January 13, 2026 • 9 mins
If you do any writing for school, work, creativity, or pleasure . . you’ve probably relied a little bit on Wikipedia as a stunt brain of sorts. Now imagine that it almost went the way of Friendster or Napster. There’s nothing else like it . . but in 2007, it almost disappeared.
DM me if you have a story you’d like me to cover . . on Facebook it’s Patty Steele and on Instagram Real Patty Steele
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Be honest when you're doing any kind of writing that
needs a little bit of stunt brain added in what's
your first stop? No doubt it's Wikipedia. It's actually hard
to imagine the Internet without it, but close to twenty
years ago it nearly went extinct. I'm Patty Steele when
the place we turned to for all human knowledge almost
(00:21):
had its lights turned off. That's next on the backstory.
The backstory is back. First off, got to thank super
backstory fan Steve Kingston for sharing this story idea Okay.
In two thousand and four, as Wikipedia was getting its wings,
co founder Jimmy Wales said in an interview, imagine a
(00:44):
world in which every single person on the planet is
given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.
That's what we're doing. It was a monumental undertaking, particularly
because it needed billions of pieces of information to go
out to billions of people for free. The mid two
thousands were actually like the dawn of the Internet as
(01:07):
a user friendly tool for everybody, not just genius computer guys.
Google felt permanent, YouTube felt kind of inevitable. Facebook and
similar sites were becoming unavoidable still is, but Wikipedia it
felt like infrastructure, not a website actually more like a utility,
similar to how folks decades ago used encyclopedias and dictionaries. Right,
(01:32):
it was turning into a thing we put in the
same category as electricity or tap water, something that would
always be there for a quick reference on pretty much anything.
Now it's two thousand and seven, very quietly, Wikipedia is
approaching extinction. It's not because of hackers or the government,
not because of misinformation, scandals, lawsuits. It boils down to
(01:55):
the same old, boring thing that's killed businesses for centuries.
It was running out of money and almost nobody knew
about this death knell. Here's the thing. By two thousand
and seven, Wikipedia was one of the top ten most
visited websites on Earth, tens of millions of articles in
hundreds of languages, providing billions of bits of info, a
(02:17):
massive global army of volunteer editors, all working for free.
There were fifty thousand of these free editors on the
English version of Wiki alone. In those days. It should
have been a success. Right, Students were using it pretty
much every day. Journalists were using it, although mostly secretly,
sort of like AI today. Teachers were telling kids not
(02:38):
to use it, but were then secretly checking it themselves.
The site looked massive, unstoppable, too big to fail, but
that was not the case. Problem is Wikipedia didn't sell ads,
it didn't charge subscription fees, and really importantly, it didn't
harvest user data. It ran on donations and faith the
(03:00):
folks would appreciate it enough to keep it alive. The
Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that ran Wikipedia, was shockingly tiny
for a website handling billions of page views. We're talking
about a billion page views per month. But as traffic exploded,
so to be costs. They had to worry about servers, bandwidth,
(03:20):
storage and maintenance. Every article edit, every page load, every
image view came with growing price tags and donations weren't
paying the bills. At Wikimedia, executives were just focused on
trying to survive a few months at a time. Soon
they were afraid the lights were going to go out
in weeks. At one point they admitted to themselves that
(03:42):
if funding didn't improve, Wikipedia might have to shut down.
We're not talking scaling back, shut down. And the weirdest
part they had no emergency plan, no big red button.
They hadn't even drafted a shutdown announcement because if the
money ran out, the servers would simply stop response. You'd
go to look up the story behind a favorite movie
(04:03):
or some background on a school or work project, and
nothing would be there. Pages would load slower and slower,
then they'd time out. Finally they'd vanish. The world's largest
encyclopedia would disappear the same way so many forgotten websites do.
Think Friendster, Vine, Napster, ask jeeves, remember that one club, penguin,
(04:24):
Pig in my House, and so many others. They all
disappeared quietly, awkwardly, without closure. But how could that happen
to the biggest online information site on Earth. Imagine opening
a browser, you search a question like you searched a
thousand times before, and instead of a familiar white page
filled with blue lengths, you get nothing, No explanation, no archive,
(04:46):
no replacement, just silence. Let's go back to Jimmy Wales again.
He's Wikipedia's co founder. This guy understood the stakes. He
knew Wikipedia wasn't just another start up, it wasn't a product.
It was true, truly a social experiment. The question was
could the Internet build something massive, useful, and above all
(05:07):
lasting without greed at the center of it? But greed
is different than survival, and now that social experiment was
failing the most basic test. Figuring out a way to survive,
they thought about the traditional solutions. ADS could bring in millions.
Corporate sponsors could stabilize budgets. They could offer premium features, which,
(05:28):
while unlocking revenue, would charge users a fee. So every
option they considered felt like a betrayal of their original creed.
ADS would compromise neutrality. Since sponsors liked to control info
and exert some influence and paywalls, they'd lock out the
very people Wikipedia existed for. If Wikipedia survived by becoming
(05:50):
something else, was that really surviving? Finally, Jimmy Wales made
a decision that terrified everybody on the inside. Wikipedia would
ask users directly for help, not through marketing campaigns or
glossy videos or even emotional manipulation. They would simply tell
the truth. Yikes, that scares anybody. So on an evening
(06:12):
in December two thousand and seven, Wikipedia rolled out something
radical a banner. It wasn't a pop up, just a
plain text based message at the top of the page,
no shouting or animation. It basically said Wikipedia is run
by a nonprofit We depend on donations. If everyone reading
this gave just a small amount, our fundraiser would be
(06:33):
over in an hour. That was it, pure honesty, go
think as you can imagine. Insiders felt overwhelming anxiety. It
was a huge gamble. There was fear that users would
find it annoying and lose trust, whereas yet they might
ignore it and then Wikipedia would still fail. Problem is,
once you ask for money, you can't unask. Then came
(06:56):
the waiting. For the first few hours, donations trickled in.
The staff kept watching and obsessively refreshing numbers. Then something shifted.
Donations began to accelerate. They weren't huge. They were amounts
like five, ten or twenty bucks from students, from teachers,
from office workers. People who had used Wikipedia for years
(07:17):
without ever thinking about who paid for it suddenly realized
I need to help. Why did it work? Well, think
about it. What's the one thing that makes you want
to help somebody in need? It's vulnerability. The message didn't
talk down to users or guilt them. It simply said
this service exists because people like you care, and if
(07:38):
people stopped caring, it disappears. That was new. Wikipedia felt human, fragile.
It didn't belong to shareholders. It belonged to everybody, and
people really responded to that honest request for help. As
donations poured in, panic turned into hope and then relief.
In the end, millions of dollars were raised. Wikipedia was validated.
(08:00):
The experiment worked because they trusted their users. As you
probably know, that banner still appears every year, the same
plane message, the same quiet plea. Honestly, a lot of
folks scroll past it, but a lot donate. Wikipedia still
runs on a thin margin, and every year they try
to gently remind us that it can disappear, not with
(08:22):
a bang or a big explosive announcement, just gone. Few
of us know what's really behind the banner. With the founders, though,
it's the maintenance of a miracle. The scariest part isn't
that Wikipedia almost died. It's that we wouldn't have noticed
until it was gone again. Thanks to super fan Steve
Kingston for tipping me off about this story. Hope you'll
(08:45):
like the backstory with Patty Steele. Please leave a review,
and I'd love it if you'd subscribe or follow for
free to get new episodes delivered automatically. Also feel free
to dm me if you have a story like Steve
did that you'd like me to cover. On Facebook It's
Patty's and on Instagram Real Patty Steele. I'm Patty Steele.
(09:13):
The Backstories a production of iHeartMedia, Premiere Networks, the Elvis
Durant Group, and Steel Trap Productions. Our producer is Doug Fraser.
Our writer Jake Kushner. We have new episodes every Tuesday
and Friday. Feel free to reach out to me with
comments and even story suggestions on Instagram at Real Patty
Steele and on Facebook at Patty Steele. Thanks for listening
(09:36):
to the Backstory with Patty Steele, the pieces of history
you didn't know you needed to know.
Be honest when you're doing any kind of writing that
needs a little bit of stunt brain added in what's
your first stop? No doubt it's Wikipedia. It's actually hard
to imagine the Internet without it, but close to twenty
years ago it nearly went extinct. I'm Patty Steele when
the place we turned to for all human knowledge almost
(00:21):
had its lights turned off. That's next on the backstory.
The backstory is back. First off, got to thank super
backstory fan Steve Kingston for sharing this story idea Okay.
In two thousand and four, as Wikipedia was getting its wings,
co founder Jimmy Wales said in an interview, imagine a
(00:44):
world in which every single person on the planet is
given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.
That's what we're doing. It was a monumental undertaking, particularly
because it needed billions of pieces of information to go
out to billions of people for free. The mid two
thousands were actually like the dawn of the Internet as
(01:07):
a user friendly tool for everybody, not just genius computer guys.
Google felt permanent, YouTube felt kind of inevitable. Facebook and
similar sites were becoming unavoidable still is, but Wikipedia it
felt like infrastructure, not a website actually more like a utility,
similar to how folks decades ago used encyclopedias and dictionaries. Right,
(01:32):
it was turning into a thing we put in the
same category as electricity or tap water, something that would
always be there for a quick reference on pretty much anything.
Now it's two thousand and seven, very quietly, Wikipedia is
approaching extinction. It's not because of hackers or the government,
not because of misinformation, scandals, lawsuits. It boils down to
(01:55):
the same old, boring thing that's killed businesses for centuries.
It was running out of money and almost nobody knew
about this death knell. Here's the thing. By two thousand
and seven, Wikipedia was one of the top ten most
visited websites on Earth, tens of millions of articles in
hundreds of languages, providing billions of bits of info, a
(02:17):
massive global army of volunteer editors, all working for free.
There were fifty thousand of these free editors on the
English version of Wiki alone. In those days. It should
have been a success. Right, Students were using it pretty
much every day. Journalists were using it, although mostly secretly,
sort of like AI today. Teachers were telling kids not
(02:38):
to use it, but were then secretly checking it themselves.
The site looked massive, unstoppable, too big to fail, but
that was not the case. Problem is Wikipedia didn't sell ads,
it didn't charge subscription fees, and really importantly, it didn't
harvest user data. It ran on donations and faith the
(03:00):
folks would appreciate it enough to keep it alive. The
Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that ran Wikipedia, was shockingly tiny
for a website handling billions of page views. We're talking
about a billion page views per month. But as traffic exploded,
so to be costs. They had to worry about servers, bandwidth,
(03:20):
storage and maintenance. Every article edit, every page load, every
image view came with growing price tags and donations weren't
paying the bills. At Wikimedia, executives were just focused on
trying to survive a few months at a time. Soon
they were afraid the lights were going to go out
in weeks. At one point they admitted to themselves that
(03:42):
if funding didn't improve, Wikipedia might have to shut down.
We're not talking scaling back, shut down. And the weirdest
part they had no emergency plan, no big red button.
They hadn't even drafted a shutdown announcement because if the
money ran out, the servers would simply stop response. You'd
go to look up the story behind a favorite movie
(04:03):
or some background on a school or work project, and
nothing would be there. Pages would load slower and slower,
then they'd time out. Finally they'd vanish. The world's largest
encyclopedia would disappear the same way so many forgotten websites do.
Think Friendster, Vine, Napster, ask jeeves, remember that one club, penguin,
(04:24):
Pig in my House, and so many others. They all
disappeared quietly, awkwardly, without closure. But how could that happen
to the biggest online information site on Earth. Imagine opening
a browser, you search a question like you searched a
thousand times before, and instead of a familiar white page
filled with blue lengths, you get nothing, No explanation, no archive,
(04:46):
no replacement, just silence. Let's go back to Jimmy Wales again.
He's Wikipedia's co founder. This guy understood the stakes. He
knew Wikipedia wasn't just another start up, it wasn't a product.
It was true, truly a social experiment. The question was
could the Internet build something massive, useful, and above all
(05:07):
lasting without greed at the center of it? But greed
is different than survival, and now that social experiment was
failing the most basic test. Figuring out a way to survive,
they thought about the traditional solutions. ADS could bring in millions.
Corporate sponsors could stabilize budgets. They could offer premium features, which,
(05:28):
while unlocking revenue, would charge users a fee. So every
option they considered felt like a betrayal of their original creed.
ADS would compromise neutrality. Since sponsors liked to control info
and exert some influence and paywalls, they'd lock out the
very people Wikipedia existed for. If Wikipedia survived by becoming
(05:50):
something else, was that really surviving? Finally, Jimmy Wales made
a decision that terrified everybody on the inside. Wikipedia would
ask users directly for help, not through marketing campaigns or
glossy videos or even emotional manipulation. They would simply tell
the truth. Yikes, that scares anybody. So on an evening
(06:12):
in December two thousand and seven, Wikipedia rolled out something
radical a banner. It wasn't a pop up, just a
plain text based message at the top of the page,
no shouting or animation. It basically said Wikipedia is run
by a nonprofit We depend on donations. If everyone reading
this gave just a small amount, our fundraiser would be
(06:33):
over in an hour. That was it, pure honesty, go
think as you can imagine. Insiders felt overwhelming anxiety. It
was a huge gamble. There was fear that users would
find it annoying and lose trust, whereas yet they might
ignore it and then Wikipedia would still fail. Problem is,
once you ask for money, you can't unask. Then came
(06:56):
the waiting. For the first few hours, donations trickled in.
The staff kept watching and obsessively refreshing numbers. Then something shifted.
Donations began to accelerate. They weren't huge. They were amounts
like five, ten or twenty bucks from students, from teachers,
from office workers. People who had used Wikipedia for years
(07:17):
without ever thinking about who paid for it suddenly realized
I need to help. Why did it work? Well, think
about it. What's the one thing that makes you want
to help somebody in need? It's vulnerability. The message didn't
talk down to users or guilt them. It simply said
this service exists because people like you care, and if
(07:38):
people stopped caring, it disappears. That was new. Wikipedia felt human, fragile.
It didn't belong to shareholders. It belonged to everybody, and
people really responded to that honest request for help. As
donations poured in, panic turned into hope and then relief.
In the end, millions of dollars were raised. Wikipedia was validated.
(08:00):
The experiment worked because they trusted their users. As you
probably know, that banner still appears every year, the same
plane message, the same quiet plea. Honestly, a lot of
folks scroll past it, but a lot donate. Wikipedia still
runs on a thin margin, and every year they try
to gently remind us that it can disappear, not with
(08:22):
a bang or a big explosive announcement, just gone. Few
of us know what's really behind the banner. With the founders, though,
it's the maintenance of a miracle. The scariest part isn't
that Wikipedia almost died. It's that we wouldn't have noticed
until it was gone again. Thanks to super fan Steve
Kingston for tipping me off about this story. Hope you'll
(08:45):
like the backstory with Patty Steele. Please leave a review,
and I'd love it if you'd subscribe or follow for
free to get new episodes delivered automatically. Also feel free
to dm me if you have a story like Steve
did that you'd like me to cover. On Facebook It's
Patty's and on Instagram Real Patty Steele. I'm Patty Steele.
(09:13):
The Backstories a production of iHeartMedia, Premiere Networks, the Elvis
Durant Group, and Steel Trap Productions. Our producer is Doug Fraser.
Our writer Jake Kushner. We have new episodes every Tuesday
and Friday. Feel free to reach out to me with
comments and even story suggestions on Instagram at Real Patty
Steele and on Facebook at Patty Steele. Thanks for listening
(09:36):
to the Backstory with Patty Steele, the pieces of history
you didn't know you needed to know.
Host
Patty Steele
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