It’s not a news site. But there’s a lot to learn from how Wikipedia constructs shared knowledge about what’s happening in the world.
Wikipedia turns 25 years old today. On January 15, 2001, at 2:27 p.m. EST, Jimmy Wales made the first edit: “This is the new WikiPedia!” (They’ve gotten better since then.)
To celebrate, you can take a “What Wikipedia of the future are you?” quiz. Without even taking the quiz, though, I know which one I am: the Wikipedia That Gets Respect As a Source of News.
The site’s early years were filled with media outrage about a source of “truth” that anyone could edit. And yes, you could right now go edit in a claim that Happy Chandler was a lizard person. But the layers of accountability the site has built up over the years would likely reverse your edit within minutes. If those minutes are the cost of creating perhaps humanity’s single greatest source of information, I’m willing to pay it — with apologies to Happy’s descendants. Here are a few things news organizations could learn from it.
Full article: https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/01/after-25-years-wikipedia-has-proved-that-news-doesnt-need-to-look-like-news/
Courtesy: https://www.niemanlab.org/
