60 Fun Facts About Wikipedia

Wikipedia was launched in which year?

The first edit came two days after the domain was registered, and 15 January is now celebrated by editors as Wikipedia Day.

Wikipedia carries no advertising. How is it mainly funded?

The annual fundraising banners raise millions of small gifts, and the foundation's endowment passed $100 million in the 2020s.

Which two people are credited as the co-founders of Wikipedia?

One defined the goal of a publicly editable encyclopedia; the other suggested using a wiki to get there, and coined the name.

Wikipedia's logo is an unfinished globe made up of what?

Each piece carries a glyph from a different writing system, and the missing pieces symbolise a project that is never finished.

Volunteer editors of Wikipedia are known by what collective name?

They edit through the open-source MediaWiki software, and the whole encyclopedia sees around five edits per second on average.

Which nonprofit has hosted Wikipedia since 2003?

It was set up in St. Petersburg, Florida, moved to California in 2008 and pays its way with millions of small donations rather than ads or paywalls.

The wiki markup tag {{Citation needed}} does what?

Some tags sit in place for years, forming an ever-growing backlog, and the phrase has escaped into everyday speech and protest signs.

The word 'wiki' comes from a word meaning 'quick' in which language?

The developer of the first wiki borrowed it from the Wiki Wiki Shuttle buses at Honolulu airport when he named his user-editable website in 1995.

Which Wikipedia sister project hosts the freely licensed images, sound and video used across editions?

Anyone can upload to it, and a photo added there becomes usable in every edition of the encyclopedia at once.

Which core Wikipedia policy, requiring articles to be written without bias, arose in its first year?

It is one of the 'Five Pillars', alongside the rules that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, is free content, expects civility and has no firm rules.

Roughly how many edits does Wikipedia receive per second, on average?

That works out at some 13 million edits a month across editions that together hold more than 68 million articles.

Wikipedia began as a feeder project for which earlier, expert-reviewed online encyclopedia?

That project's seven-step approval process was so slow it produced just 21 articles in its first year, while its wiki offshoot managed 18,000.

Which TV satirist coined 'wikiality' in 2006 and urged viewers to edit the elephant article?

Numerous articles about elephants and Africa were vandalised, and an account bearing the comedian's name was blocked indefinitely.

Which edition of Wikipedia is written using a restricted vocabulary of roughly 1,500 common words?

The word list grows out of Charles Kay Ogden's 850-word Basic English of the 1920s and is aimed at children and language learners.

Jimmy Wales worked in which profession before turning to the internet?

He grew up in Huntsville, took finance degrees and left a PhD programme to work in Chicago finance in the 1990s.

Wikipedia's original web address ended in which top-level domain?

The switch to .org came after one language edition forked in 2002 over fears of advertising, and Wales promised the site would carry no ads.

Wikipedia's parent foundation has had its headquarters in which city since 2008?

The move from Florida was justified by proximity to like-minded organisations, a better talent pool and cheaper international travel.

Since 2011, which annual conference has announced the 'Wikimedian of the Year' award?

The first was held in Frankfurt in August 2005 and drew about 380 people; the second moved to Harvard Law School.

In January 2012 English Wikipedia went dark for 24 hours to protest which proposed US laws?

More than 162 million people saw the blackout page, and over 8 million used it to look up their member of Congress.

Which video platform said in 2018 it would use Wikipedia to fact-check conspiracy videos?

CEO Susan Wojcicki made the announcement at South by Southwest; from 2018 information boxes drawn from Wikipedia appeared beneath some videos.

Jimmy Wales was born in which US state?

He attended Randolph School in Huntsville, graduated at 16 and studied finance at Auburn and the University of Alabama.

Which for-profit wiki hosting company, now called Fandom, was co-founded by Jimmy Wales?

It hosts fan-run wikis for games and TV shows and, unlike Wikipedia, runs advertising.

Who developed WikiWikiWeb, the very first wiki, in 1995?

He installed it on his consulting firm's site his consulting firm's website on 25 March 1995 and later co-wrote the Manifesto for Agile Software Development.

Which subject did Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger teach at Ohio State University?

He drafted several of the site's earliest policies, was laid off in March 2002, and later launched an expert-reviewed rival.

Which project, launched on 29 October 2012, stores structured facts that all Wikipedia editions can share, with every item given a 'Q' number?

Elvis Presley is Q303 and love is Q316; by 2025 it held around 1.65 billion statements and was the Foundation's first new project since 2006.

Which journal's 2005 study found Wikipedia averaged four errors per science entry to Britannica's three?

Britannica disputed the study's methods, the journal fired back, and the argument over the sample of 42 entries has never quite ended.

Wikipedia has been blocked in which country since May 2015?

Turkey blocked every language edition from April 2017 until January 2020, when its constitutional court ruled the ban violated human rights.

According to Jimmy Wales, what text did he type in Wikipedia's very first test edit?

The classic programmer's greeting may have gone into an early version that was scrapped and restarted soon afterwards.

Which Wikipedia edition was the first after English to reach one million articles, in 2009?

The Japanese edition became the thirteenth to hit a million in January 2016.

Early Wikipedia was bankrolled by Bomis, a web company whose best-known sections were devoted to what?

Its 'Babe Engine' helped users find adult content, and about $100,000 of its revenue went into Wikipedia before the project turned nonprofit.

Becoming a Wikipedia administrator is nicknamed being given what?

The janitorial image is deliberate: adminship is meant to be 'no big deal', and there were about 1,000 admins on the English edition in 2006.

A 2006 'Weird Al' Yankovic music video shows him vandalising a Wikipedia article. Which song?

In the clip he defaces the page for Atlantic Records, a dig at the label that had refused him permission to parody one of its songs.

What was named after Wikipedia in January 2013?

Minor planet 274301 Wikipedia was discovered by the Andrushivka observatory in Ukraine and later given the encyclopedia's name.

Which initiative let people in developing countries read the encyclopedia without mobile data charges?

It ran from 2012 to 2018 and was wound down partly because critics said zero-rating undermined net neutrality.

Users of which language edition split off in 2002 to form Enciclopedia Libre, fearing Wikipedia would run adverts?

The fork prompted the promise that Wikipedia would stay ad-free, a policy the site has kept ever since, funding itself through reader donations.

In 2025, which Wikipedia edition ranked second by article count with few active editors?

Nearly all its six million articles were generated by Sverker Johansson's Lsjbot, which also wrote about half of the Swedish edition.

A 2005 hoax biography falsely tied which retired journalist to the Kennedy assassinations?

The prankster turned out to be a Nashville delivery-company manager who thought the site was a joke; he was fired, then reinstated at his victim's request.

The 'Essjay' scandal of 2007 involved a trusted editor who had falsely claimed to be what?

The New Yorker had profiled him as a tenured academic; he was actually a 24-year-old with no advanced degrees, and the exposure fuelled distrust of anonymous 'experts'.

In 2015 the Wikipedia community received the Erasmus Prize and which award presented in Oviedo?

The same year saw the printed 'Print Wikipedia' art project begin publishing 106 of the 7,473 700-page volumes the English edition would fill.

Which 2010 anti-vandalism bot uses a neural network trained on past vandalism to revert bad edits within seconds?

Estimates suggest bots already wipe out about half of all vandalism before a human sees it.

Larry Sanger founded which expert-reviewed rival to Wikipedia in 2006?

He stepped down as its editor-in-chief in 2010 and left entirely in 2020, having since accused Wikipedia of ideological bias.

What did Jimmy Wales use as a placeholder logo when Wikipedia first went live?

The famous puzzle globe only arrived after a 2003 international contest won by Paul Stansifer and refined by David Friedland.

In 2007 the English Wikipedia overtook which 15th-century Chinese compilation as the largest encyclopedia ever?

Known in English as the Yongle Encyclopedia, the Ming-dynasty compilation of 1408 had held the record for almost 600 years.

Rambot, the first big article-writing bot on Wikipedia in 2002, generated thousands of pages about what?

Derek Ramsey's program mass-produced articles for American towns and cities from US Census figures, many of which still form the skeleton of those pages.

In which country was the first Wikipedia Monument unveiled in 2014?

It stands in Frankfurt Square in the border town of Słubice, was designed by Armenian-born sculptor Mihran Hakobyan and cost about 50,000 złoty.

Which website's mention in July of Wikipedia's first year brought its first big wave of new contributors?

The tech news site had given it two minor mentions in March; the New York Times followed with the first mainstream coverage that September.

By the end of 2004, roughly how many language editions of Wikipedia existed?

The first non-English editions were created between March and May of the site's first year.

The English Wikipedia's one-millionth article, created on 1 March 2006, was about what?

Jordanhill railway station in Glasgow became briefly famous, and its article was expanded from a stub to a detailed page within hours.

In December 2008 most UK ISPs blocked a Wikipedia article about which metal album over its cover art?

The Internet Watch Foundation blacklisted the page for four days, and the resulting publicity made the cover far more widely seen than before.

In which country was a copy of English Wikipedia placed on '5D' optical storage underground in January 2024?

The copy went into a research site under the Alps, a medium designed to outlast every other backup of the encyclopedia.

Wikipedia's expert-reviewed predecessor closed in 2003 having fully approved how many articles?

Another 150 were stuck in its review pipeline when it closed; Wikipedia had by then already passed 100,000.

Which service company employed the man who wrote the Seigenthaler hoax as a joke for a colleague?

Brian Chase admitted it in December 2005 after the journalist traced the IP address to BellSouth and then to Rush Delivery.

Which Israeli lunar lander crash-landed in 2019 carrying nearly all of English Wikipedia on nickel plates?

Experts believe the thin engraved plates likely survived the impact on the Moon's surface.

In June 2019, scientists encoded all 16 GB of English Wikipedia's article text into what?

Print Wikipedia, by contrast, would run to 7,473 volumes of 700 pages each.

What is the name of the Wikipedia redesign that debuted on January 18, 2023?

It moved the table of contents into a sidebar; editors of the Swahili Wikipedia voted unanimously to revert it.

Wikipedia's fundamental community principles are summarised as the 'Five' what?

Detailed editorial rules live in many separate policies and guidelines beneath them.

Researchers Reagle and Sue Gardner compared Wikipedia's consensus-building to that of which religious group?

One difference they noted: Wikipedia has no equivalent of the clerk who facilitates when a meeting disagrees.

A 2008 Wikimedia Foundation survey found what share of Wikipedia editors were female?

Universities including Yale and Brown later offered credit for student edits on women in science and technology.

The bot Lsjbot created most of the articles on the Cebuano and Waray Wikipedias, both languages of which country?

The same bot had written about half of the Swedish Wikipedia by 2013.

What was the title of Jimmy Wales's book published by Penguin Random House in October 2025?

The publisher billed it as a reflection on the global crisis of credibility and what let Wikipedia succeed.