Wikipedia Turns 25: What Editing Taught Me
An uneasy celebration of Wikipedia at 25, recalling what's good about the online encyclopedia and what editing it can still teach us.
Twenty-five years ago today, a Florida internet entrepreneur who didn’t mind being called “Jimbo” set up a little experiment on a web domain with an inscrutable name: wikipedia.com. The rest, as they say, is history: a quarter century later, Wikipedia is one of the great wonders of the internet world.
The Wikipedian doesn’t really do reposts of old content, but this occasion feels worthy of a partial exception. Almost ten years ago, I wrote a version of the piece below to mark my first decade as a Wikipedia editor. I’ve made a few updates to align with the current occasion, ideally more Blade Runner: The Final Cut and less Star Wars Special Editions. I hope it still resonates.
All I Really Needed to Know I Learned Editing Wikipedia
By William Beutler
Wikipedia is turning twenty-five years old today, January 15, 2026. Last year, when Wikipedia hit the 7-million article milestone, I wrote about a number of ways the encyclopedia has changed—and stayed the same—over time.
The same is true for me: later this year I will notch twenty years editing Wikipedia, and much has changed. These days I have a family, a mortgage, and a business. I also have this blog, which I started writing in March 2009, less than three years into my Wikipedia career.
To say that Wikipedia has changed me far more than I have changed it would be an understatement. I owe a great deal to Wikipedia, and so I am given to reflect on what, specifically, I have learned from it. Dare I say, to finally invoke the title of this piece, all I really needed to know I learned editing Wikipedia.
The following is an entirely non-comprehensive list of life principles as elucidated by Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines as I’ve come to understand them. I’d love to hear feedback, whether you agree or disagree, and especially if you can think of any others:
There are many lifetimes worth of knowledge to be found in the 7 million entries1 on the English Wikipedia. In a very literal and obvious sense, of course it contains everything you need to know.
More to the point, Wikipedia’s written rules and the unwritten lessons one can learn from participaion, are extremely useful if you’re willing to think about them and apply them to your own life. (WP:POLICYLIST)
Finding a balance between giving others benefit of the doubt while also being judicious in whom you trust is one of the most challenging tasks facing everyone, and making the right call can have a profound influence on what we believe and how we act upon these beliefs. (WP:AGF, WP:RELIABLE)
Building on the last one: be prepared to investigate your own opinions and beliefs. Just because you think something is true, there’s a decent chance you may be wrong, and the best way to handle any challenges is to soberly consider the evidence and determine if your conclusions hold up. (WP:VERIFY)
Sometimes the best way to understand what a thing is is to observe what it is not. By process of exclusion, one can arrive at more a objective assessment about the practical nature of a thing by determining first what it isn’t, than by trying to understand it solely for itself. (WP:NOT)
Not all principles should be accorded the same weight, and forming a coherent and defensible hierarchy for which values supersede others is necessary to conduct oneself morally. Rules should in general be followed, but well-intentioned rules can lead to bad outcomes if you don’t pay attention to the totality of their implications. (WP:GUIDES, WP:IGNORE)
Respect others’ intellectual contributions as you would their physical property. If you got a good idea from someone, give them fair credit. You’d want the same, and if you don’t there’s a very good chance it will catch up with you, especially on the Internet where everything is searchable. (WP:COPYVIO, WP:IMAGEPOL)
Don’t be a jerk, don’t violate others’ space, and don’t cause anyone grief to make a point, even if you have one. It’s possible to disagree reasonably and with appropriate emphasis while upholding your dignity and allowing others’ theirs. Just be cool, OK? (WP:CIVIL, WP:PERSONAL, WP:BADGER)
If you want to get along with others and coexist in a world where there are many differences of opinion and belief, it’s important to have a good sense of how others came to those conclusions, be able to assess other opinions neutrally, and know not only when to give them their due but also how far is too far in polite society. (WP:NPOV, WP:UNDUE)
You can’t make rules for everything, and some degree of flexibility based on your surroundings will be necessary to thrive in surroundings you cannot control. Not every community will have the same standards, so it’s in your best interest to be alert for these differences and conduct oneself accordingly. (WP:CONSENSUS)
Finally, no matter how worthy the principles you decide to live by, it’s simply a fact that not everyone you’ll come across will agree to them, or act the same even if they voice agreement with them. When you’re dealing with human beings who have their own objectives, passions, prejudices and prerogatives, a certain comfortability with uncertainty and disagreement is as necessary as any of the rules preceding this one.
When I first published this list in 2016, I concluded in part with this:
So, does all this mean Wikipedia is perfect? Heck, no! What I mean is that it’s an excellent place not just to soak up the sum of all human knowledge, but also to learn how to conduct oneself in a society riven with conflict and ambiguity, where might sometimes seems to make right and in the end all one can really be certain about having the power to safeguard is one’s own integrity. Maybe that's a dim view of the world, but when you consider all the bad things that happen every day, you know, getting into (and out of) an edit war on Wikipedia is a relatively safe and surprisingly practical way to learn some key lessons about life.
A lot has changed in ten years’ time, but my “dim view of the world” unfortunately has proven to be the right one. It’s hard to remember now, but by mid-2016 it had become fashionable to declare it the worst year ever. For a time it was partly a joke, based on a series of unexpected celebrity deaths: David Bowie, Prince, Alan Rickman. But things got worse: a second major terrorist attack in France—the Bataclan massacre was just the November before—and the original version of this post was published one month after the Pulse nightclub shooting and two weeks after the Brexit vote.
Now it’s January 2026, and—stop me if you’ve heard this one—the world has never felt more on edge. But this time no one is joking. The instability owes more to geopolitics, including the continuing Russia–Ukraine war, and much of it emanates from an unpopular, unrestrained U.S. government: Minneapolis, Venezuela, Greenland, Iran, even CBS News—while artificial intelligence and other changes threaten mass culture and maybe even our shared reality.
Not even Wikipedia is insulated from these changes. The world has grown more hostile to it and more dependent on it at the same time. The open web Jimbo built it upon can no longer be taken for granted. Twenty-five years on, we still have much to learn from Wikipedia—and more to lose than we once imagined.
At time of first publication, in July 2016, the number was 5.2 million.