Celebrating 20 years of Wikipedia – Wikimedia Foundation

Celebrating 20 years of Wikipedia – Wikimedia Foundation
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Celebrating
20 years of
Wikipedia
Wikipedia started as an ambitious idea
…to create a free encyclopedia, written by volunteers, for everyone in the world. It seemed impossible.
Over 20 years,
Wikipedia
has become the largest collection of open knowledge in history. How did it happen? People, like you.
Made and sustained by humans.
Meet the movement.
For
Wikipedia
’s 20th birthday, we are celebrating the power of human collaboration, creativity, and curiosity.
We are celebrating the humans, our volunteers and supporters, who make Wikipedia possible.
Netha Hussain
Location: Gothenburg, Sweden
Volunteer start year: 2010
Netha, a medical doctor, wrote, updated, and translated dozens of Wikipedia articles during COVID-19 to ensure reliable information about the pandemic is available for everyone. Recently, she launched a project to improve information about vaccine safety topics on Wikipedia, helping combat misinformation.
Learn more about Netha’s story.
In emergency situations like this, it is not possible for traditional encyclopedias, or even some governments, to access, filter, analyse, and summarize massive loads of information coming from around the world every day and make it available in roughly 300 languages. This is only possible with a large global network of volunteers and a platform such as Wikipedia.
— Netha Hussain
Nkem Osuigwe (User: AfricanLibrarian)
Location: Nigeria
Volunteer start year: 2020
Dr. Nkem Osuigwe creates powerful connections between the African librarian community and Wikipedia. In 2020, she organized the first African Librarians Week as part of the Wikimedia Foundation’s bi-annual #1Lib1Ref (One Librarian, One Reference) campaign. More than 800 editors participated, making 27,800 updates to improve information on Wikipedia.
Getting African librarians to believe in the power of telling the true African story through adding citations and editing articles about Africans was amazing. It was a call to action for librarians to go beyond being disseminators of information to information leaders in their different countries, telling the stories of their communities on a global platform.
— Nkem Osuigwe
Jess Wade
Location: London, United Kingdom
Volunteer start year: 2018
Dr. Jess Wade, a physicist by day, started editing Wikipedia in 2018 after learning about the site’s knowledge gaps. Since then, she has written nearly 1,200 Wikipedia biographies about women, people of color and LGBTQ+ scientists, helping increase their representation online and beyond.
Learn more about Jess’s story.
I knew Wikipedia was important – although I think I only realised how important lately. The world needs honest and impartial information more than ever before – and Wikipedia is the most powerful, collaborative platform we can write and share that on.
— Jess Wade
Tulsi Bhagat
Location: Janakpurdham, Nepal
Volunteer start year: 2014
With the desire to promote and preserve his mother tongue, the Maithili language, Tulsi helped launch Maithili Wikipedia in 2014. He has since authored more than 500 Wikipedia articles in the language. Tulsi has also created and participated in campaigns such as the Wiki Awareness Campaign in Nepal, Wiki Loves Folklore, and Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos, which help fill content gaps on Wikipedia.
I realised that there are a lot of ways to contribute to the Wikimedia movement beyond only writing articles. I have been involved in combating vandalism, trolls, and spam. I am also active in Wikimedia outreach events and activities. Continuous learning and being able to share what I have learned makes me happy and eager to continue volunteering.
— Tulsi Bhagat
Graham Pearce (User: Graham87)
Location: Busselton, Western Australia, Australia
Volunteer start year: 2005
As a volunteer, Graham most enjoys doing “wikiarchaeology” — which means he checks the edit histories of Wikipedia pages to ensure all the past edits have been properly attributed. If there is an issue, he tries to fix it. As a blind Wikipedia user, Graham also helps to advocate for accessibility on the platform and guide other users on best practices.
Learn more about Graham’s story.
Wikipedia has made it much easier to find a starting place for information about all sorts of topics. It’s been particularly beneficial for blind people like me because access to books has historically been very difficult for us. With Wikipedia, we can now have an encyclopedia that we can use on a close-to-equal footing with sighted people.
— Graham Pearce
Ota Takashi (User: Takot)
Location: Ishikawa, Japan
Volunteer start year: 2005
Takashi, a native Japanese speaker, volunteers as a Wikimedia translator. He helps interpret events, translate articles, and more. In fact, Takashi says the most impactful thing he has done as a volunteer is translate the user interface text of the Wikipedia app (for Android/iOS) into Japanese. Every time you launch the app in Japanese, you are reading his translation.
My hope for Wikipedia’s 40th birthday is that automatic machine translation will reach native speaker level for every language. That way, all the knowledge across Wikimedia projects would be available to readers in every language as soon as it is written. At that time, human translators will no longer be needed. It would make me, as a translator, somewhat sad, but it’s okay in the universal aspect.
— Ota Takashi
Sherry Antoine
Location: New York City, New York, USA
Volunteer start year: 2015
Sherry is on a mission to improve representation on Wikipedia for people of African descent. She is the Executive Director of AfroCROWD, an initiative to create and improve information about black culture and history on Wikipedia, and the lead organizer of the Wikimedians of the Caribbean Usergroup. She is also motivated by a sense of community. So, during the pandemic in 2020, Sherry planned a 24-hour virtual event in which Wikimedia volunteers around the world uploaded pictures and shared updates that represented their experiences in the unique time.
Learn more about Sherry’s story.
Connection had become ever more valuable, and I felt it could be therapeutic. So with help from organizing partners, at noon local time, from New Zealand to India, Italy to Nigeria, and from New York where I stood to Oregon and California, Wikipedians came together. We edited about the pandemic, shared our experiences in our own languages, and left messages of encouragement for one another.
— Sherry Antoine
Syed Muzammiluddin (User: Hindustanilanguage)
Location: India
Volunteer start year: 2004
Muzammiluddin, who goes by Muzammil, is a living historian of the Wikimedia movement. For more than half a decade, he has highlighted the work of fellow volunteers through countless interviews and blog posts. An accomplished Wikipedia editor and community organizer himself, Muzammil has participated in conferences, established a growing volunteer community in India, and made more than 100,000 edits across Wikimedia projects.
Although people from all walks of life use Wikipedia for knowledge and information, many are either unaware or unmindful of the fact that they too can help in creating or expanding the content in their area of interest and in their own language.
— Syed Muzammiluddin
Bobby Shabangu
Location: South Africa
Volunteer start year: 2011
Bobby speaks five languages fluently. It is a skill he puts to use regularly in editing several language versions of Wikipedia, with a focus on promoting smaller languages such as Swati. In addition to editing, Bobby also supports community engagement activities, which includes sharing input on a new Universal Code of Conduct for all Wikimedia projects.
Learn more about Bobby’s story.
The strength of Wikimedia lies in its ability to crowdsource content and its quest to share that content freely. I think this has made a huge impact on the world.
— Bobby Shabangu
Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight
Location: Nevada City, California, USA
Volunteer start year: 2007
Rosie’s work to close the gender gap on Wikipedia is so notable that there is a Wikipedia article about it. In 2015, Rosie co-founded Women in Red, a project focused on creating Wikipedia articles about women’s biographies, works, and topics. At the time, only 15% of Wikipedia biographies were about women, and there is still more work to do. Rosie has created 5,000 new articles on Wikipedia, an activity that she says is her great passion in life.
Learn more about Rosie’s story.
Wikipedia changes people’s lives. It is shifting people’s understanding of the world in a way that nothing has before it.
— Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight
Wilfredo Rodríguez
Location: Canada
Volunteer start year: 2005
Before he was forced to flee Venezuela, photographer Wilfredo risked his safety on several occasions to take and share photos of his home country. He once went three days without food on a journey to capture the melting glaciers on some of Venezuela’s highest mountains. In total, he has uploaded more than 46,000 images to Wikimedia Commons, a free online media repository. And, unlike many other contributors, he releases most of his photos into the public domain, giving up the right to be credited when his work is shared.
Learn more about Wilfredo’s story.
I always thought that what I was trying to show was more important than my life, because what I was doing was going to remain for future generations.
— Wilfredo Rodríguez
Emna Mizouni
Location: Tunisia
Volunteer start year: 2013
In the wake of the Arab Spring, Emna was startled by the lack of information available about the history of her home country, Tunisia. She saw an opportunity to close the content gap with Wikipedia. Since then, there is not much Emna has not done in the Wikimedia movement. The 2019 Wikimedian of the Year organizes workshops; recruits new volunteers; and edits articles on women, African people and culture, and human rights topics.
Learn more about Emna’s story.
Wikipedia is for everyone to read and edit. Many people use it as an informative website, if they spot a mistake while reading it, I hope they edit it instead of ignoring it.
— Emna Mizouni
Greta Doçi
Location: Berlin, Germany
Volunteer start year: 2013
Greta’s volunteering journey started with translating articles from English and Italian Wikipedia into Albanian Wikipedia. From there, she began training other new contributors and hosting workshops in partnership with universities and cultural institutions. In 2017, Greta co-organized an event called WikiDiversity, which led to the creation of the first articles about LGBTQ+ topics on Albanian Wikipedia.
Wikipedia helps the world to be more free and educated. I want people to know that doing little things on the website can culminate in a great impact on other people.
— Greta Doçi
Hrishikes Sen
Location: India
Volunteer start year: 2007
Hrishikes is an active volunteer on one of Wikipedia’s and other
Wikimedia projects
, Wikisource, also known as the free library. There, he proofreads documents and uploads freely-licensed books. One of Hrishikes’ most recent projects was adding the original calligraphed Constitution of India to English Wikisource, where he proofread the entire manuscript of the constitution, identified its signatories, and for the first time listed all of the artists involved. This daunting task was made even more challenging because all of the text was handwritten.
Learn more about Hrishikes’ story.
Wikipedia has made knowledge freely and readily accessible to the masses. Instead of information scattered around in multiple websites and offline libraries, now all of it is under one umbrella, which makes our real life endeavours that much easier and knowledge-based.
— Hrishikes Sen
Sam Oyeyele
Location: Ilorin, Nigeria
Volunteer start year: 2011
Thanks to Sam and his brainchild, the Afrocine Project, more than 3,000 articles about African cinema have been added to Wikipedia. The project is just the latest success for Sam, a co-founder of Wikimedia Nigeria. In 2017, he helped produce two Wikipedia informational videos that went viral and dramatically increased awareness of the website in Nigeria.
Learn more about Sam’s story.
In Africa, I would love for people to realize that what they read on Wikipedia is written and added by other internet users like them, and we desperately need them to also join in contributing to this huge knowledge base.
— Sam Oyeyele
Mónica Paola Bonilla-Parra
Location: Bogotá, Colombia
Volunteer start year: 2018
Mónica is a linguist and researcher who sees Wikipedia’s value as a tool for social development. She works with fellow volunteers to add articles to the website in indigneous languages — helping preserve and promote the culture and histories of native communities in Latin America.
It motivates me to know that Wikipedia and the movement are built day by day, with each individual contribution, and that we still have much to learn from new voices. There are no limits to participating and contributing. If you don’t do it, who will?
— Mónica Paola Bonilla-Parra
Sandister Tei
Location: Accra, Ghana
Volunteer start year: 2012
Sandister is the 2020 Wikimedian of the Year, an annual award granted by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales to recognize one of our movement’s most exceptional contributors. As one of the founding members of the Wikimedia Ghana User Group, Sandister helped pioneer the development of Wikipedia’s volunteer communities in sub-Saharan Africa.
Learn more about Sandister’s story.
Wikipedia is more than an encyclopedia. It extends into sister projects, global editor and volunteer communities; a foundation; multidisciplinary and multicultural project opportunities; it can be plugged into various partnerships; it gives basis for advocacy – it’s a galaxy.
— Sandister Tei
Susan Garrett Weiss
Frederick, Maryland, U.S.
First donation: No idea — my husband and I have been contributing for a while!
Susan, a college professor, has a son who is an avid animal and zoo enthusiast and uses Wikipedia every day to find new and fascinating facts. They donate to Wikipedia in support of his continued curiosity and love of knowledge.
He discovered Wikipedia while looking for information on endangered animals a few years back, and now, nearly every day, he asks to use his screen time to read biographies or read about animals or the world’s zoos on Wikipedia. What a gift your website is – it lets him explore new subjects daily. Nearly every dinnertime conversation includes new information gleaned from Wikipedia.
— Susan Garrett Weiss
Volunteers around the world are contributing every minute.
Over 280,000 people edit Wikipedia every month
If you read or donate to
Wikipedia
, you are part of a global movement of volunteers, projects, and campaigns contributing to free knowledge around the world.
13 Wikimedia projects
179 Wikimedia movement affiliates
Dozens of global campaigns
Supported by
one global nonprofit
Wikipedia
All the world’s knowledge
Wikibooks
E-book textbooks and annotated texts
Wiktionary
A dictionary for over 170 languages
Wikiquote
Find quotes across your favorite books, movies, authors and more
Wikimedia Commons
60 million images, photographs, videos and music files and counting
Wikisource
The free library
Wikiversity
Access learning resources, projects and research at any level of study
Wikispecies
The free species directory
Wikidata
The database of structured information collaboratively edited
MediaWiki
The software platform that makes Wikipedia possible
Wikivoyage
The ultimate travel guide
Wikinews
The free news source
Meta-Wiki
Project coordination software tool for global collaboration
Key moments in Wikipedia’s history
The first edit
Thanks to the power of human imagination, on January 15, Wikipedia is born.
Wikipedia becomes a nonprofit
Wikimedia Foundation, a group of people dedicated to supporting Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, is formed.
1,000,000 topics of knowledge in English
English Wikipedia celebrates the creation of its millionth article: the
Jordanhill railway station
The movement grows
The number of human beings helping to document the sum of all human knowledge grows to
over five million
Volunteers share more knowledge in more languages
Wikipedia editors celebrate 10 million articles across 251 languages.
Wikipedia goes dark
The humans of Wikipedia vote to protest the
Stop Online Piracy Act
with a 24-hour blackout.
Wikipedia is in the top five
Wikipedia is listed as the world’s fifth most popular website according to Alexa Internet, a web traffic analysis company.
Wikipedia reaches 50 million articles around the world
Wikipedia’s editors achieve 50 million topics of knowledge across more than
300 language editions
Welcome back, Turkey
After a more than two and a half year block imposed by the Turkish government, access to Wikipedia
is restored
to the 82 million humans in Turkey.
Wikipedia turns 20
Happy birthday, Wikipedia! Cheers to the humans around the world who make Wikipedia and other free knowledge projects possible!
You, Wikipedia, and the world
Humans around the world look to
Wikipedia
around 21 billion times every month for information on everything from politics, to music, sports, and beyond. Have you ever wondered what the most popular articles on Wikipedia were in the last 20 years?
Explore
How to celebrate Wikipedia’s 20th birthday
Party
Party for one? For 10? 100? It doesn’t matter, as long as you are celebrating
#Wikipedia20
. Download our swag items, including social media stickers, gifs, and video call backgrounds for virtual events, and find out what virtual/physical events are happening in the world.
Download digital swag pack
Attend an event
Get Wikipedia merchandise
Send a birthday gift
Do you know what we would really like for our 20th birthday? To keep the sum of all human knowledge free for every human being in the world to share in it. Here is how to help us:
Donate
Learn about making a leadership gift
Join the movement
Wikipedia
and other
free knowledge projects
are made by volunteers — people like you. Everyone is invited to join our global community. You can help improve
Wikipedia
articles, join local or virtual events, write code, and so much more. Share your knowledge and interests with the world.
Get involved
Send a birthday message #Wikipedia20
Happy 20th birthday, @Wikipedia! Join me and celebrate the website and people who make free knowledge available to everyone, everywhere!
Tweet this
If you have ever won an argument using a Wikipedia article, learned something new, or taken a deep dive down a Wikipedia rabbit hole for hours, join me in wishing @Wikipedia a happy 20th birthday!
Tweet this
Write your own message… 20.wikipedia.org #Wikipedia20
Tweet this
#Wikipedia20 highlights
This Friday marks 20 years of Wikipedia. Join us for a special #Wikipedia20 event that day, celebrating the idea that knowledge can be shared by and open to everyone
— Esra'a @ealshafei
Looking forward to the Twitter chat celebrating 20 years of @Wikipedia and @Space_Station with @DrKeithSmith! #Wikipedia20
— Kjell Lindgren @astro_kjell
Whoot Whoot! We got a hashflag for our 20th Birthday! Thank you @Twitter @Wikipedia is turning 20 on Friday, Jan 15th! And we’re having a party! Join us…but you have to bring your own cake because the party is at your house! #Wikipedia20
— Janeen Uzzell is asking #WhoTellsYourStory @janeenuzzell
More from Wikipedia’s 20th birthday
Learn:
Wikipedia celebrates 20 years of free, trusted information for the world
Here
Read:
Celebrating 20 years of Wikipedia and the International Space Station
Here
Thank you:
Meet our 20th birthday partners
Here
Definitely on porpoise
Did you know? On the Wikipedia page listing cetaceans, boxes with missing pictures read… ‘
cetacean needed.
Fun fact #1
Wikipedia in tourism
Did you know? Improvements to Wikipedia pages about places can have an
impact on tourism,
potentially increasing the number of nights tourists choose to stay in a city by nine percent.
Fun fact #2
How much is free knowledge worth?
“The median value that U.S. consumers place on Wikipedia is about $150 a year—but the cost is $0.” Read more in the
Harvard Business Review.
Fun fact #3
The official treat of Wikimedia
You do not have to wonder how hundreds of volunteers from around the world came to enjoy a very particular Dutch snack, you just have to embrace it. Meet the
Association of Stroopwafel Addicts
Fun fact #4
Edit wars: the battle of T/the Beatles
Should the “T” in “t/The Beatles” be capitalised? In early 2006, this question was debated at such length (roughly 11,000 words worth of debate), it was covered in
The Wall Street Journal
and
Harper’s Magazine
Fun fact #5
To shave the Wales, or not to shave the Wales?
In 2005, WikiProject “Wikipedians against
Jimbo
‘s beard” was formed to oppose Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales’ facial hair. In rebuttal, “Wikipedians for Jimbo’s beard” was born. The battle of the beard included banter, propaganda and, of course, a
Soliloquy in favour of Jimbo’s beard
Fun fact #6
Questions about the Wikimedia Foundation or our projects? Get in touch with our team.
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