Wikipedia turns 25, still boasting zero ads and over 7 billion visitors per month despite the rise of AI and threats of government repression

Jimmy Wales, the founder, President and Chair of Wikimedia Foundation, at Wikimania 2006 held at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, on August 4, 2006. The Wikimedia Foundation operates some of the largest collaboratively-edited reference projects in the world, including Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is an international non-profit organization dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, and to providing the full content of these wiki-based projects to the public free of charge. .

As reported by Tom's Hardware, the ubiquitous, nonprofit, user-driven reference site Wikipedia celebrated its 25th anniversary on January 15. Though threatened by AI and censorious repression in the US and UK, Wikipedia remains a staggering achievement and a rare bright spot on the modern internet.

As Tom's Hardware pointed out, Wikipedia founder and public face Jimmy Wales made the site's first edit on a deliciously era-appropriate iMac G3 on January 15, 2001. That's the really cute, all-in-one Apple with a CRT display and translucent Game Boy plastic.