This week the best website in the history of the internet celebrates its 25th birthday. What URL could I possibly mean besides Wikipedia.org — bastion of what the internet once was, and what it still could be. It stands in stark contrast to nearly every other online platform that has been ens**ttified by profit-hungry algorithms, AI slop and racist bots. The World Wide Web can feel like a pretty dark place lately, but on Wikipedia — which exists in 340 languages, hosts 7.1 million articles in English, and is consistently among the top 10 most visited websites — it feels a lot different, much brighter and more free.
Its authors, as you probably know, are countless and largely anonymous “Wikipedians,” volunteer editors who nitpick citations and uphold its editorial standards so you and I can enjoy entries about weird mushrooms, the cast of “The Pitt” or the latest political crisis in crowd-sourced and generally fair-minded terms. And Wikipedia is still improving steadily, edit by edit, which is remarkable given how close it has remained, over all those years, to its original principles and site design. It’s not just a website for settling an argument — though it’s really good for that! — it’s a place to satisfy curiosity, brush up on basics or take a wild trip down an information rabbit hole and learn things you didn’t know you needed to know.
