Wikipedia Trivia
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100 free Wikipedia trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Wikipedia trivia quiz is about the encyclopedia itself rather than the things in it. It starts with the origin story: the Hawaiian word behind 'wiki', the first wiki built in 1995, the expert-reviewed Nupedia that Wikipedia was meant to feed, the web company that paid the bills, and the two co-founders who later fell out over how an encyclopedia should be run. From there it covers how the site actually works and grows: the puzzle-globe logo and its contest, the neutral point of view policy, administrators and their 'mop', the bots that wrote millions of articles and the ones that fight vandalism, Wikidata and Commons, and milestones like the millionth article and the day it overtook a 600-year-old Chinese record. There is also a run of questions on the controversies and culture around Wikipedia: the Seigenthaler hoax, the Essjay affair, Stephen Colbert's 'wikiality', the 2012 blackout, national blocks, the Wikipedia Monument in Poland and the asteroid named after the site. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's own documented history and related encyclopaedia entries, and each question links to its source.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Wikipedia 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.
Q 02How is Wikipedia, which carries no advertising, mainly funded?
Donations from readers
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.
Q 03On Wikipedia, a link pointing to an article nobody has written yet appears in which colour?
Red
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.
Q 04Wikipedia's logo is an unfinished globe made up of what?
Jigsaw pieces
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.
Q 05Volunteer editors of Wikipedia are known by what collective name?
Wikipedians
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.
Q 06Which Microsoft encyclopedia, sold on CD-ROM from 1993, was shut down in 2009 as readers flocked to Wikipedia?
Encarta
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.
Q 07Wikipedia's 'citation needed' tag became a protest placard in a 2007 strip of which webcomic?
XKCD
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.
Q 08The word 'wiki' comes from a word meaning 'quick' in which language?
Hawaiian
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'.
Q 09Which Wikipedia sister project hosts the freely licensed images, sound and video used across editions?
Wikimedia Commons
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'.
Q 10Which principle joins verifiability and a ban on original research as Wikipedia's three core content policies?
Neutral point of view
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.
Q 11In 2010 which US agency demanded that Wikipedia take down an image of its official seal, only to be refused?
The FBI
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.
Q 12Wikipedia began as a feeder project for which earlier, expert-reviewed online encyclopedia?
Nupedia
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.
Q 13Which TV satirist coined 'wikiality' in 2006 and urged viewers to edit the elephant article?
Stephen Colbert
Q 21Jimmy Wales grew up in Huntsville, home of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, in which US state?
Alabama
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.
Q 22Which for-profit wiki hosting company, now called Fandom, was co-founded by Jimmy Wales?
Wikia
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.
Q 23Who developed WikiWikiWeb, the very first wiki, in 1995?
Ward Cunningham
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.
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.
Q 14Which edition of Wikipedia asks its writers to use short sentences and a limited list of common words?
Simple English
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.
Q 15Jimmy Wales spent the later 1990s in Chicago working in which profession before turning to the internet?
Options trader
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.
Q 16Wikipedia's original web address ended in which top-level domain?
.com
.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.
Q 17Wikipedia's parent foundation has had its headquarters in which city since 2008?
San Francisco
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.
Q 18Which annual conference for Wikipedia's volunteers first met in Frankfurt in 2005?
Wikimania
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.
Q 19In January 2012 English Wikipedia went dark for 24 hours to protest which proposed US laws?
SOPA and PIPA
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.
Q 20Which video platform said in 2018 it would use Wikipedia to fact-check conspiracy videos?
YouTube
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.
Q 24In 2011, repeatedly clicking the first link in most Wikipedia articles eventually led to which page?
Philosophy
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.
Q 25On which Wikipedia sister project is every person, place and idea given an ID such as Q42, for Douglas Adams?
Wikidata
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.
Q 26Which journal's 2005 study of 42 scientific entries found Wikipedia averaged four errors each to Britannica's three?
Nature
Nature stood by its study when Britannica called it 'fatally flawed' and bought a half-page advert in The Times demanding a retraction.
Q 27As of 2025, which country had blocked every language edition of Wikipedia since April 2019?
China
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.
Q 28According to Jimmy Wales, what text did he type in Wikipedia's very first test edit?
Hello, World!
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.
Q 29Which Wikipedia edition was the first after English to reach one million articles, in 2009?
German
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.
Q 30Early Wikipedia was bankrolled by Bomis, a web company whose best-known sections were devoted to what?
Erotic images
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.