The Ming Dynasty Yongle Encyclopedia is quietly seething.
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.
According to Wikimedia Statistics, the free encyclopedia saw 27 billion page views in December from seven billion unique visitors, just a few decades worth of population growth behind the current estimated human population of eight billion. Those are the sort of traffic numbers to make any digital media executive salivate, but famously, Wikipedia remains one of the few places on the internet that won’t inundate you with ads and trackers, just a few donation requests per year like a public radio station or something.
The Guinness Book of World Records crowned Wikipedia the largest encyclopedia in the world in 2020 when it was sitting at the 50 million article mark across all languages, but that recognition was more than a little belated.
