Wikipedia often gets taken for granted – but its history is fascinating, and its future is fragilehttps://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/oct/18/wikipedia-human-history-ai-future-under-threat
Wikipedia’s 68m articles have been consulted trillions of times. Not bad for a website that has barely changed since it was founded 20 years ago A few years ago, I was struck by the tension between how Wikipedia was used, and how it was talked about. Everyone was on it all the time, and yet its reputation had stalled at “don’t trust it”, because it was the “free encyclopedia that anyone can edit”. Clearly people were trusting it, so much so it had become part of the fabric of everyday life since it was founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001. But despite the fact it now ha…
