On 15 January 2001, two men in California - a philosophy fan named Larry Sanger and a former options trader named Jimmy Wales - flipped a switch on a brand-new website. It looked plain. It had hardly any articles. It had a strange Hawaiian name, 'wiki,' which means 'quick.' Most people had never heard of it. But the idea behind it was unusual - anyone, anywhere, could click 'edit' and write or fix a page. No gatekeeper. No fancy degree required.
At first there were just a handful of articles, mostly about computer topics. Then teachers in Germany started adding science entries. Bird-watchers in Australia filled in pages on parrots. Movie nerds wrote about old films. Within a year there were 20,000 articles. Within five years there were over a million. Volunteer editors argued, corrected each other, and slowly built the world's biggest reference book - for free. Wikipedia has never shown a single advert and depends on donations to keep its servers running.
Today Wikipedia has more than 6 million articles in English and over 60 million across more than 300 languages, from Welsh to Swahili to Esperanto. Scientists use it. Students use it. Even doctors quietly check it. Voice assistants like Siri and Alexa pull facts straight from its pages. The whole project is run by a non-profit and is largely written by an army of unpaid volunteers who simply want the world to know stuff - proof that millions of strangers can build something extraordinary together.
