Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, written by human volunteers and hosted by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation. It started on January 15, 2001. What goes in has to be checkable against published, reliable sources, and edits based on personal opinion, personal experience or unreviewed research aren't allowed to stay.
Source: Wikipedia, Wikipedia:About, checked October 29, 2026
What Wikipedia means for your business
Wikipedia's text is free to reuse. Its copyright page says anyone may copy and change article text, as long as they credit it and share their changes under the same terms. So a sentence on Wikipedia about your trade or your kind of product can turn up on other sites, word for word.
In six Google searches we ran on October 29, 2026, for terms like Microsoft Copilot and product feed, Google's AI Overview cited Wikipedia in four. ChatGPT's answers to the same six cited it in none.
We'd read the Wikipedia articles about your field, because their wording can be copied anywhere. If one gets a fact about your trade wrong, the fix goes through Wikipedia's own process, with a published source behind it. Whether your business can have an article of its own is a separate question, and the Wikipedia presence entry covers it.
If you're not sure which AI tools to check for your field, the AI search research we keep current tracks how many people use each.
Last reviewed October 29, 2026. All terms
How AI answers it today
On October 29, 2026, both answers called Wikipedia a free encyclopedia written by volunteers. ChatGPT linked only wikipedia.org and suggested double-checking it; Google's AI Overview cited Wikipedia's own pages, Business Insider and Britannica.
Our run through ChatGPT and Google's AI Overview, October 29, 2026. A sample, not what every buyer sees.
Related terms in the platforms
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