Wikipedia is 25. Founded in 2001, this community contributor-driven site has convincingly usurped what were once the default general reference works of choice, like Encyclopædia Britannica and Microsoft Encarta. Since its launch, this free resource has risen to become the world’s 7th most popular website, with over 7 million English articles, and around 7 billion monthly visitors. Wikipedia is the most successful non‑commercial, non‑social, non‑search web destination.

The first entry on Wikipedia was a computer-ritually headed "Hello, World!" and began with the rather amateurishly optimistic line “This is the new Wikipedia!” Co-founder Jimmy Wales, a former financial trader and best known as the face of Wikipedia (better known than Larry Sanger, anyway), uploaded the first Wikipedia edit. As an aside, this first page was recreated as a non-fungible token (NFT) in 2021, making $750,000 at auction.

iMac used by Jimmy Wales to make the first edit to Wikipedia. (Image credit: Steve Jurvetson Attribution 2.0 Generic)

Since we are a hardware site, it is worth remembering that Wales used one of the bulbous, All-in-One Apple iMac computers of the era to type his first Wikipedia entry. That first iMac was notable for several milestones. The translucent, candy‑colored computer was the first major product under the renewed leadership of Steve Jobs, and would pioneer USB ports and put a sizable nail in the floppy disk coffin.

Early criticism to roaring success

We’ve already mentioned the amateurish first edit of Wikipedia. From its humble but creditable beginnings, it took quite some time to find its feet and earn a decent reputation.

Critics would initially highlight that ‘anyone could edit it’ as a major failing, regarding the reliability of Wikipedia encyclopedia entries. Even when much more fully grown, the community-driven knowledge base faced issues such as vandalism and edit wars.

Like any human-sourced knowledge repository, Wikipedia also suffered (suffers) from bias. Every contributor has their own opinions, world view, politics, and other flaws. In some encyclopedia topics, such personal lenses can cause conflicts. There were also sizable wrinkles caused by the platform possessing no editorial board, a formal fact-checking system, and so on.

The Wikipedia ship slowly turned round in the mid to late noughties, with slow structural changes being made to solidify the reputation and reference value of this now massive knowledge base. By this time, the site started to feel less like a free-for-all, and studies around this time began to show the accuracy of Wikipedia wasn’t that far removed from respected tomes like Britannica.

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(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)

Into the 2010s and beyond, Wikipedia began to be widely regarded as a trustworthy resource. It has long been integrated into Google, for example, as a primary data source of the ‘knowledge graph.’ That’s earned its place, and it is worth repeating, as the world’s top non‑commercial, non‑social, non‑search web destination. It isn’t just English, either, as Wikipedia is now available in 342 languages.

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Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom’s Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.