SAN FRANCISCO – On 15 January 2026, Wikipedia celebrated 25 years of making trustworthy, human-created knowledge accessible worldwide.
While the milestone marks two and a half decades of volunteer-led information sharing, it also signals a massive shift in how the world’s most powerful technology companies consume and sustain that data.
The New Guardians of Human-Curated Data
To mark this historic occasion, the Wikimedia Foundation is highlighting the rapid expansion of the Wikimedia Enterprise ecosystem.
In a significant move for the industry, the organization is announcing Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral AI, and Perplexity for the first time as they join an elite roster of partners.
These tech titans join existing members—including Google, Ecosia, Nomic, Pleias, ProRata, and Reef Media—in a formalized effort to support the infrastructure they rely on.
Consequently, these organizations are now utilizing Wikimedia Enterprise to integrate human-governed knowledge into their platforms at a global scale.
By doing so, they help ensure that the work of the global volunteer community reaches billions of people with the accuracy and transparency that Wikipedia represents.
Sustaining Truth in the Age of AI
In the current AI era, Wikipedia’s human-created and curated knowledge has never been more valuable.
Despite the rise of machine-generated content, Wikipedia remains among the top-ten most-visited global websites and holds the distinction of being the only one operated by a nonprofit.
The statistics surrounding the platform’s reach remain staggering:
-
Global audiences view more than 65 million articles.
-
Content is available in over 300 languages.
-
The site receives nearly 15 billion views every month.
Furthermore, this vast repository serves as the backbone for the modern digital experience, powering generative AI chatbots, search engines, and voice assistants.
Because of its rigorous community standards, Wikipedia remains one of the highest-quality datasets for training Large Language Models (LLMs).
High-Speed Infrastructure for Modern Tech
As the demand for real-time information grows, the Wikimedia Foundation is emphasizing that tech companies relying on this content must use it responsibly.
To facilitate this, Wikimedia Enterprise was developed as a commercial product for large-scale reusers.
The service provides reliable, high-throughput API access through three primary channels:
-
The On-demand API: Returns the most recent version for a specific article request.
-
The Snapshot API: Provides Wikipedia as a downloadable file for every language, updated every hour.
-
The Realtime API: Streams updates as they happen.
Looking Ahead: Closing the Knowledge Gap
As knowledge on Wikipedia continues to grow to close knowledge gaps and include more languages, its value as a dataset for a broad spectrum of use cases also increases.
Beyond general searches, the Enterprise APIs provide access to other Wikimedia projects that complement the main encyclopedia.
This diversification makes the ecosystem valuable for specialized applications, such as knowledge graphs with travel data or Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) models trained on educational material.
For those interested in these collaborations, the Wikimedia Enterprise blog serves as a resource for understanding these partnerships, featuring in-depth articles about the challenges these companies aim to solve.
As the community looks toward the next 25 years, the message to the tech industry is clear: the vast, multilingual, human knowledge repository built by volunteers is available for those who wish to ensure high-speed, reliable access to the world’s most trusted source of knowledge.