Wikipedia Turns 25, Sells Access To Amazon, Meta, Microsoft And Other AI Giants
January 15, 2026
Wikipedia is 25 years old today and celebrated with a retrospective of its history building 65 million articles in 300 languages with the help of almost a quarter of a million volunteers (including me). The open and free encyclopedia of everything also celebrated by announcing AI partners who use Wikipedia to “integrate human-governed knowledge into their platforms at scale.” Those companies include Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral AI and Perplexity, and they join existing partners Google, Ecosia, Nomic, Pleias, ProRata, and Reef Media.
25 years ago, the first words founder Jimmy Wales wrote were – of course – the immortal “Hello World” programmers often write in their first application in a new programming language.
Beyond the home page, one of the first pages on Wikipedia was, perhaps fittingly, an “about” page on what exactly Wikipedia is. You can see its edit history still to this day, dating back to November 6, 2001. The oldest surviving edit dates back to January 15, 2001, and is titled UuU: it was originally intended to be a list of countries whose names start with “u.”
Those of us who grew up in the Wikipedia era will remember fights with teachers and professors who viewed citations of Wikipedia with profound suspicion because it was online, free and created entirely by volunteers. Today, of course, it is well respected and generally accepted as a reliable source.
AI, however, has been a relatively new introduction to how we find information. Increasingly, instead of googling something or checking Wikipedia, we ask ChatGPT or Gemini, which is why Wikipedia is striking enterprise access deals with major AI companies.
It’s an interesting evolution: Wikipedia, a symbol of free, volunteer-generated knowledge, now also serves as critical commercial infrastructure for the technology giants and AI startups that increasingly shape how that knowledge is consumed.
The reality is that Wikipedia’s founding principles don’t really allow anything else. The “five pillars” of Wikipedia are:
- Wikipedia is an encyclopedia
- Wikipedia is written from a neutral point of view
- Wikipedia is free content that anyone can use, edit, and distribute
- Wikipedia’s editors should treat each other with respect and civility
- Wikipedia has no firm rules
Given number three, any AI company can simply scrape or download the entirety of Wikipedia, consented or not, and use the world’s freely-provided knowledge to train their AI models. The enterprise partnerships that Wikipedia has created at least have the potential to ensure that access is structured and regularly updated, as well as providing some revenue for Wikipedia (likely in hundreds of thousands of dollars, though revenue details are not released).
At minimum, the partnerships reduce the site burden on Wikipedia and ensure the site remains up for all human users as well.
The 25th anniversary celebration highlights the almost 250,000 people who have built and continue to build Wikipedia, sharing stories of volunteer editors from around the world like “Hurricane Hank,” who worked on a page during a natural disaster, to medical professionals contributing accurate health information.
Founder Jimmy Wales has framed Wikipedia as “25 years of humanity at its best.”
Hopefully that foundation helps create AI at its best as well.
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