What 20 million bans reveal about the strain on Wikipedia’s volunteers
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This year, Wikipedia is celebrating 25 years as the internet’s encyclopedia that anyone can edit.
In its first decade, the quirky experiment for passionate nerds exploded in popularity. It became a ubiquitous information resource and a homework helper for schoolkids, much to the dismay of skeptical teachers. In its second decade, amid the public’s growing dissatisfaction with the mangling of facts in popular discourse, it took on a new role as information infrastructure, helping categorize and validate information worldwide.
Wired magazine deemed it “the last best place on the internet.” The hope was that the volunteer project could serve as the antidote for misinformation. Platforms from Facebook and Twitter to Alexa and YouTube began embedding Wikipedia material to ensure that users had context for what they read or saw. That role has become more acute in recent years.
Artificial intelligence developers have relied deeply on Wikipedia to train the large language models behind popular chatbots, which weight clean, reasonably reliable information sources more heavily than the rest of the web. Chatbots and AI-powered search engines have intensified Wikipedia’s significance, even as they siphon its readers by answering questions directly, with fewer people going to the source site itself. But as Wikipedia’s importance – and size – has grown, the size of the volunteer corps that maintains it has not, and the number of volunteer administrators, a key moderation role, has shrunk.
I’m a researcher who studies social media platforms. I analyzed two decades of the site’s moderation records to understand the effect of these conditions. I found changes in behavior that appear to prioritize content quality while weakening the project’s ability to recruit and retain new volunteers.
As Wikipedia has become more prominent, its resistance to top-down control has made it a target for people who have political or financial power. There is frequent news about takedown demands and censorship abroad, investigations and threats to its nonprofit status in the U.S., and, outside the U.S., volunteers have been arrested and imprisoned. The Wikipedia community is also sensitive to its rising importance, but not in the way you might think.
Contributors are keenly aware of political rhetoric that takes aim at their project or threatens volunteers. But the chief effect on volunteers has been a sense of heightened obligation to their global readership, which has gradually increased quality standards. As a longtime volunteer myself, I’m often taken by the community’s perseverance and the people’s desire, above all, to get on with their work of summarizing the world’s knowledge.
The English language Wikipedia has maintained a reasonably steady number of contributors since 2010 – about 40,000 – yet its size and importance have grown. In 2006, it contained 1 million articles; in May 2025, it passed 7 million. A new issue is an influx of low-quality content generated by large language models.
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- Explore together: Search for “what million” on NASA Kids’ Club, DK Find Out, or National Geographic Kids for more kid-friendly facts.
- Critical thinking: Science findings can change as more research is done. Ask: “How would scientists test this? What would prove them wrong?”
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