Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia founded in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, has grown to include 68 million articles and has been consulted trillions of times. English Wikipedia alone contains 5.2 billion words, and Pew Research estimates it served 1.9 trillion page views between 2015 and 2025.
Despite its monumental scale, Wikipedia's future is now described as fragile. Artificial intelligence (AI) has begun to impact the platform by diminishing the web traffic it relies on. Additionally, editors are contributing large volumes of poorly written AI-generated text, posing a threat to the encyclopedia.
The website's foundational tool, the wiki, was invented by Ward Cunningham in the 1990s, drawing on concepts like constructivism and wabi-sabi. Philosophy also played a significant role in Wikipedia's inception, with co-founder Jimmy Wales hiring a philosopher, Larry Sanger, as the only person he initially employed for the project.