Overview
- Wikipedia marks its 25th anniversary after launching on January 15, 2001, having grown to roughly 65 million articles across about 300 languages.
- The Wikimedia Foundation reported a 50% surge in traffic driven by bots rather than humans, which may be harvesting content for AI systems.
- Volunteers rejected a Foundation experiment to offer AI‑generated article summaries via a Chrome extension, leading to the feature’s withdrawal.
- The site’s ad‑free, donation‑funded model faces strain as AI tools consume its content and reduce direct visits that help sustain fundraising.
- New AI encyclopedias, including Elon Musk’s Grokipedia, are emerging with material drawn from Wikipedia and are reported to carry ideological bias.