On January 15, 2026, Wikipedia celebrates its 25th birthday. Yes, 25 years of being a cornerstone of free, collaborative knowledge!
Looking back, the evolution of information retrieval and online search has been one of the most rapid transformations in Internet history. The journey from text-based interfaces to today's AI-driven, context-aware search engines highlights just how far we’ve come in connecting people with knowledge.
The earliest days of the internet featured tools like Gopher, a text-based (command line) interface that served academia well when scholarly papers were the primary focus of internet searches. Around the same time, tools like Archie, Jughead, and Veronica emerged to help users locate files on FTP servers. Archie is often considered the first real search engine.
In the mid-to-late 1990s, search engines like Infoseek became mainstream. Infoseek was eventually acquired by the Walt Disney Company and morphed into Go.com. Around this time, Ask Jeeves gained popularity by offering a novel approach: users could ask natural-language questions and receive seemingly human-like answers.
Wikipedia’s Legacy
What makes Wikipedia unique, even 25 years after its launch, is its mission: to provide free, accurate, and collaboratively curated information to everyone. With over 6 million articles in English alone and countless others in hundreds of languages, Wikipedia remains an enduring symbol of how technology can democratize knowledge.
Its success lies in its commitment to neutrality and its reliance on community contributions, moderated through a rigorous editing process. Wikipedia has not only survived in a world of misinformation and rapid technological shifts—it has thrived.
Closing Thoughts
As we celebrate Wikipedia’s 25th birthday, we can also look to the future of how knowledge will be created and shared. Artificial intelligence-powered tools like chatbots and generative AI are beginning to reshape how people interact with and consume information. However, Wikipedia's human-driven ethos reminds us that collaboration, critical thinking, and transparency remain key to the integrity of the knowledge ecosystem.
So here’s to 25 years of Wikipedia—and to the next 25, when technology and community will continue to intersect in new and exciting ways!
Blog by Mark Reynolds, updated December 2024.