100 Fun Facts About Wikipedia

Wikipedia launched three years before which of these websites?

Facebook arrived in February 2004; the encyclopedia's first edit was made on 15 January 2001, and volunteers still hold meetups around that date each year to mark its birthday with cake.

How is Wikipedia, which carries no advertising, mainly funded?

Donations from readers cover most of the budget, averaging about $10 a gift; the foundation says turning down ads keeps any single company from swaying what the articles say.

On Wikipedia, a link pointing to an article nobody has written yet appears in which colour?

Red marks a link to a page that is still missing; clicking it offers to start the article, and editors are told to leave useful red links in place to show what needs writing next.

Wikipedia's logo is an unfinished globe made up of what?

Jigsaw pieces: each one carries a character from a different writing system, and the gap at the top is left open to show that the encyclopedia is a permanent work in progress.

Volunteer editors of Wikipedia are known by what collective name?

Wikipedians must declare it if they are paid to edit, and in 2015 the site blocked 381 accounts in one sweep after a ring was caught writing promotional articles for undisclosed clients.

Which Microsoft encyclopedia, sold on CD-ROM from 1993, was shut down in 2009 as readers flocked to Wikipedia?

Encarta drew just 1.27 percent of American visits to online encyclopedias in January 2009 against its free rival's 97 percent, and Microsoft announced the closure two months later.

Wikipedia's 'citation needed' tag became a protest placard in a 2007 strip of which webcomic?

XKCD: Randall Munroe drew a heckler raising the sign during a politician's speech, and real crowds copied him, carrying the tag on placards at a 2010 rally on Washington's National Mall.

The word 'wiki' comes from a word meaning 'quick' in which language?

Hawaiian: the first wiki's creator was once sent to the 'Wiki Wiki' shuttle bus at Honolulu airport, and later borrowed the word so he would not have to call his editable site 'quick-web'.

Which Wikipedia sister project hosts the freely licensed images, sound and video used across editions?

Wikimedia Commons lets one upload be used in every language edition at once, so it takes only freely licensed files and deletes on sight anything that leans on 'fair use'.

Which principle joins verifiability and a ban on original research as Wikipedia's three core content policies?

Neutral point of view is labelled non-negotiable on its own policy page, which says neither other policies nor editors' consensus can override its principles.

In 2010 which US agency demanded that Wikipedia take down an image of its official seal, only to be refused?

The FBI cited a law aimed at fake badges; the foundation's lawyer wrote back that the Bureau had misread the statute, refused to remove the seal and offered to argue the case in court.

Wikipedia began as a feeder project for which earlier, expert-reviewed online encyclopedia?

Nupedia put every article through a seven-step expert review, so it finished only 21 in its first year, while the open wiki set up to feed it drafts was adding thousands.

Which TV satirist coined 'wikiality' in 2006 and urged viewers to edit the elephant article?

Stephen Colbert told viewers to write that Africa's elephant population had tripled in six months, and so many obliged that editors had to lock nearly every elephant-related page.

Which edition of Wikipedia asks its writers to use short sentences and a limited list of common words?

Simple English is written for children and for people still learning the language, so its writers are steered toward a core word list that starts from Charles Ogden's 850-word Basic English.

Jimmy Wales spent the later 1990s in Chicago working in which profession before turning to the internet?

Options trader: he left a finance PhD unfinished to trade futures and options in Chicago, and made enough money there to quit and start his own internet company.

Wikipedia's original web address ended in which top-level domain?

.com came first, because the site began inside a for-profit company; when Spanish-language volunteers walked out in 2002 fearing adverts, its founder ruled out ads and switched the address to .org.

Wikipedia's parent foundation has had its headquarters in which city since 2008?

San Francisco was chosen from six candidate cities for its pool of tech talent and its like-minded organisations, and the foundation left its first home in Florida at the start of 2008.

Which annual conference for Wikipedia's volunteers first met in Frankfurt in 2005?

Wikimania moves to a new host city each year, from Alexandria to Singapore, and it is usually where Jimmy Wales names his pick for Wikimedian of the Year.

In January 2012 English Wikipedia went dark for 24 hours to protest which proposed US laws?

SOPA and PIPA were both pulled from voting within two days, after more than 162 million people saw the darkened page and 8 million used it to look up their representatives in Congress.

Which video platform said in 2018 it would use Wikipedia to fact-check conspiracy videos?

YouTube announced the plan on stage at South by Southwest without telling the encyclopedia's parent foundation, which said publicly that it had been given no advance notice.

Jimmy Wales grew up in Huntsville, home of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, in which US state?

Alabama: he was taught there in a tiny private school run by his mother and grandmother, and credits its loose style and the family's World Book set for his later ideas.

Which for-profit wiki hosting company, now called Fandom, was co-founded by Jimmy Wales?

Wikia began in 2004 as Wikicities, set up with Angela Beesley to host fan-run wikis on games and TV shows, and unlike its famous nonprofit cousin it pays its way with advertising.

Who developed WikiWikiWeb, the very first wiki, in 1995?

Ward Cunningham also gave his name to Cunningham's Law: the best way to get a right answer online is not to ask a question but to post a wrong answer and wait to be corrected.

In 2011, repeatedly clicking the first link in most Wikipedia articles eventually led to which page?

Philosophy ended the chain for more than nine articles in ten in 2011 counts; the leading theory is that articles open by defining their subject, so each first link climbs to a broader category.

On which Wikipedia sister project is every person, place and idea given an ID such as Q42, for Douglas Adams?

Wikidata keeps each fact once so that every language edition can reuse it, and Adams's ID matches the number his Hitchhiker's Guide gives as the answer to everything.

Which journal's 2005 study of 42 scientific entries found Wikipedia averaged four errors each to Britannica's three?

Nature stood by its study when Britannica called it 'fatally flawed' and bought a half-page advert in The Times demanding a retraction.

As of 2025, which country had blocked every language edition of Wikipedia since April 2019?

China had shut out the Chinese-language edition in 2015, just as the site moved to encrypted connections that stop censors from blocking one article at a time.

According to Jimmy Wales, what text did he type in Wikipedia's very first test edit?

Hello, World! is the line programmers traditionally use to test new software; it may have gone into a trial version that was soon scrapped, which would explain why no such edit survives.

Which Wikipedia edition was the first after English to reach one million articles, in 2009?

German got there on 27 December 2009, and it is stricter than its English cousin: since 2008 a newcomer's changes stay hidden from readers until an experienced editor has checked them.

Early Wikipedia was bankrolled by Bomis, a web company whose best-known sections were devoted to what?

Erotic images: revenue from its 'Bomis Babes' photo pages helped pay for the servers and for the encyclopedia's only salaried editor, until the money ran short in 2002.

Becoming a Wikipedia administrator is nicknamed being given what?

The mop: the janitor's image is deliberate, because the job brings tools to delete pages and block vandals rather than any rank, and Jimmy Wales called it 'not a big deal'.

In the video for which 2006 'Weird Al' Yankovic song does he vandalise a Wikipedia article?

White & Nerdy shows him replacing the Atlantic Records page with 'YOU SUCK!', his payback for the label blocking the release of 'You're Pitiful', his parody of a James Blunt hit.

What was named after Wikipedia in January 2013?

An asteroid: astronomers in Ukraine spotted the main-belt rock in 2008, and it took the encyclopedia's name after a board member of the country's volunteer chapter put the idea forward.

Which scheme let people in developing countries read Wikipedia without paying mobile data charges?

Wikipedia Zero ran from 2012 to 2018 through deals with 97 phone carriers in 72 countries; the foundation wound it down when carrier interest fell away, pointing to a shifting mobile market and data costs.

In 2014 Wikipedia's parent body refused to delete a famous selfie, arguing nobody owned it because which animal took it?

A monkey: a crested macaque in Indonesia pressed the button on a British photographer's camera, and the foundation argued that a picture taken by an animal has no copyright owner at all.

In 2025, which Wikipedia edition ranked second by article count with few active editors?

Cebuano: nearly all of its six million articles were written by Lsjbot, a program built by a Swedish physicist, which is how an edition with only a few hundred active editors came to hold more articles than any but English.

A 2005 hoax Wikipedia biography falsely tied which retired journalist to the Kennedy assassinations?

John Seigenthaler had in fact been Robert Kennedy's friend and aide; the lie stood for four months, and after he denounced it in USA Today the site curbed what unregistered users could do.

The 'Essjay' scandal of 2007 involved a senior Wikipedia editor who had falsely claimed to be what?

A university professor of religion was the persona he gave The New Yorker, which later reported he was 24, held no advanced degrees and had never taught; Jimmy Wales then asked him to resign his posts.

In 2015 the Wikipedia community received the Erasmus Prize and which award presented in Oviedo?

The Princess of Asturias Award for International Cooperation: its jury praised thousands of unpaid contributors of every nationality for reviving the encyclopedic spirit of the 18th century.

ClueBot NG, an automated program at work on Wikipedia since 2010, was built to do which job?

Revert vandalism: its neural network scores every new edit against examples that human volunteers have labelled good or bad, and undoes the worst ones on its own, around the clock.

Larry Sanger founded which expert-reviewed rival to Wikipedia in 2006?

Citizendium was built to give credentialed experts the deference he felt they were denied on the open site, yet five years on it was down to fewer than 100 active members.

What did Jimmy Wales use as a placeholder logo when Wikipedia first went live?

The flag of the United States was never meant to last: he uploaded it as a test image, and it soon gave way to a sphere wrapped in a sentence from Lewis Carroll.

In 2007 English Wikipedia overtook which reference work, the world's largest of its kind for almost 600 years?

The Yongle Encyclopedia was compiled by thousands of scholars for a Ming emperor in 1408 and ran to 22,937 handwritten chapters; most were lost in 19th-century wars, and fewer than 400 volumes survive.

Rambot, the first big article-writing bot on Wikipedia in 2002, generated thousands of pages about what?

US towns from census data: Derek Ramsey's program added more than 33,000 articles in October 2002, and by its owner's count it went on to create or edit 98 percent of all American city and county entries.

The world's first Wikipedia Monument was unveiled in 2014 in Słubice, a town in which country?

Poland: Słubice sits on the country's western border, and its statue of four figures holding the globe logo aloft was paid for by the town as a tribute to the anonymous volunteers who write the site for nothing.

A July 2001 mention on which tech news site brought Wikipedia its first big wave of new contributors?

Slashdot linked to the project a day after its editor published an essay on the future of free encyclopedias at the tech forum Kuro5hin, and the readers who followed the links stayed to write.

Until a 2010 redesign, Wikipedia's globe logo carried a letter from which fictional language?

Klingon: the Star Trek letter sat among the globe's real scripts from 2003 until the redesign, which swapped it for a character from Ethiopia's Ge'ez script.

The English Wikipedia's one-millionth article, created on 1 March 2006, was about what?

A Scottish railway station: Jordanhill, in suburban Glasgow, began as a single sentence posted at 11 pm, and within a day dozens of people had edited the page more than 400 times.

In December 2008 most UK ISPs blocked a Wikipedia article about which rock album over its cover art?

Virgin Killer: the Internet Watch Foundation lifted its blacklisting of the 1976 Scorpions sleeve after four days, citing how long and how widely it had been on sale, having also locked many Britons out of editing.

Which topic had the most-viewed article on English Wikipedia in 2023, with more than 52 million page views?

ChatGPT finished ahead of the year's list of notable deaths, a perennial favourite that editors split into month-by-month lists to keep its length down.

In 2017 Wikipedia's editors ruled which British newspaper generally unreliable and all but barred it as a reference?

Daily Mail: the editors cited its 'reputation for poor fact checking, sensationalism and flat-out fabrication', and volunteers were asked to review and replace some 12,000 existing links to the paper.

A very short Wikipedia article that still needs expanding is known by which name?

A stub usually runs to just two to seven sentences, and it wears a tag at the foot of the page that anyone may delete once the article has grown beyond a sketch.

Which lunar lander crash-landed in 2019 carrying nearly all of English Wikipedia on nickel plates?

Beresheet, an Israeli craft, carried a DVD-sized 'lunar library' of thin nickel sheets, and months after the crash the archive's founder revealed that thousands of tardigrades had been sealed in with it.

In June 2019, scientists encoded all 16 GB of English Wikipedia's article text into what?

Synthetic DNA: a Boston startup called Catalog wrote the text into prefabricated strands, betting that the molecules will outlast any tape or drive on the market.

Wikipedia's 2023 desktop redesign, its first in over a decade, moved which feature to the side of the page?

The table of contents used to appear only at the top of an article; in the new look, named Vector 2022, it stays in view at the side so readers can jump between sections without scrolling back up.

Wikipedia's fundamental community principles are summarised as the 'Five' what?

Pillars: the fifth of them says the site has no firm rules, and an official policy duly tells editors to ignore any rule that stops them improving the encyclopedia.

In Good Faith Collaboration, scholar Joseph Reagle likened Wikipedia's consensus-building to the meetings of which religious group?

Quakers settle their business without taking votes, as the site's editors are meant to, but a Quaker meeting has a clerk to steer it through a disagreement and the editors have no such referee.

Which physicist had no Wikipedia article until she won the 2018 Nobel Prize, a draft having been rejected months earlier?

Donna Strickland's draft was turned down because its references did not show she qualified; volunteers built her page as soon as the prize was announced, when fewer than one in five biographies were of women.

On Wikipedia, what name is given to a second account an editor secretly uses to fake support for their views?

A sock puppet breaks the rule of one editor, one account, and a small team of vetted volunteers called checkusers can inspect technical logs to tie the fakes back to their owner.

Jimmy Wales's 2025 book sets out 'Seven Rules' of what, the quality he says built Wikipedia?

Trust: The Seven Rules of Trust, written with Dan Gardner, starts from the fact that people predicted the site's collapse from its first days and argues these rules are why it lasted.

In 2020 an American teenager was found to have written much of which language's Wikipedia without speaking it?

Scots lost thousands of Wikipedia articles after a Reddit post showed that nearly 23,000 of them, about a third of the edition, were one user's English written in a put-on accent.

Which billionaire's company launched Grokipedia, an AI-written rival to Wikipedia, in October 2025?

Elon Musk had long attacked Wikipedia as biased, and his site opened with entries generated by the Grok chatbot alongside others copied from Wikipedia nearly word for word.

Whose death in June 2009 sent nearly a million visitors to one Wikipedia biography within a single hour?

Michael Jackson's article drew what was probably the biggest one-hour crowd in the site's history to that point, and Wikipedia itself reported a crash that afternoon.

Cornelia Parker's 2015 embroidery, almost 13 metres long, copies the Wikipedia article about which medieval document?

Magna Carta was stitched largely behind bars: 36 prisoners sewed most of the text, while members of the Embroiderers' Guild added the pictures.

Which country blocked Wikipedia for almost three years until its Constitutional Court ruled the ban a rights violation?

Turkey cut off access in April 2017 over an article on state-sponsored terrorism that named it as a sponsor of militant groups, and the block stayed in place until January 2020.

Vicipaedia, which bans its writers from coining new words, is the Wikipedia edition written in which ancient language?

Latin has no classical words for much of modern life, so the edition's writers borrow terms from botanical and scientific usage and from the Vatican's own modern dictionary.

Which playground-inspired name is given to Wikipedia pages where newcomers can practise editing safely?

Sandbox pages are ordinary pages with a warning attached: anything written there is for testing, and nothing in them should be expected to last.

Which invented language has the largest Wikipedia of any constructed tongue, with hundreds of thousands of articles?

Esperanto's edition began in 2001 when one volunteer spent three weeks importing 139 articles from an existing encyclopedia in the language.

A 2015 art project in a New York gallery turned the whole of English Wikipedia into more than 7,000 what?

Printed volumes numbering 7,473 would have been needed for the text alone, so the gallery showed 106 bound books beside a display of the spines of the first 1,980.

Which name is given to the panel beside a Wikipedia article that sums up its subject in labelled facts?

Infobox panels set facts out as tidy label-and-value pairs, which also lets software harvest them: the DBpedia project builds its linked database from them.

What name is given to the companion forum behind every Wikipedia article, where editors discuss changes to it?

Talk page discussions are open for anyone to read: each one sits a single click from its article, under a tab at the top of the screen.

Which term does Wikipedia use for a page listing the different articles that share a name, such as Mercury?

Disambiguation pages exist because titles collide: Mercury alone is a planet, a chemical element and a Roman god, so each article gets a label in brackets.

Wikiracing players compete to travel from one Wikipedia article to another as fast as possible using only what?

Internal links are the only moves allowed, yet journeys are short: the average English article sits fewer than four clicks from the one on the United Kingdom.

Which test, requiring coverage in independent reliable sources, decides whether a topic merits a Wikipedia article?

Notability became a written rule in 2006, and it made Wikipedia the first encyclopedia to debate in the open what deserves an entry.

Which name is given to organised events where volunteers gather to improve Wikipedia articles on one theme?

Edit-a-thon joins 'edit' to 'marathon', and many have been held to draw in women as contributors and to widen coverage of women's topics.

Wiki Loves Monuments, held each September, was recognised by Guinness World Records as the world's largest what?

Photo contest entries in the record-setting 2011 edition numbered 168,208, sent in by more than 5,000 people who had pictured historic buildings and sites.

A 2022 competition that drew more than 3,000 entries from 135 countries gave Wikipedia its first official what?

Sound logo duties went to a four-second clip of rustling book pages, keyboard clicks and a synthesiser chime, made by Thaddeus Osborne, a nuclear engineer by day.

Before moving to California in 2008, Wikipedia's parent foundation was founded and based in which US state?

Florida was where Jimmy Wales set up the nonprofit, in St. Petersburg in 2003, to fund a project that until then had been hosted by his own for-profit company.

In 2015 Wikipedia's parent foundation joined a lawsuit accusing which US spy agency of mass surveillance of its users?

NSA slides leaked by Edward Snowden had named Wikipedia as a surveillance target, but the case was dismissed for lack of standing and the Supreme Court declined to hear it.

A Wikipedia hoaxer known as Zhemao was exposed in 2022 after a decade of inventing medieval history for which country?

Russia's past was embroidered across more than 200 articles until a novelist researching a silver mine found that the cited books and pages did not exist.

A 2008 joke edit to Wikipedia led newspapers and books to call which South American mammal the 'Brazilian aardvark'?

Coati pages carried the made-up nickname for six years, long enough for hundreds of websites, several newspapers and even university-press books to repeat it as fact.

The 'Bicholim conflict', a Wikipedia hoax rated a good article for five years, described a made-up war in which country?

India was the setting for fighting supposedly waged in 1640 and 1641, and the invention won 'Good Article' status, held by fewer than 1 percent of articles, within months.

In 2013 which country's spy agency forced a volunteer to delete a Wikipedia article about a military radio station?

France's spies got the opposite of secrecy: another volunteer restored the page from Switzerland, and the row briefly made it the most-read article in its language edition.

Which language edition of Wikipedia hid all its articles in October 2011 to protest a proposed wiretapping law?

Italian volunteers feared a clause that would have made every website publish, within 48 hours and without comment, a correction demanded by anyone who felt a page harmed their image.

In September 2020 English Wikipedia retitled its article on which European city, dropping a long-used spelling?

Kyiv follows the Ukrainian form of the name, which Ukraine's foreign ministry had been urging on English-language media through a campaign launched in 2018.

Wikipedia's editors wrote over 40,000 words arguing about which detail of the film title Star Trek Into Darkness?

A capital letter was the whole fight: house style lower-cases short prepositions such as 'into', but the studio's title used a capital I, which won after two months of debate.

Wikipedia is often likened to the 'World Brain', a global encyclopedia imagined in the 1930s by which novelist?

H. G. Wells pictured a free, permanent 'World Encyclopaedia' that would help every citizen make use of humanity's knowledge and, he hoped, keep the peace.

In 2010 which London institution became the first to host a Wikipedia volunteer 'in residence' for five weeks?

British Museum curators hosted Australian volunteer Liam Wyatt, and the idea spread: libraries, archives, universities and learned societies have since taken on residents of their own.

Wikitrivia, a browser game built on Wikipedia facts, asks players to slot each card into the right place on a what?

Timeline placements are unforgiving: each card names a subject and a kind of date, a wrong slot costs a life, and the game ends once three lives are gone.

Which small icon in the top corner of a Wikipedia article shows that editors have judged it among the site's very best?

Bronze star status is rare: an article must pass a review for accuracy, completeness and style, and only about one in every thousand on the English edition has earned it.

Which award, named after an ornament found on farm buildings, do Wikipedia editors give each other for good work?

Barnstar awards borrow the image of a barn raising, where a whole community turns out to build together, and editors have been handing them out since December 2003.

WikiScanner, a 2007 tool that exposed self-serving edits by companies, traced anonymous Wikipedia editors using what?

IP addresses tied each edit to the organisation that owned the computers, and the tool caught changes made from machines at Diebold, the CIA and the Vatican.

Which Google service, opened in 2008 with signed articles and seen as a rival to Wikipedia, was closed in 2012?

Knol took its name from Google's term for a 'unit of knowledge', but it never found an audience, and every article was deleted a few months after it shut.

Which novelist published an open letter to Wikipedia in 2012 after clashing with editors over the article on his novel?

Philip Roth wanted the article on The Human Stain to stop suggesting its hero was modelled on the critic Anatole Broyard; he said a friend, Melvin Tumin, was the inspiration.

Which free app, created in 2007, lets people read the whole of Wikipedia with no internet connection?

Kiwix has carried Wikipedia to places the internet does not reach, from schools in Tanzania and Mali to prison education programmes and smuggling runs into North Korea.

In 2012 which Welsh town was called the world's first 'Wikipedia town' after putting QR code plaques on its landmarks?

Monmouth fixed ceramic plaques to its sights, each carrying a code that opens the Wikipedia article about that spot on a smartphone in a choice of languages.

Which British physicist wrote over 2,100 Wikipedia biographies by 2024 to raise the profile of women in science?

Jess Wade's biography of the nuclear chemist Clarice Phelps was deleted in 2019, setting off a long dispute in which it was restored and removed again and again.

Which free software, written in PHP and first released in 2002, runs Wikipedia and many other wikis?

MediaWiki began as a rewrite by Magnus Manske, a Cologne student whose worry about bugs striking during his final exams pushed its launch back to January 2002.

Which panel of editors, created by Jimmy Wales in 2003, issues binding rulings in English Wikipedia's worst disputes?

Arbitration Committee rulings took over a power that Jimmy Wales once held alone, and the press has likened the panel to a supreme court, a label it rejects.

Which online newspaper, founded by a volunteer in 2005, reports on the English Wikipedia's own community?

The Signpost was started by a lawyer who went on to chair the board of Wikipedia's parent foundation, and its beat includes the project's own dispute rulings.