Wikipedia Trivia
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60 free Wikipedia trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Wikipedia trivia quiz is about the encyclopedia itself rather than the things in it. It starts with the origin story: the Hawaiian word behind 'wiki', the first wiki built in 1995, the expert-reviewed Nupedia that Wikipedia was meant to feed, the web company that paid the bills, and the two co-founders who later fell out over how an encyclopedia should be run. From there it covers how the site actually works and grows: the puzzle-globe logo and its contest, the neutral point of view policy, administrators and their 'mop', the bots that wrote millions of articles and the ones that fight vandalism, Wikidata and Commons, and milestones like the millionth article and the day it overtook a 600-year-old Chinese record. There is also a run of questions on the controversies and culture around Wikipedia: the Seigenthaler hoax, the Essjay affair, Stephen Colbert's 'wikiality', the 2012 blackout, national blocks, the Wikipedia Monument in Poland and the asteroid named after the site. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's own documented history and related encyclopaedia entries, and each question links to its source.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Wikipedia was launched in which year?
2001
The first edit came two days after the domain was registered, and 15 January is now celebrated by editors as Wikipedia Day.
Q 02Wikipedia carries no advertising. How is it mainly funded?
Donations from readers
The annual fundraising banners raise millions of small gifts, and the foundation's endowment passed $100 million in the 2020s.
Q 03Which two people are credited as the co-founders of Wikipedia?
Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger
One defined the goal of a publicly editable encyclopedia; the other suggested using a wiki to get there, and coined the name.
Q 04Wikipedia's logo is an unfinished globe made up of what?
Jigsaw pieces
Each piece carries a glyph from a different writing system, and the missing pieces symbolise a project that is never finished.
Q 05Volunteer editors of Wikipedia are known by what collective name?
Wikipedians
They edit through the open-source MediaWiki software, and the whole encyclopedia sees around five edits per second on average.
Q 06Which nonprofit has hosted Wikipedia since 2003?
The Wikimedia Foundation
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.
Q 07The wiki markup tag {{Citation needed}} does what?
Flags an unsourced claim
Some tags sit in place for years, forming an ever-growing backlog, and the phrase has escaped into everyday speech and protest signs.
Q 08The word 'wiki' comes from a word meaning 'quick' in which language?
Hawaiian
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.
Q 09Which Wikipedia sister project hosts the freely licensed images, sound and video used across editions?
Wikimedia Commons
Anyone can upload to it, and a photo added there becomes usable in every edition of the encyclopedia at once.
Q 10Which core Wikipedia policy, requiring articles to be written without bias, arose in its first year?
Neutral point of view
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.
Q 11Roughly how many edits does Wikipedia receive per second, on average?
About five
That works out at some 13 million edits a month across editions that together hold more than 68 million articles.
Q 12Wikipedia began as a feeder project for which earlier, expert-reviewed online encyclopedia?
Nupedia
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.
Q 13Which TV satirist coined 'wikiality' in 2006 and urged viewers to edit the elephant article?
Stephen Colbert
Numerous articles about elephants and Africa were vandalised, and an account bearing the comedian's name was blocked indefinitely.
Q 21Jimmy Wales was born in which US state?
Alabama
He attended Randolph School in Huntsville, graduated at 16 and studied finance at Auburn and the University of Alabama.
Q 22Which for-profit wiki hosting company, now called Fandom, was co-founded by Jimmy Wales?
Wikia
It hosts fan-run wikis for games and TV shows and, unlike Wikipedia, runs advertising.
Q 23Who developed WikiWikiWeb, the very first wiki, in 1995?
Ward Cunningham
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.
Q 14Which edition of Wikipedia is written using a restricted vocabulary of roughly 1,500 common words?
Simple English
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.
Q 15Jimmy Wales worked in which profession before turning to the internet?
Options trader
He grew up in Huntsville, took finance degrees and left a PhD programme to work in Chicago finance in the 1990s.
Q 16Wikipedia's original web address ended in which top-level domain?
.com
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.
Q 17Wikipedia's parent foundation has had its headquarters in which city since 2008?
San Francisco
The move from Florida was justified by proximity to like-minded organisations, a better talent pool and cheaper international travel.
Q 18Since 2011, which annual conference has announced the 'Wikimedian of the Year' award?
Wikimania
The first was held in Frankfurt in August 2005 and drew about 380 people; the second moved to Harvard Law School.
Q 19In January 2012 English Wikipedia went dark for 24 hours to protest which proposed US laws?
SOPA and PIPA
More than 162 million people saw the blackout page, and over 8 million used it to look up their member of Congress.
Q 20Which video platform said in 2018 it would use Wikipedia to fact-check conspiracy videos?
YouTube
CEO Susan Wojcicki made the announcement at South by Southwest; from 2018 information boxes drawn from Wikipedia appeared beneath some videos.
Q 24Which subject did Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger teach at Ohio State University?
Philosophy
He drafted several of the site's earliest policies, was laid off in March 2002, and later launched an expert-reviewed rival.
Q 25Which project, launched on 29 October 2012, stores structured facts that all Wikipedia editions can share, with every item given a 'Q' number?
Wikidata
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.
Q 26Which journal's 2005 study found Wikipedia averaged four errors per science entry to Britannica's three?
Nature
Britannica disputed the study's methods, the journal fired back, and the argument over the sample of 42 entries has never quite ended.
Q 27Wikipedia has been blocked in which country since May 2015?
China
Turkey blocked every language edition from April 2017 until January 2020, when its constitutional court ruled the ban violated human rights.
Q 28According to Jimmy Wales, what text did he type in Wikipedia's very first test edit?
Hello, World!
The classic programmer's greeting may have gone into an early version that was scrapped and restarted soon afterwards.
Q 29Which Wikipedia edition was the first after English to reach one million articles, in 2009?
German
The Japanese edition became the thirteenth to hit a million in January 2016.
Q 30Early Wikipedia was bankrolled by Bomis, a web company whose best-known sections were devoted to what?
Erotic images
Its 'Babe Engine' helped users find adult content, and about $100,000 of its revenue went into Wikipedia before the project turned nonprofit.