Wikipedia is, in many ways, the backbone of the internet. The free encyclopedia boasts more than 66 million articles in 342 languages on just about every topic under the sun; the English articles alone would take more than 38 years to get through. On an average day, the site receives more than 508 million pageviews, according to Pew Research.
For Wikipedia’s 25th anniversary, the site doesn’t want you to forget it.
In November, Wikipedia released a brand anthem video that showcases the depth and breadth of its content, its hundreds of thousands of volunteer editors, and the many ways in which that work has shaped the internet today—perhaps not always with due credit.
“AI studies Wikipedia,” a voice-over in the anthem declares. “Search engines copy it. Your smart speaker whispers it back to you.”
The marketing effort, designed with the creative agency Kin, marked a rare moment for the site, which doesn’t typically advertise. It seems to have paid off: the anthem has been viewed more than 24 million times across sites, Wikipedia reported, and has led to an 8% lift in brand awareness and half a million dollars in donations.
“We realized there are some stories we need to tell about ourselves that we have not told,” Zack McCune, director of global brand at the Wikimedia Foundation, told Marketing Brew, adding that “most internet users perceive Wikipedia as a utility…but they don’t know that it’s written by people.”
On the site’s official anniversary date, January 15, Wikipedia released a docuseries across social media that further showcases volunteer editors in the US, UK, Nigeria, Japan, India, France, and Brazil. Beyond that, it released a time capsule, a quiz, and a new mascot, Baby Globe, which was hand-drawn and designed by a volunteer. There are also plans for virtual and in-person events as Wikipedia continues to celebrate those who have made the site possible over the last quarter century.
We spoke with McCune and Sophie Ozoux, co-founder of Kin, about the “Knowledge is Human” campaign and how Wikipedia plans to keep the internet human in the age of AI.
“The human side of Wikipedia”
The anniversary docuseries highlights stories ranging from a physician in India writing about Covid-19 to a woman in the UK writing an article on the founder of the first public wildflower garden in the US. McCune said it wasn’t easy to pick the people to showcase given the sheer volume of volunteers. Ultimately, he said, the team identified large reader markets and put out regional calls for participation.
“We asked people in our volunteer group, ‘What are great stories that you don’t think have been told about the human side of Wikipedia?’” he said. “We collected those stories, looked at all of them, and ran an editorial process to try to distill down to some super-favorites.”
Ozoux felt it was important to show the various roles required to keep the site operating, as well as the debates and vetting processes all volunteers endure before their work is published to ensure accuracy.
“It was really awesome to be able to showcase not only different backgrounds, stories, personalities, but also show people that no matter who you are, what your skill sets are, you can contribute to Wikipedia,” she said.
McCune cited a study from Cornell that found that the more people contribute to an article, the “more neutral content becomes,” a contrast to more fragmented and polarized corners of today’s internet landscape.
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Wikipedia’s the-more-the-merrier mentality also applies to its financial structure, which relies on worldwide donations averaging around $11 per person. In the brand anthem video, the voice-over touts Wikipedia’s unique status as one of the few ad-free places on the internet, which McCune said remains a commitment. (Also unlike much of the internet, the brand does not engage in any form of data collection, he said.) He compared Wikipedia to a national park or public library as the only nonprofit among the top 10 most-visited websites. After the anthem dropped, McCune said 41% of the donations that followed were from first-time donors.
“We’re trying to not just remind people why they love [Wikipedia],” he said. “We’re also trying to attract a whole new generation of people to appreciate Wikipedia and to take part in supporting it.”
No “AI” in team
While Wikipedia is unlike much of the web, it’s not immune to the conditions faced by other publishers. In 2025, more than 88 billion views on Wikipedia came from “web crawlers, AI bots, and other nonhuman agents,” according to Pew Research, and in October, the Wikimedia Foundation reported that pageviews were down by 8% year over year, which it attributed to generative AI and social media.
With fewer site visits, the report read, “fewer volunteers may grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors may support this work.”
The goal of the platform’s anniversary campaign, Ozoux said, is to “show how the work that Wikipedia and the volunteers are doing is essential, and it needs…to be supported as we move into this new generation of technology and AI.”
As part of its 25th anniversary, Wikimedia Foundation’s commercial arm, Wikimedia Enterprise, announced a deal with Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral AI, and Perplexity to allow for those companies’ generative AI models to reuse and distribute Wikipedia and Wikimedia content and help “sustain Wikipedia for the future.” Wikimedia Enterprise has already established similar partnerships with other platforms, including Google, Ecosia, Nomic, Pleias, ProRata, and Reef Media.
The deal seems like a response to a growing frustration McCune voiced, which is that “just because there are new tools doesn’t mean this information is being made by those platforms.” The information pulled by LLMs, he said, could be the “summary of something that tens of thousands of humans may have been fighting about on Wikipedia for 25 years.”
Through the campaign, his hope is that a new generation is inspired to keep Wikipedia alive and continue to support its existence for years to come.
“In this age of AI, when writing online is increasingly not written by people,” he said, “we really wanted to emphasize that the reason Wikipedia endures, the reason people turn to it, is because it’s powered by people.”
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