you find out which future Wikipedia appears most similar to your own character.
Latest challenges
The Wikimedia Foundation has long since looked after more than just the reference work. Projects such as Wikisource, Wikivoyage and Wikidata expand the offering. Despite contributions mainly made by humans, artificial intelligence currently represents a major challenge. Many AI providers are only too happy to use the established online reference work as a training basis for their Large Language Models (LLMs). A large proportion of the access numbers now come from their scrapers. The citability of Wikipedia is questioned much less often today than twenty years ago, but even today people still occasionally take issue with the content of the collectively created content: Elon Musk describes Wikipedia as ideologically colored and counters this with a (clearly ideologically colored) Grokipedia – not without making heavy use of the original.
