The Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia has turned 25 years old. What you need to know

The famous Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia has turned 25 years old. She has gone from a modest website to a resource that is one of the ten most visited in the whole world. During this time, Wikipedia has also been at the center of several scandals due to the publication of false or politicized information. How a popular source of unverified information appeared and developed on the Internet is in the Izvestia material.

The emergence of Wikipedia

• With the rapid development of the Internet in the 1990s, users requested the creation of a digital encyclopedia, a universal resource that would contain all relevant and useful information for humanity. By the end of the decade, several projects had emerged that tried to become a source of accumulated knowledge, including the Nupedia project by American entrepreneur Jimmy Wells. It was assumed that articles for her would be written by a group of competent professionals in their field, and the texts would undergo editorial review.

• However, the process of creating materials turned out to be difficult, and the speed of writing articles was too slow. Then in January 2001, the idea arose to use a wiki engine for the development of the Nupedia website (wiki means "fast" in Hawaiian). It allows any user to participate in writing and editing texts directly in an Internet browser. Some of the users of Nupedia did not accept this idea, and then a separate encyclopedia with a wiki engine was created, called Wikipedia. The first edit was made on January 15, 2001, which was the birthday of the project.

• Wikipedia was originally English-language, but in March 2001 a separate section appeared in German, followed a few minutes later by an encyclopedia in Catalan. Soon, projects were created in other common languages, including Russian. Over the past 25 years, more than 350 sections have been launched, and some of them use the same languages. For example, in addition to the English Wikipedia, there is a separate set of articles in simplified English, and sections with official spelling and alternative spelling have been created for the Belarusian language. Several sections use artificial languages such as Esperanto.

• The English-language section of Wikipedia remains the most popular. It contains more than 7 million articles and has about 260 thousand active editors who make at least 100 edits per month. In second place is Wikipedia in Sibuan, the language spoken in the Philippines. More than 6 million of her articles were written mainly with the help of bots. Russian-language Wikipedia ranks eighth in terms of the number of articles (2.08 million) and 12th in terms of the number of active users (7.7 thousand).

Who runs Wikipedia

• Wikipedia is managed by the American organization Wikimedia Foundation. Its headquarters are located in San Francisco, and therefore Wikipedia's work is subject to the laws of the United States and California. The Foundation declares that it defines the basic rules of Wikipedia and its other projects, but does not participate in the creation of articles and does not own copyright over them, as they are distributed under a free license. The most popular languages have their own national managing partner organizations.

• Wikipedia does not have any editorial body that determines the content of articles on controversial issues. The articles are written by so-called volunteers. It is assumed that any user, even if they are not registered, can post any information, as long as it is verifiable and does not violate certain rules. At the same time, in each language section, several users have the status of administrators. They can close articles for editing, delete them, and block users. Administrators are appointed based on the results of online elections among other editors and are stripped of this status for abuse of authority and violation of the rules.

• Because of these features of the creation of articles, Wikipedia is not considered a reliable source of information, and all the data provided in its materials need to be checked for validity. Wikipedia has become an Internet phenomenon, as its popularity is growing despite the distrust of a part of society.

• The Wikimedia Foundation positions itself as a charitable, non-profit organization that exists through donations. In 2024, the organization's revenues amounted to $185 million, and expenses — $178 million, the value of the fund's assets is estimated at $271 million. Wikipedia's policy assumes that the editors of articles are volunteers on a pro bono basis, and if they receive remuneration from the customer of edits, they must inform about it in advance.

Scandals with Wikipedia

Over the 25 years of its existence, Wikipedia has been at the center of scandals several times. Being a resource that anyone can edit, it became a source of unverified and false information, leading to various consequences. For example, in 2007, Turkish historian Taner Akcam was detained in Canada on the grounds that an article about him claimed that he was a terrorist, although this was not true. And in 2009, in an article about German Minister Karl-Theodor Guttenberg, whose full name consists of ten separate names, the 11th name Wilhelm was added, after which the media also began to massively indicate him.

• Articles about famous people, and especially about politicians, were more often than not the subject of editorial disputes. In 2006, a scandal broke out when it became clear that US congressional staff had removed unwanted information about lawmakers from articles and replaced it with benevolent information. In particular, articles about future US President Joe Biden and future Vice President Mike Pence were edited.

• Although in some cases other users quickly notice suspicious edits and can return the original content, in some cases, falsifications on Wikipedia can last for years. In 2022, a deception on the part of a Chinese user was revealed. Since 2012, she has been writing fictional but related articles about the history of Russia, for example, about the alleged war between the Moscow and Tver principalities over silver mines and about the Tatar uprisings of the 17th century. The articles looked high-quality, so she was even rewarded with thanks from other authors. The deception was revealed after it was noticed that these materials about Russia had no translation into Russian.

Wikipedia's Blockages and Restrictions

• The lack of verification of information and the ability to present it in a politicized manner led to the fact that Wikipedia's work was limited in some countries. So, it is completely blocked in China. At various times, restrictions were imposed in Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Thailand, Tunisia and Uzbekistan.

• The work of Wikipedia was also restricted in Western countries. For example, in the UK, an article about The Scorpions' Virgin Killer album was banned because of a childish erotic picture from the album cover. In Portugal, businessman Cesar Do Paz obtained the removal of unwanted information through the court. In France, in 2013, a scandal arose due to the fact that internal intelligence officers detained one of the administrators and demanded that he delete an article about the Pierre-sur-Haute military radio station. It was later restored by an administrator from Switzerland.

• In Russia, after the creation of the register of banned sites in 2012, several Wikipedia articles related to drug and suicide propaganda were included in it. In 2015, the encyclopedia was blocked due to an article about the narcotic substance charas, but access to it was soon restored. Since 2022, Russian search engines have been labeling Wikipedia as a foreign resource that violates the laws of the Russian Federation due to the content of articles related to the Russian Armed Forces, and the Wikimedia Foundation, which developed the Russian-speaking segment, was liquidated in 2025 after being included in the list of foreign agents.