{"id":25510,"date":"2026-10-18T14:37:26","date_gmt":"2026-10-18T12:37:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/2026\/10\/18\/wikipedia-often-gets-taken-for-granted-but-its-history-is-fascinating-and-its-future-is-fragile\/"},"modified":"2026-10-18T14:37:26","modified_gmt":"2026-10-18T12:37:26","slug":"wikipedia-often-gets-taken-for-granted-but-its-history-is-fascinating-and-its-future-is-fragile","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/2026\/10\/18\/wikipedia-often-gets-taken-for-granted-but-its-history-is-fascinating-and-its-future-is-fragile\/","title":{"rendered":"Wikipedia often gets taken for granted \u2013 but its history is fascinating, and its future is fragile"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wikipedia\u2019s 68m articles have been consulted trillions of times. Not bad for a website that has barely changed since it was founded 20 years ago<\/p>\n

A few years ago, I was struck by the tension between how Wikipedia was used, and how it was talked about. Everyone was on it all the time, and yet its reputation had stalled at \u201cdon\u2019t trust it\u201d, because it was the \u201cfree encyclopedia that anyone can edit\u201d.<\/p>\n

Clearly people were<\/em> trusting it, so much so it had become part of the fabric of everyday life since it was founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001. But despite the fact it now has been consulted trillions of times by billions of people (English Wikipedia alone is 5.2bn words long), it inspires an odd lack of curiosity. Even people donating to Wikipedia might say the money was \u201cfor the factcheckers\u201d, though there aren\u2019t any \u2013 not paid ones, anyway. Meanwhile, the internet in the social media era had begun to feel like a much uglier place, and some digital nostalgia was setting in: here was this holdover that had somehow survived; a website that functions \u2013 and even looks \u2013 much the same as it did 20 years ago.<\/p>\n

Continue reading…<\/a>
\nWikipedia\u2019s 68m articles have been consulted trillions of times. Not bad for a website that has barely changed since it was founded 20 years ago
\nA few years ago, I was struck by the tension between how Wikipedia was used, and how it was talked about. Everyone was on it all the time, and yet its reputation had stalled at \u201cdon\u2019t trust it\u201d, because it was the \u201cfree encyclopedia that anyone can edit\u201d.
\nClearly people were trusting it, so much so it had become part of the fabric of everyday life since it was founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001. But despite the fact it now has been consulted trillions of times by billions of people (English Wikipedia alone is 5.2bn words long), it inspires an odd lack of curiosity. Even people donating to Wikipedia might say the money was \u201cfor the factcheckers\u201d, though there aren\u2019t any \u2013 not paid ones, anyway. Meanwhile, the internet in the social media era had begun to feel like a much uglier place, and some digital nostalgia was setting in: here was this holdover that had somehow survived; a website that functions \u2013 and even looks \u2013 much the same as it did 20 years ago. Continue reading…Technology | The Guardian<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wikipedia\u2019s 68m articles have been consulted trillions of times. Not bad for a website that has barely changed since it was founded 20 years ago A few years ago, I was struck by the tension between how Wikipedia was used, and how it was talked about. Everyone was on it all the time, and yet …<\/p>\n

Wikipedia often gets taken for granted \u2013 but its history is fascinating, and its future is fragile<\/span> Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":25511,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25510"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25510"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25510\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25511"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/costops.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}