One of my favorite weekly newsletters is called the Weeklypedia; here’s last Friday’s edition. Each email contains two lists: The 20 Wikipedia articles that have been edited the most times in the past week, and the 10 most-edited articles created within the past week. If you read it long enough, you’ll start to see the subcategories most of these articles fall into — and the amount of volunteer labor that goes into them.

There are the very specific lists that some completist has taken on as a challenge. (Last week, “List of Phi Alpha Honor Society chapters” was edited 257 times — by only two authors. Or “Deaths in March 1982,” edited 398 times by five authors.)

There are the sports tournaments and reality TV shows that demand moment-to-moment updates. (Last week, there were 268 edits on “2026 Malaysia Open (badminton)” and 605 on “Bigg Boss (Tamil TV series) season 9.”)

There are the biographies of people whom someone has decided deserve memorializing. (Last week, user Mary Mark Ockerbloom created the article on Quaker abolitionist John Vickers and edited it 161 times. User pigsonthewing did the same for the artist Charles Shepard — best known for making posters for the British travel industry — but edited it only 90 times.)

But the most common Wikipedia genre represented each week is news. When something big happens in the world, some Wikipedian will start an article — and within minutes, editors will descend on it, using news articles as raw material to construct something encyclopedic. Here’s last week’s top 10 — it’s awfully close to a summary of the week’s front pages:

Wikipedia turns 25 years old today. On January 15, 2001, at 2:27 p.m. EST, Jimmy Wales made the first edit: “This is the new WikiPedia!” (They’ve gotten better since then.)

To celebrate, you can take a “What Wikipedia of the future are you?” quiz. Without even taking the quiz, though, I know which one I am: the Wikipedia That Gets Respect As a Source of News.

The site’s early years were filled with media outrage about a source of “truth” that anyone could edit. And yes, you could right now go edit in a claim that Happy Chandler was a lizard person. But the layers of accountability the site has built up over the years would likely reverse your edit within minutes. If those minutes are the cost of creating perhaps humanity’s single greatest source of information, I’m willing to pay it — with apologies to Happy’s descendants. Here are a few things news organizations could learn from it.

• News isn’t always what just happened. A few decades into the web, this might seem obvious today. But in 2001, news organizations were still very much constructed around producing daily newspapers and nightly newscasts. The rhythms of production drove everything from story selection to writing style to revenue models. Wikipedia was the first site that gave most journalists a vision of an “article” that is constantly updated, not rewritten with a new lede the next day. If there’s an important new detail in that Swiss bar fire investigation, it’ll be used to make the current Wikipedia article a little bit better — not to have a new unique URL to push out on social. Whatever questions your journalism answers, people will probably still be asking them tomorrow, and next week, and next year. Wikipedia is optimized for catching people up on news stories they missed the first time around.
• Building processes means building culture. Wikipedia succeeds because it has a core set of standards and practices that its editors treat as holy writ. No original research. Neutral point of view. Not every source is equally reliable. No sockpuppetry. Do not disrupt Wikipedia to make a point — but assume good faith. Most (though not all) align perfectly well with the principles of journalism. But they’ve been constructed, a codified set of editorial standards, a collective ethos that guides the whole operation. For Wikipedia to work, there has to be consensus about how things are done, and that requires building a culture among editors. Why have so many other wiki-driven sites failed? They never build the culture that undergirds the processes.
• Don’t break links. Unless an article has been taken down entirely, just about every link to a Wikipedia page created in the past quarter-century still works. Its article on Nicolás Maduro is still in the same place it was when first created in 2006, 4,493 edits ago. How many news articles published online in 2006 still live at the same address? Vanishingly few. When you start to think of articles as something with permanence, you realize the high cost of breaking a perfectly good URL.
• Document your work. Check out one of those newsy Wikipedia articles, like this one on the killing of Renee Good. It’s currently 4,559 words. It’s been read nearly 1.4 million times. A total of 331 people have made 2,204 edits to it. Its talk page includes more than 1,000 signed comments from Wikipedia users arguing for something’s inclusion or exclusion. (Should the page’s title refer to Renee Good or Renée Good, with an accent? Should we note the date the shooter was first publicly identified? Should this article include details about anti-ICE protests after the killing, or should that be in a separate article?) It backs up its claims with 169 footnotes linking to news sources and official statements. And all of this work is available for anyone to see. The back-and-forths on the talk page let the reader see that points of view are being heard and debated. And anyone can click a link to confirm if a source is being accurately reflected. All that transparency won’t be practical for all journalistic work — but there’s no denying the trust that is built by operating in public.

Photo via Adobe Stock.