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In 1999, as part of the process of devolution within the UK, Elizabeth formally opened newly established legislatures for Wales and Scotland: the National Assembly for Wales at Cardiff in May, and the Scottish Parliament at Edinburgh in July.

On the eve of the new millennium, Elizabeth and Philip boarded a vessel from Southwark, bound for the Millennium Dome. Before passing under Tower Bridge, Elizabeth lit the National Millennium Beacon in the Pool of London using a laser torch. Shortly before midnight, she officially opened the Dome. During the singing of "Auld Lang Syne", Elizabeth held hands with Philip and British prime minister Tony Blair.

In 2002, Elizabeth marked her Golden Jubilee, the 50th anniversary of her accession. Her sister and mother died in February and March respectively, and the media speculated on whether the Jubilee would be a success or a failure. She again undertook an extensive tour of her realms, beginning in Jamaica in February, where she called the farewell banquet "memorable" after a power cut plunged the King's House, the official residence of the governor-general, into darkness. As in 1977, there were street parties and commemorative events, and monuments were named to honour the occasion. One million people attended each day of the three-day main Jubilee celebration in London, and the enthusiasm shown for Elizabeth by the public was greater than many journalists had anticipated.

In 2003, Elizabeth sued the "Daily Mirror" for breach of confidence and obtained an injunction which prevented the outlet from publishing information gathered by a reporter who posed as a footman at Buckingham Palace. The newspaper also paid £25,000 towards her legal costs. Though generally healthy throughout her life, in 2003 she had keyhole surgery on both knees. In October 2006, she missed the opening of the new Emirates Stadium because of a strained back muscle that had been troubling her since the summer.

In May 2007, citing unnamed sources, "The Daily Telegraph" reported that Elizabeth was "exasperated and frustrated" by the policies of Tony Blair, that she was concerned the British Armed Forces were overstretched in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that she had raised concerns over rural and countryside issues with Blair. She was, however, said to admire Blair's efforts to achieve peace in Northern Ireland. She became the first British monarch to celebrate a diamond wedding anniversary in November 2007. On 20 March 2008, at the Church of Ireland St Patrick's Cathedral, Armagh, Elizabeth attended the first Maundy service held outside England and Wales.

Elizabeth addressed the UN General Assembly for a second time in 2010, again in her capacity as Queen of all Commonwealth realms and Head of the Commonwealth. The UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, introduced her as "an anchor for our age". During her visit to New York, which followed a tour of Canada, she officially opened a memorial garden for British victims of the September 11 attacks. Elizabeth's 11-day visit to Australia in October 2011 was her 16th visit to the country since 1954. By invitation of the Irish president, Mary McAleese, she made the first state visit to the Republic of Ireland by a British monarch in May 2011.

Elizabeth's 2012 Diamond Jubilee marked 60 years on the throne, and celebrations were held throughout her realms, the wider Commonwealth, and beyond. She and her husband undertook an extensive tour of the United Kingdom, while her children and grandchildren embarked on royal tours of other Commonwealth states on her behalf. On 4 June, Jubilee beacons were lit around the world. On 18 December, she became the first British sovereign to attend a peacetime Cabinet meeting since George III in 1781.

Elizabeth, who opened the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, also opened the 2012 Summer Olympics and Paralympics in London, making her the first head of state to open two Olympic Games in two countries. For the London Olympics, she played herself in a short film as part of the opening ceremony, alongside Daniel Craig as James Bond. On 4 April 2013, she received an honorary BAFTA for her patronage of the film industry and was called "the most memorable Bond girl yet" at the award ceremony.

On 3 March 2013, Elizabeth stayed overnight at King Edward VII's Hospital as a precaution after developing symptoms of gastroenteritis. A week later, she signed the new Charter of the Commonwealth. Because of her age and the need for her to limit travelling, in 2013 she chose not to attend the biennial Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting for the first time in 40 years. She was represented at the summit in Sri Lanka by Prince Charles. On 20 April 2018, the Commonwealth heads of government announced that she would be succeeded by Charles as Head of the Commonwealth, which she stated was her "sincere wish". She underwent cataract surgery in May 2018. In March 2019, she gave up driving on public roads, largely as a consequence of a car crash involving her husband two months earlier.

Elizabeth surpassed her great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, to become the longest-lived British monarch on 21 December 2007, and the longest-reigning British monarch and longest-reigning queen regnant and female head of state in the world on 9 September 2015. She became the oldest current monarch after King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia died on 23 January 2015. She later became the longest-reigning current monarch and the longest-serving current head of state following the death of King Bhumibol of Thailand on 13 October 2016, and the oldest current head of state on the resignation of Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe on 21 November 2017. On 6 February 2017, she became the first British monarch to commemorate a sapphire jubilee, and on 20 November, she was the first British monarch to celebrate a platinum wedding anniversary. Philip had retired from his official duties as the Queen's consort in August 2017.

On 19 March 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United Kingdom, Elizabeth moved to Windsor Castle and sequestered there as a precaution. Public engagements were cancelled and Windsor Castle followed a strict sanitary protocol nicknamed "HMS Bubble".

On 5 April, in a televised broadcast watched by an estimated 24 million viewers in the UK, she asked people to "take comfort that while we may have more still to endure, better days will return: we will be with our friends again; we will be with our families again; we will meet again." On 8 May, the 75th anniversary of VE Day, in a television broadcast at 9pm—the exact time at which her father George VI had broadcast to the nation on the same day in 1945—she asked people to "never give up, never despair". In October, she visited the UK's Defence Science and Technology Laboratory in Wiltshire, her first public engagement since the start of the pandemic. On 4 November, she appeared masked for the first time in public, during a private pilgrimage to the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior at Westminster Abbey, to mark the centenary of his burial. In 2021, she received her first and second COVID-19 vaccinations in January and April respectively.

Prince Philip died on 9 April 2021, after 73 years of marriage, making Elizabeth the first British monarch to reign as a widow or widower since Queen Victoria. She was reportedly at her husband's bedside when he died, and remarked in private that his death had "left a huge void". Due to the COVID-19 restrictions in place in England at the time, Elizabeth sat alone at Philip's funeral service, which evoked sympathy from people around the world. In her Christmas broadcast that year, she paid a personal tribute to her "beloved Philip", saying, "That mischievous, inquiring twinkle was as bright at the end as when I first set eyes on him".

Despite the pandemic, Elizabeth attended the 2021 State Opening of Parliament in May, and the 47th G7 summit in June. On 5 July, the 73rd anniversary of the founding of the UK's National Health Service, she announced that the NHS would be awarded the George Cross to "recognise all NHS staff, past and present, across all disciplines and all four nations". In October 2021, she began using a walking stick during public engagements for the first time since her operation in 2004. Following an overnight stay in hospital on 20 October, her previously scheduled visits to Northern Ireland, the COP26 summit in Glasgow, and the 2021 National Service of Remembrance were cancelled on health grounds.

Elizabeth's Platinum Jubilee began on 6 February 2022, marking 70 years since she acceded to the throne on her father's death. On the eve of the date, she held a reception at Sandringham House for pensioners, local Women's Institute members and charity volunteers. In her accession day message, Elizabeth renewed her commitment to a lifetime of public service, which she had originally made in 1947.

Later that month, Elizabeth had "mild cold-like symptoms" and tested positive for COVID-19, along with some staff and family members. She cancelled two virtual audiences on 22 February, but held a phone conversation with British prime minister Boris Johnson the following day amid a crisis on the Russo-Ukrainian border, following which she made a donation to the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) Ukraine Humanitarian Appeal. On 28 February, she was reported to have recovered and spent time with her family at Frogmore. On 7 March, Elizabeth met Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau at Windsor Castle, in her first in-person engagement since her COVID diagnosis. She later remarked that COVID infection "leave[s] one very tired and exhausted ... It's not a nice result".

Elizabeth was present at the service of thanksgiving for Prince Philip at Westminster Abbey on 29 March, but was unable to attend the annual Commonwealth Day service that month or the Royal Maundy service in April. She missed the State Opening of Parliament in May for the first time in 59 years. (She did not attend in 1959 and 1963 as she was pregnant with Prince Andrew and Prince Edward, respectively.) In her absence, Parliament was opened by the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Cambridge as counsellors of state.

During the Platinum Jubilee celebrations, Elizabeth was largely confined to balcony appearances and missed the National Service of Thanksgiving. For the Jubilee concert, she took part in a sketch with Paddington Bear, that opened the event outside Buckingham Palace. On 13 June 2022, she became the second-longest reigning monarch in history among those whose exact dates of reign are known, with 70 years, 127 days reigned—surpassing King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand. On 6 September 2022, she appointed her 15th British prime minister, Liz Truss, at Balmoral Castle in Scotland. This marked the only time she did not receive a new prime minister at Buckingham Palace during her reign. No other British reign had seen so many prime ministers.

Elizabeth never planned to abdicate, though she took on fewer public engagements as she grew older and Prince Charles took on more of her duties. The Queen told Canadian governor-general Adrienne Clarkson in a meeting in 2002 that she would never abdicate, saying "It is not our tradition. Although, I suppose if I became completely gaga, one would have to do something". In June 2022, Elizabeth met the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, who "came away thinking there is someone who has no fear of death, has hope in the future, knows the rock on which she stands and that gives her strength."

On 8 September 2022, Buckingham Palace released a statement which read: "Following further evaluation this morning, the Queen's doctors are concerned for Her Majesty's health and have recommended she remain under medical supervision. The Queen remains comfortable and at Balmoral." Elizabeth's immediate family rushed to Balmoral to be by her side. She died "peacefully" at 15:10 BST at the age of 96, with two of her children, Charles and Anne, by her side. Her death was announced to the public at 18:30, setting in motion Operation London Bridge and, because she died in Scotland, Operation Unicorn.

Elizabeth was the first monarch to die in Scotland since James V in 1542. Her death certificate recorded her cause of death as "old age".

On 12 September, Elizabeth's coffin was carried up the Royal Mile in a procession to St Giles' Cathedral, where the Crown of Scotland was placed on it. Her coffin lay at rest at the cathedral for 24 hours, guarded by the Royal Company of Archers, during which around 33,000 people filed past the coffin. It was taken by air to London on 13 September. On 14 September, her coffin was taken in a military procession from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Hall, where Elizabeth lay in state for four days. The coffin was guarded by members of both the Sovereign's Bodyguard and the Household Division. An estimated 250,000 members of the public filed past the coffin, as did politicians and other public figures. On 16 September, Elizabeth's children held a vigil around her coffin, and the next day her eight grandchildren did the same.

Elizabeth's state funeral was held at Westminster Abbey on 19 September, which marked the first time that a monarch's funeral service had been held at the Abbey since George II in 1760. More than a million people lined the streets of central London, and the day was declared a holiday in several Commonwealth countries. In Windsor, a final procession involving 1,000 military personnel took place which was witnessed by 97,000 people. Elizabeth's fell pony, and two royal corgis, stood at the side of the procession. After a Committal Service at St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, Elizabeth was interred with her husband Philip in the King George VI Memorial Chapel later the same day in a private ceremony attended by her closest family members.

Elizabeth rarely gave interviews and little was known of her political opinions, which she did not express explicitly in public. It is against convention to ask or reveal the monarch's views. When "Times" journalist Paul Routledge asked her about the miners' strike of 1984–85 during a royal tour of the newspaper's offices, she replied that it was "all about one man" (a reference to Arthur Scargill), with which Routledge disagreed. Routledge was widely criticised in the media for asking the question, and claimed that he was unaware of the protocols. After the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, Prime Minister David Cameron was overheard saying that Elizabeth was pleased with the outcome. She had arguably issued a public coded statement about the referendum by telling one woman outside Balmoral Kirk that she hoped people would think "very carefully" about the outcome. It emerged later that Cameron had specifically requested that she register her concern.

Elizabeth had a deep sense of religious and civic duty, and took her Coronation Oath seriously. Aside from her official religious role as Supreme Governor of the established Church of England, she worshipped with that church and also the national Church of Scotland. She demonstrated support for inter-faith relations and met with leaders of other churches and religions, including five popes: Pius XII, John XXIII, John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Francis. A personal note about her faith often featured in her annual Christmas Message broadcast to the Commonwealth. In 2000, she said:

Elizabeth was patron of more than 600 organisations and charities. The Charities Aid Foundation estimated that Elizabeth helped raise over £1.4 billion for her patronages during her reign. Her main leisure interests included equestrianism and dogs, especially her Pembroke Welsh Corgis. Her lifelong love of corgis began in 1933 with Dookie, the first corgi owned by her family. Scenes of a relaxed, informal home life were occasionally witnessed; she and her family, from time to time, prepared a meal together and washed the dishes afterwards.

In the 1950s, as a young woman at the start of her reign, Elizabeth was depicted as a glamorous "fairytale Queen". After the trauma of the Second World War, it was a time of hope, a period of progress and achievement heralding a "new Elizabethan age". Lord Altrincham's accusation in 1957 that her speeches sounded like those of a "priggish schoolgirl" was an extremely rare criticism. In the late 1960s, attempts to portray a more modern image of the monarchy were made in the television documentary "Royal Family" and by televising Prince Charles's investiture as Prince of Wales. Elizabeth also instituted other new practices; her first royal walkabout, meeting ordinary members of the public, took place during a tour of Australia and New Zealand in 1970. Her wardrobe developed a recognisable, signature style driven more by function than fashion. In public, she took to wearing mostly solid-colour overcoats and decorative hats, allowing her to be seen easily in a crowd.

At Elizabeth's Silver Jubilee in 1977, the crowds and celebrations were genuinely enthusiastic; but, in the 1980s, public criticism of the royal family increased, as the personal and working lives of Elizabeth's children came under media scrutiny. Her popularity sank to a low point in the 1990s. Under pressure from public opinion, she began to pay income tax for the first time, and Buckingham Palace was opened to the public. Although support for republicanism in Britain seemed higher than at any time in living memory, republican ideology was still a minority viewpoint and Elizabeth herself had high approval ratings. Criticism was focused on the institution of the monarchy itself, and the conduct of Elizabeth's wider family, rather than her own behaviour and actions. Discontent with the monarchy reached its peak on the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, although Elizabeth's personal popularity—as well as general support for the monarchy—rebounded after her live television broadcast to the world five days after Diana's death.

In November 1999, a referendum in Australia on the future of the Australian monarchy favoured its retention in preference to an indirectly elected head of state. Many republicans credited Elizabeth's personal popularity with the survival of the monarchy in Australia. In 2010, Prime Minister Julia Gillard noted that there was a "deep affection" for Elizabeth in Australia and another referendum on the monarchy should wait until after her reign. Gillard's successor, Malcolm Turnbull, who led the republican campaign in 1999, similarly believed that Australians would not vote to become a republic in her lifetime. "She's been an extraordinary head of state", Turnbull said in 2021, "and I think frankly, in Australia, there are more Elizabethans than there are monarchists". Similarly, referendums in both Tuvalu in 2008 and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines in 2009 saw voters reject proposals to become republics.

Polls in Britain in 2006 and 2007 revealed strong support for the monarchy, and in 2012, Elizabeth's Diamond Jubilee year, her approval ratings hit 90 per cent. Her family came under scrutiny again in the last few years of her life due to her son Andrew's association with convicted sex offenders Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, his lawsuit with Virginia Giuffre amidst accusations of sexual impropriety, and her grandson Harry and his wife Meghan's exit from the working royal family and subsequent move to the United States. Polling in Great Britain during the Platinum Jubilee, however, showed Elizabeth's personal popularity remained strong. As of 2021 she remained the third most admired woman in the world according to the annual Gallup poll, her 52 appearances on the list meaning she had been in the top ten more than any other woman in the poll's history.

Elizabeth was portrayed in a variety of media by many notable artists, including painters Pietro Annigoni, Peter Blake, Chinwe Chukwuogo-Roy, Terence Cuneo, Lucian Freud, Rolf Harris, Damien Hirst, Juliet Pannett and Tai-Shan Schierenberg. Notable photographers of Elizabeth included Cecil Beaton, Yousuf Karsh, Anwar Hussein, Annie Leibovitz, Lord Lichfield, Terry O'Neill, John Swannell and Dorothy Wilding. The first official portrait photograph of Elizabeth was taken by Marcus Adams in 1926.

Elizabeth held many titles and honorary military positions throughout the Commonwealth, was sovereign of many orders in her own countries, and received honours and awards from around the world. In each of her realms, she had a distinct title that follows a similar formula: "Queen of Saint Lucia and of Her other Realms and Territories" in Saint Lucia, "Queen of Australia and Her other Realms and Territories" in Australia, etc. In the Channel Islands and Isle of Man, which are Crown Dependencies rather than separate realms, she was known as Duke of Normandy and Lord of Mann, respectively. Additional styles include Defender of the Faith and Duke of Lancaster.

From 21 April 1944 until her accession, Elizabeth's arms consisted of a lozenge bearing the royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom differenced with a label of three points argent, the centre point bearing a Tudor rose and the first and third a cross of St George. Upon her accession, she inherited the various arms her father held as sovereign. Elizabeth also possessed royal standards and personal flags for use in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica, and elsewhere.

Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers through open collaboration and a wiki-based editing system. Its editors are known as Wikipedians. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read reference work in history. It is consistently one of the 10 most popular websites ranked by Similarweb and formerly Alexa; Wikipedia was ranked the 5th most popular site in the world. It is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American non-profit organization funded mainly through donations.

Wikipedia was launched by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on January 15, 2001. Sanger coined its name as a blend of "wiki" and "encyclopedia". Wales was influenced by the "spontaneous order" ideas associated with Friedrich Hayek and the Austrian School of economics after being exposed to these ideas by the libertarian economist Mark Thornton. Initially available only in English, versions in other languages were quickly developed. Its combined editions comprise more than articles, attracting around 2billion unique device visits per month and more than 17 million edits per month (1.9edits per second) . In 2006, "Time" magazine stated that the policy of allowing anyone to edit had made Wikipedia the "biggest (and perhaps best) encyclopedia in the world".

Wikipedia has been praised for its enablement of the democratization of knowledge, extent of coverage, unique structure, culture, and reduced degree of commercial bias; but criticism for exhibiting systemic bias, particularly gender bias against women and alleged ideological bias. The reliability of Wikipedia was frequently criticized in the 2000s, but has improved over time, as Wikipedia has been generally praised in the late 2010s and early 2020s. The website's coverage of controversial topics such as American politics and major events like the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine has received substantial media attention. It has been censored by world governments, ranging from specific pages to the entire site. In April 2018, Facebook and YouTube announced that they would help users detect fake news by suggesting fact-checking links to related Wikipedia articles. Articles on breaking news are often accessed as a source of frequently updated information about those events.

Various collaborative online encyclopedias were attempted before the start of Wikipedia, but with limited success. Wikipedia began as a complementary project for Nupedia, a free online English-language encyclopedia project whose articles were written by experts and reviewed under a formal process. It was founded on March 9, 2000, under the ownership of Bomis, a web portal company. Its main figures were Bomis CEO Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, editor-in-chief for Nupedia and later Wikipedia. Nupedia was initially licensed under its own Nupedia Open Content License, but before Wikipedia was founded, Nupedia switched to the GNU Free Documentation License at the urging of Richard Stallman. Wales is credited with defining the goal of making a publicly editable encyclopedia, while Sanger is credited with the strategy of using a wiki to reach that goal. On January 10, 2001, Sanger proposed on the Nupedia mailing list to create a wiki as a "feeder" project for Nupedia.

The domains "wikipedia.com" (later redirecting to "wikipedia.org") and "wikipedia.org" were registered on January 12, 2001, and January 13, 2001, respectively, and Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001, as a single English-language edition at www.wikipedia.com, and announced by Sanger on the Nupedia mailing list. Its integral policy of "neutral point-of-view" was codified in its first few months. Otherwise, there were initially relatively few rules, and it operated independently of Nupedia. Bomis originally intended it as a business for profit.

Wikipedia gained early contributors from Nupedia, Slashdot postings, and web search engine indexing. Language editions were created beginning in March 2001, with a total of 161 in use by the end of 2004. Nupedia and Wikipedia coexisted until the former's servers were taken down permanently in 2003, and its text was incorporated into Wikipedia. The English Wikipedia passed the mark of two million articles on September 9, 2007, making it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled, surpassing the "Yongle Encyclopedia" made during the Ming Dynasty in 1408, which had held the record for almost 600 years.

Citing fears of commercial advertising and lack of control, users of the Spanish Wikipedia forked from Wikipedia to create Enciclopedia Libre in February 2002. Wales then announced that Wikipedia would not display advertisements, and changed Wikipedia's domain from "wikipedia.com" to "wikipedia.org".

Though the English Wikipedia reached three million articles in August 2009, the growth of the edition, in terms of the numbers of new articles and of editors, appears to have peaked around early 2007. Around 1,800 articles were added daily to the encyclopedia in 2006; by 2013 that average was roughly 800. A team at the Palo Alto Research Center attributed this slowing of growth to the project's increasing exclusivity and resistance to change. Others suggest that the growth is flattening naturally because articles that could be called "low-hanging fruit"—topics that clearly merit an article—have already been created and built up extensively.

In November 2009, a researcher at the Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid found that the English Wikipedia had lost 49,000 editors during the first three months of 2009; in comparison, it lost only 4,900 editors during the same period in 2008. "The Wall Street Journal" cited the array of rules applied to editing and disputes related to such content among the reasons for this trend. Wales disputed these claims in 2009, denying the decline and questioning the study's methodology. Two years later, in 2011, he acknowledged a slight decline, noting a decrease from "a little more than 36,000 writers" in June 2010 to 35,800 in June 2011. In the same interview, he also claimed the number of editors was "stable and sustainable". A 2013 "MIT Technology Review" article, "The Decline of Wikipedia", questioned this claim, revealing that since 2007, Wikipedia had lost a third of its volunteer editors, and that those remaining had focused increasingly on minutiae. In July 2012, "The Atlantic" reported that the number of administrators was also in decline. In the November 25, 2013, issue of "New York" magazine, Katherine Ward stated, "Wikipedia, the sixth-most-used website, is facing an internal crisis."

The number of active English Wikipedia editors has since remained steady after a long period of decline.

In January 2007, Wikipedia first became one of the ten most popular websites in the United States, according to Comscore Networks. With 42.9 million unique visitors, it was ranked #9, surpassing "The New York Times" (#10) and Apple (#11). This marked a significant increase over January 2006, when Wikipedia ranked 33rd, with around 18.3 million unique visitors. , it ranked 13th in popularity according to Alexa Internet. In 2014, it received eight billion page views every month. On February 9, 2014, "The New York Times" reported that Wikipedia had 18 billion page views and nearly 500 million unique visitors a month, "according to the ratings firm comScore". Loveland and Reagle argue that, in process, Wikipedia follows a long tradition of historical encyclopedias that have accumulated improvements piecemeal through "stigmergic accumulation".

On January 18, 2012, the English Wikipedia participated in a series of coordinated protests against two proposed laws in the United States Congress—the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA)—by blacking out its pages for 24 hours. More than 162 million people viewed the blackout explanation page that temporarily replaced its content.

On January 20, 2014, Subodh Varma reporting for "The Economic Times" indicated that not only had Wikipedia's growth stalled, it "had lost nearly ten percent of its page views last year. There was a decline of about two billion between December 2012 and December 2013. Its most popular versions are leading the slide: page-views of the English Wikipedia declined by twelve percent, those of German version slid by 17 percent and the Japanese version lost nine percent." Varma added, "While Wikipedia's managers think that this could be due to errors in counting, other experts feel that Google's Knowledge Graphs project launched last year may be gobbling up Wikipedia users." When contacted on this matter, Clay Shirky, associate professor at New York University and fellow at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society said that he suspected much of the page-view decline was due to Knowledge Graphs, stating, "If you can get your question answered from the search page, you don't need to click [any further]." By the end of December 2016, Wikipedia was ranked the fifth most popular website globally.

In January 2013, 274301 Wikipedia, an asteroid, was named after Wikipedia; in October 2014, Wikipedia was honored with the "Wikipedia Monument"; and, in July 2015, 106 of the 7,473 700-page volumes of Wikipedia became available as Print Wikipedia. In April 2019, an Israeli lunar lander, Beresheet, crash landed on the surface of the Moon carrying a copy of nearly all of the English Wikipedia engraved on thin nickel plates; experts say the plates likely survived the crash. In June 2019, scientists reported that all 16 GB of article text from the English Wikipedia had been encoded into synthetic DNA.

As of November 2022, 55,800 Wikipedia English articles have been cited 92,300 times in scholarly journals, from which cloud computing was the most cited page.

Unlike traditional encyclopedias, Wikipedia follows the procrastination principle regarding the security of its content.

Due to Wikipedia's increasing popularity, some editions, including the English version, have introduced editing restrictions for certain cases. For instance, on the English Wikipedia and some other language editions, only registered users may create a new article. On the English Wikipedia, among others, particularly controversial, sensitive or vandalism-prone pages have been protected to varying degrees. A frequently vandalized article can be "semi-protected" or "extended confirmed protected", meaning that only "autoconfirmed" or "extended confirmed" editors can modify it. A particularly contentious article may be locked so that only administrators can make changes. A 2021 article in the "Columbia Journalism Review" identified Wikipedia's page-protection policies as "perhaps the most important" means at its disposal to "regulate its market of ideas".

In certain cases, all editors are allowed to submit modifications, but review is required for some editors, depending on certain conditions. For example, the German Wikipedia maintains "stable versions" of articles which have passed certain reviews. Following protracted trials and community discussion, the English Wikipedia introduced the "pending changes" system in December 2012. Under this system, new and unregistered users' edits to certain controversial or vandalism-prone articles are reviewed by established users before they are published.

Although changes are not systematically reviewed, the software that powers Wikipedia provides tools allowing anyone to review changes made by others. Each article's History page links to each revision. On most articles, anyone can undo others' changes by clicking a link on the article's History page. Anyone can view the to articles, and anyone registered may maintain a "watchlist" of articles that interest them so they can be notified of changes. "New pages patrol" is a process where newly created articles are checked for obvious problems.

In 2003, economics Ph.D. student Andrea Ciffolilli argued that the low transaction costs of participating in a wiki created a catalyst for collaborative development, and that features such as allowing easy access to past versions of a page favored "creative construction" over "creative destruction".

Any change or edit that manipulates content in a way that deliberately compromises Wikipedia's integrity is considered vandalism. The most common and obvious types of vandalism include additions of obscenities and crude humor; it can also include advertising and other types of spam. Sometimes editors commit vandalism by removing content or entirely blanking a given page. Less common types of vandalism, such as the deliberate addition of plausible but false information, can be more difficult to detect. Vandals can introduce irrelevant formatting, modify page semantics such as the page's title or categorization, manipulate the article's underlying code, or use images disruptively.

Obvious vandalism is generally easy to remove from Wikipedia articles; the median time to detect and fix it is a few minutes. However, some vandalism takes much longer to detect and repair.

In the Seigenthaler biography incident, an anonymous editor introduced false information into the biography of American political figure John Seigenthaler in May 2005, falsely presenting him as a suspect in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It remained uncorrected for four months. Seigenthaler, the founding editorial director of "USA Today" and founder of the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, called Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and asked whether he had any way of knowing who contributed the misinformation. Wales said he did not, although the perpetrator was eventually traced. After the incident, Seigenthaler described Wikipedia as "a flawed and irresponsible research tool". The incident led to policy changes at Wikipedia for tightening up the verifiability of biographical articles of living people.

In 2010, Daniel Tosh encouraged viewers of his show, "Tosh.0", to visit the show's Wikipedia article and edit it at will. On a later episode, he commented on the edits to the article, most of them offensive, which had been made by the audience and had prompted the article to be locked from editing.

Wikipedians often have disputes regarding content, which may result in repeated competing changes to an article, known as "edit warring". It is widely seen as a resource-consuming scenario where no useful knowledge is added, and criticized as creating a competitive and conflict-based editing culture associated with traditional masculine gender roles.

Content in Wikipedia is subject to the laws (in particular, copyright laws) of the United States and of the US state of Virginia, where the majority of Wikipedia's servers are located. Beyond legal matters, the editorial principles of Wikipedia are embodied in the "Five pillars" and in numerous policies and guidelines intended to appropriately shape content. Even these rules are stored in wiki form, and Wikipedia editors write and revise the website's policies and guidelines. Editors can by deleting or modifying non-compliant material. Originally, rules on the non-English editions of Wikipedia were based on a translation of the rules for the English Wikipedia. They have since diverged to some extent.

According to the rules on the English Wikipedia, each entry in Wikipedia must be about a topic that is encyclopedic and is not a dictionary entry or dictionary-style. A topic should also meet Wikipedia's standards of "notability", which generally means that the topic must have been covered in mainstream media or major academic journal sources that are independent of the article's subject. Further, Wikipedia intends to convey only knowledge that is already established and recognized. It must not present original research. A claim that is likely to be challenged requires a reference to a reliable source, as do all quotations. Among Wikipedia editors, this is often phrased as "verifiability, not truth" to express the idea that the readers, not the encyclopedia, are ultimately responsible for checking the truthfulness of the articles and making their own interpretations. This can at times lead to the removal of information that, though valid, is not properly sourced. Finally, Wikipedia must not take sides.

Wikipedia's initial anarchy integrated democratic and hierarchical elements over time. An article is not considered to be owned by its creator or any other editor, nor by the subject of the article.

Editors in good standing in the community can request extra , granting them the technical ability to perform certain special actions. In particular, editors can choose to run for "adminship", which includes the ability to delete pages or prevent them from being changed in cases of severe vandalism or editorial disputes. Administrators are not supposed to enjoy any special privilege in decision-making; instead, their powers are mostly limited to making edits that have project-wide effects and thus are disallowed to ordinary editors, and to implement restrictions intended to prevent disruptive editors from making unproductive edits.

By 2012, fewer editors were becoming administrators compared to Wikipedia's earlier years, in part because the process of vetting potential administrators had become more rigorous. In 2022, there was a particularly contentious request for adminship over the candidate's anti-Trump views; ultimately, they were granted adminship.

Over time, Wikipedia has developed a semiformal dispute resolution process. To determine community consensus, editors can raise issues at appropriate community forums, seek outside input through third opinion requests, or initiate a more general community discussion known as a "request for comment".

Wikipedia encourages local resolutions of conflicts, which Jemielniak argues is quite unique in organization studies, though there has been some recent interest in consensus building in the field. Joseph Reagle and Sue Gardner argue that the approaches to consensus building are similar to those used by Quakers. A difference from Quaker meetings is the absence of a facilitator in the presence of disagreement, a role played by the clerk in Quaker meetings.

The Arbitration Committee presides over the ultimate dispute resolution process. Although disputes usually arise from a disagreement between two opposing views on how an article should read, the Arbitration Committee explicitly refuses to directly rule on the specific view that should be adopted. Statistical analyses suggest that the committee ignores the content of disputes and rather focuses on the way disputes are conducted, functioning not so much to resolve disputes and make peace between conflicting editors, but to weed out problematic editors while allowing potentially productive editors back in to participate. Therefore, the committee does not dictate the content of articles, although it sometimes condemns content changes when it deems the new content violates Wikipedia policies (for example, if the new content is considered biased). Its remedies include cautions and probations (used in 63% of cases) and banning editors from articles (43%), subject matters (23%), or Wikipedia (16%). Complete bans from Wikipedia are generally limited to instances of impersonation and anti-social behavior. When conduct is not impersonation or anti-social, but rather anti-consensus or in violation of editing policies, remedies tend to be limited to warnings.

Each article and each user of Wikipedia has an associated and dedicated "talk" page. These form the primary communication channel for editors to discuss, coordinate and debate.

Wikipedia's community has been described as cultlike, although not always with entirely negative connotations. Its preference for cohesiveness, even if it requires compromise that includes disregard of credentials, has been referred to as "anti-elitism".

Wikipedians sometimes award one another "virtual barnstars" for good work. These personalized tokens of appreciation reveal a wide range of valued work extending far beyond simple editing to include social support, administrative actions, and types of articulation work.

Wikipedia does not require that its editors and contributors provide identification. As Wikipedia grew, "Who writes Wikipedia?" became one of the questions frequently asked there. Jimmy Wales once argued that only "a community ... a dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers" makes the bulk of contributions to Wikipedia and that the project is therefore "much like any traditional organization". In 2008, a "Slate" magazine article reported that: "According to researchers in Palo Alto, one percent of Wikipedia users are responsible for about half of the site's edits." This method of evaluating contributions was later disputed by Aaron Swartz, who noted that several articles he sampled had large portions of their content (measured by number of characters) contributed by users with low edit counts.

The English Wikipedia has articles, registered editors, and active editors. An editor is considered active if they have made one or more edits in the past 30 days.

Editors who fail to comply with Wikipedia cultural rituals, such as signing talk page comments, may implicitly signal that they are Wikipedia outsiders, increasing the odds that Wikipedia insiders may target or discount their contributions. Becoming a Wikipedia insider involves non-trivial costs: the contributor is expected to learn Wikipedia-specific technological codes, submit to a sometimes convoluted dispute resolution process, and learn a "baffling culture rich with in-jokes and insider references". Editors who do not log in are in some sense second-class citizens on Wikipedia, as "participants are accredited by members of the wiki community, who have a vested interest in preserving the quality of the work product, on the basis of their ongoing participation", but the contribution histories of anonymous unregistered editors recognized only by their IP addresses cannot be attributed to a particular editor with certainty.

A 2007 study by researchers from Dartmouth College found that "anonymous and infrequent contributors to Wikipedia ... are as reliable a source of knowledge as those contributors who register with the site". Jimmy Wales stated in 2009 that "[I]t turns out over 50% of all the edits are done by just 0.7% of the users... 524 people... And in fact, the most active 2%, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4% of all the edits." However, "Business Insider" editor and journalist Henry Blodget showed in 2009 that in a random sample of articles, most Wikipedia content (measured by the amount of contributed text that survives to the latest sampled edit) is created by "outsiders", while most editing and formatting is done by "insiders".

A 2008 study found that Wikipedians were less agreeable, open, and conscientious than others, although a later commentary pointed out serious flaws, including that the data showed higher openness and that the differences with the control group and the samples were small. According to a 2009 study, there is "evidence of growing resistance from the Wikipedia community to new content".

Several studies have shown that most Wikipedia contributors are male. Notably, the results of a Wikimedia Foundation survey in 2008 showed that only 13 percent of Wikipedia editors were female. Because of this, universities throughout the United States tried to encourage women to become Wikipedia contributors. Similarly, many of these universities, including Yale and Brown, gave college credit to students who create or edit an article relating to women in science or technology. Andrew Lih, a professor and scientist, wrote in "The New York Times" that the reason he thought the number of male contributors outnumbered the number of females so greatly was because identifying as a woman may expose oneself to "ugly, intimidating behavior". Data has shown that Africans are underrepresented among Wikipedia editors.

There are currently language editions of Wikipedia (also called "language versions", or simply "Wikipedias"). As of 2022, the six largest, in order of article count, are the , , , , , and Wikipedias. The and -largest Wikipedias owe their position to the article-creating bot Lsjbot, which had created about half the articles on the Swedish Wikipedia, and most of the articles in the Cebuano and Waray Wikipedias. The latter are both languages of the Philippines.

In addition to the top six, twelve other Wikipedias have more than a million articles each (, , , , , , , , , , and ), seven more have over 500,000 articles (, , , , , and ), 44 more have over 100,000, and 82 more have over 10,000. The largest, the English Wikipedia, has over 0.1*floor(/100000) million articles. the English Wikipedia receives 48% of Wikipedia's cumulative traffic, with the remaining split among the other languages. The top 10 editions represent approximately 85% of the total traffic.

Since Wikipedia is based on the Web and therefore worldwide, contributors to the same language edition may use different dialects or may come from different countries (as is the case for the English edition). These differences may lead to some conflicts over spelling differences (e.g. "colour" versus "color") or points of view.

Though the various language editions are held to global policies such as "neutral point of view", they diverge on some points of policy and practice, most notably on whether images that are not licensed freely may be used under a claim of fair use.

Jimmy Wales has described Wikipedia as "an effort to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language". Though each language edition functions more or less independently, some efforts are made to supervise them all. They are coordinated in part by Meta-Wiki, the Wikimedia Foundation's wiki devoted to maintaining all its projects (Wikipedia and others). For instance, Meta-Wiki provides important statistics on all language editions of Wikipedia, and it maintains a list of articles every Wikipedia should have. The list concerns basic content by subject: biography, history, geography, society, culture, science, technology, and mathematics. It is not rare for articles strongly related to a particular language not to have counterparts in another edition. For example, articles about small towns in the United States might be available only in English, even when they meet the notability criteria of other language Wikipedia projects.

Translated articles represent only a small portion of articles in most editions, in part because those editions do not allow fully automated translation of articles. Articles available in more than one language may offer "interwiki links", which link to the counterpart articles in other editions.

A study published by "PLOS One" in 2012 also estimated the share of contributions to different editions of Wikipedia from different regions of the world. It reported that the proportion of the edits made from North America was 51% for the English Wikipedia, and 25% for the simple English Wikipedia.

On March 1, 2014, "The Economist", in an article titled "The Future of Wikipedia", cited a trend analysis concerning data published by the Wikimedia Foundation stating that "[t]he number of editors for the English-language version has fallen by a third in seven years." The attrition rate for active editors in English Wikipedia was cited by "The Economist" as substantially in contrast to statistics for Wikipedia in other languages (non-English Wikipedia). "The Economist" reported that the number of contributors with an average of five or more edits per month was relatively constant since 2008 for Wikipedia in other languages at approximately 42,000 editors within narrow seasonal variances of about 2,000 editors up or down. The number of active editors in English Wikipedia, by sharp comparison, was cited as peaking in 2007 at approximately 50,000 and dropping to 30,000 by the start of 2014.

In contrast, the trend analysis for Wikipedia in other languages (non-English Wikipedia) shows success in retaining active editors on a renewable and sustained basis, with their numbers remaining relatively constant at approximately 42,000. No comment was made concerning which of the differentiated edit policy standards from Wikipedia in other languages (non-English Wikipedia) would provide a possible alternative to English Wikipedia for effectively ameliorating substantial editor attrition rates on the English-language Wikipedia.

Various Wikipedians have criticized Wikipedia's large and growing regulation, which includes more than fifty policies and nearly 150,000 words

Critics have stated that Wikipedia exhibits systemic bias. In 2010, columnist and journalist Edwin Black described Wikipedia as being a mixture of "truth, half-truth, and some falsehoods". Articles in "The Chronicle of Higher Education" and "The Journal of Academic Librarianship" have criticized Wikipedia's "Undue Weight" policy, concluding that the fact that Wikipedia explicitly is not designed to provide correct information about a subject, but rather focus on all the major viewpoints on the subject, give less attention to minor ones, and creates omissions that can lead to false beliefs based on incomplete information.

Journalists Oliver Kamm and Edwin Black alleged (in 2010 and 2011 respectively) that articles are dominated by the loudest and most persistent voices, usually by a group with an "ax to grind" on the topic. A 2008 article in "Education Next" Journal concluded that as a resource about controversial topics, Wikipedia is subject to manipulation and spin.

In 2020, Omer Benjakob and Stephen Harrison noted that "Media coverage of Wikipedia has radically shifted over the past two decades: once cast as an intellectual frivolity, it is now lauded as the 'last bastion of shared reality' online."

In 2022, libertarian John Stossel opined that Wikipedia, a site he financially supported at one time, appears to have gradually taken a significant turn in bias to the political left, specifically on political topics.

In 2006, the "Wikipedia Watch" criticism website listed dozens of examples of plagiarism in the English Wikipedia.

Articles for traditional encyclopedias such as "Encyclopædia Britannica" are written by experts, lending such encyclopedias a reputation for accuracy. However, a peer review in 2005 of forty-two scientific entries on both Wikipedia and "Encyclopædia Britannica" by the science journal "Nature" found few differences in accuracy, and concluded that "the average science entry in Wikipedia contained around four inaccuracies; "Britannica", about three." Joseph Reagle suggested that while the study reflects "a topical strength of Wikipedia contributors" in science articles, "Wikipedia may not have fared so well using a random sampling of articles or on humanities subjects." Others raised similar critiques. The findings by "Nature" were disputed by "Encyclopædia Britannica", and in response, "Nature" gave a rebuttal of the points raised by "Britannica". In addition to the point-for-point disagreement between these two parties, others have examined the sample size and selection method used in the "Nature" effort, and suggested a "flawed study design" (in "Nature"s manual selection of articles, in part or in whole, for comparison), absence of statistical analysis (e.g., of reported confidence intervals), and a lack of study "statistical power" (i.e., owing to small sample size, 42 or 4× 10 articles compared, vs >10 and >10 set sizes for "Britannica" and the English Wikipedia, respectively).

As a consequence of the open structure, Wikipedia "makes no guarantee of validity" of its content, since no one is ultimately responsible for any claims appearing in it. Concerns have been raised by "PC World" in 2009 regarding the lack of accountability that results from users' anonymity, the insertion of false information, vandalism, and similar problems.

Economist Tyler Cowen wrote: "If I had to guess whether Wikipedia or the median refereed journal article on economics was more likely to be true after a not so long think I would opt for Wikipedia." He comments that some traditional sources of non-fiction suffer from systemic biases, and novel results, in his opinion, are over-reported in journal articles as well as relevant information being omitted from news reports. However, he also cautions that errors are frequently found on Internet sites and that academics and experts must be vigilant in correcting them. Amy Bruckman has argued that, due to the number of reviewers, "the content of a popular Wikipedia page is actually the most reliable form of information ever created".

Critics argue that Wikipedia's open nature and a lack of proper sources for most of the information makes it unreliable. Some commentators suggest that Wikipedia may be reliable, but that the reliability of any given article is not clear. Editors of traditional reference works such as the "Encyclopædia Britannica" have questioned the project's utility and status as an encyclopedia. Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has claimed that Wikipedia has largely avoided the problem of "fake news" because the Wikipedia community regularly debates the quality of sources in articles.

Wikipedia's open structure inherently makes it an easy target for Internet trolls, spammers, and various forms of paid advocacy seen as counterproductive to the maintenance of a neutral and verifiable online encyclopedia.

In response to paid advocacy editing and undisclosed editing issues, Wikipedia was reported in an article in "The Wall Street Journal" to have strengthened its rules and laws against undisclosed editing. The article stated that: "Beginning Monday [from the date of the article, June 16, 2014], changes in Wikipedia's terms of use will require anyone paid to edit articles to disclose that arrangement. Katherine Maher, the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation's chief communications officer, said the changes address a sentiment among volunteer editors that, 'we're not an advertising service; we're an encyclopedia. These issues, among others, had been parodied since the first decade of Wikipedia, notably by Stephen Colbert on "The Colbert Report".

"Legal Research in a Nutshell" (2011), cites Wikipedia as a "general source" that "can be a real boon" in "coming up to speed in the law governing a situation" and, "while not authoritative, can provide basic facts as well as leads to more in-depth resources".

Most university lecturers discourage students from citing any encyclopedia in academic work, preferring primary sources; some specifically prohibit Wikipedia citations. Wales stresses that encyclopedias of any type are not usually appropriate to use as citable sources, and should not be relied upon as authoritative. Wales once (2006 or earlier) said he receives about ten emails weekly from students saying they got failing grades on papers because they cited Wikipedia; he told the students they got what they deserved. "For God's sake, you're in college; don't cite the encyclopedia", he said.

In February 2007, an article in "The Harvard Crimson" newspaper reported that a few of the professors at Harvard University were including Wikipedia articles in their syllabi, although without realizing the articles might change. In June 2007, former president of the American Library Association Michael Gorman condemned Wikipedia, along with Google, stating that academics who endorse the use of Wikipedia are "the intellectual equivalent of a dietitian who recommends a steady diet of Big Macs with everything".

In contrast, academic writing in Wikipedia has evolved in recent years and has been found to increase student interest, personal connection to the product, creativity in material processing, and international collaboration in the learning process.