Wikipedia at 25: A nonprofit knowledge commons under mounting pressure

As Wikipedia marks its 25th anniversary, it faces political attacks, relentless AI scraping that strains servers, and a shrinking pool of volunteers, threatening the site’s founding ideals of neutral, noncommercial, human-edited knowledge. External pressures include proposed UK age-gating, Saudi editor imprisonments, and China blocks, while debates about AI’s impact on human knowledge deepen. Wikimedia’s new CEO Bernadette Meehan aims to navigate these challenges, but renewal of editor engagement and sustainable funding remain critical to keeping Wikipedia a trusted knowledge base used by AI and search engines.