JIMMY'S FIGHT FOR THE TRUTH

Twelve seconds. That's how long it took from the final dart hitting the board in the PDC World Championships in January to Wikipedia updating Luke Littler's entry as the confirmed 2026 world champion.

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Of course, it wasn't Wikipedia per se updating Littler's entry. It was one of more than 260,000 active editors on the site, who was primed to update the online encyclopaedia the moment he hit that crucial double. A volunteer system that many thought would lead to chaos when it was first unveiled 25 years ago, but has turned out to be one of the most inspired ideas to emerge from any tech company.

That idea was Jimmy Wales', and 25 years later he's talking to me on a video call, describing how Wikipedia remains true to its original mission. The site "has evolved the way I expected", he told me, without a trace of arrogance. "There haven't been that many surprises along the way.

"In terms of what Wikipedia is today, it's very, very close to the original vision: a free encyclopaedia for everyone, written by volunteers. We've always really stuck very, very carefully to that original dream. And so, yeah, it's pretty stable. Wikipedia is something you can count on."

It is indeed. Perform a web search on pretty much any topic and you can count on Wikipedia being among the top two or three results. It's the internet's primary source of knowledge, without doubt.

But Wikipedia is also under threat, arguably a greater threat that at any time in the past quarter of a century. Free speech is under attack like never before, AI is gobbling up Wikipedia content and spitting it back out as its own, and journalism – the primary source for much of Wikipedia's content – is in a hole.

Wikipedia may have been one of the greatest inventions of the 21st century, but will it need to reinvent itself to survive for another 25 years?

Nu beginnings

Although Wales is credited with the idea of creating an online encyclopaedia that can be edited by anyone, that wasn't what he and his co-founders initially set out to create.

In the mid-1990s, Wales was a futures trader in Chicago, writing computer code in his spare time.