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One floor below a turtle rescue facility in Manhattan, about 30 people gathered last week at an event space to watch the Spain-Belgium World Cup quarterfinal.

This was not a crowd locked in on the game, holding its breath with each tackle or shot on goal. Instead, people sat in front of laptops, one eye on the TV, the other on their screens. The game mattered, but they were there to build on the ever-growing, vigorously sourced and diligently fact-checked public repository of knowledge on the Internet.

They were editing Wikipedia.

The website averages about 508 million total views per day on its more than 65.9 million (and counting) pages. Its sports pages alone feel recursive, endless, updated in near-real time moments after a game-winning goal or playoff-clinching home run.

There are no AI bots scraping the guts of the Internet for robotic writing of questionable accuracy. Behind the millions of pages are masses of sports fans who spend dozens of unpaid hours each week meticulously, obsessively editing.

Those editors include sports fans like Kunal Mehta, 31, who began editing Wikipedia in 2006, when he was in middle school.

“It was addicting,” he said during the combination World Cup/Wikipedia editing watch party.

Mehta got his start by updating scores and creating athlete pages for the NHL’s San Jose Sharks, his home team. Now he works as a software engineer for the Freedom of the Press Foundation and edits in his spare time, often about sports. He sees Wikipedia as the “second draft” of history.

“Through all of human history, people have always tried to collect all knowledge together, that has just always been a task, like the Library of Alexandria,” Mehta said. “Wikipedia has shown that you can just do it. You just provide a blank slate for people to do it, and people will come together and work at it.”

Unlike the original in ancient Egypt, the digital Library of Alexandria includes the World Cup. As editors worked on pages during the Spain-Belgium game, many were contributing to Wiki Loves Fútbol, a Wikipedia project run during the tournament by a group of editors aimed at finding the site’s blind spots and improving Wikipedia’s knowledge base on Latino football culture.

“The big names all have information, like Messi and folks, but there should be the same level of coverage of all the players on these teams, and especially teams that aren’t in the top 10,” said Pacita Rudder, 37, executive director of Wikimedia NYC, a nonprofit Wikipedia chapter hosting the Wiki Loves Fútbol event.

The project takes inspiration from Panini sticker albums, awarding stamps to editors who fulfill requirements like adding high-quality citations and hyperlinks, translating pages between English and Spanish, expanding articles and uploading photos that document the tournament’s fan culture. Wikipedia is largely decentralized and self-governed, but its contributors mustadhere to a set of standards — no copyright infringement, only verified sources, only notable topics and no AI.

The stakes are real — as is the platform’s potential to spread false information. After French referee Francois Letexier’s controversial call to disallow one of Egypt’s goals against Argentina, an editor added unfounded information to Letexier’s page that he was Jewish, which spread for hours and was amplified by Grok, X’s AI, before it was taken down and the editor banned, according to reporting by the Forward.

Episodes such as the one involving Letexier are what bring editors like those contributing to the Wiki Loves Fútbol event together. They are vigilant in guarding against this type of editing yet driven to grow the site’s knowledge base on all things soccer.

The World Cup project has a list of target articles editors want improved — like those on the Mexico national football team, the FIFA Peace Prize, eligibility rules, the city of Houston — and gift card prizes for top contributors. As the World Cup final nears, dozens have contributed to the project — and that doesn’t include the masses of editors in waiting updating World Cup pages throughout the tournament, regardless of any organized effort.

“People are getting more and more of their information from AI, and then knowing that AI is pulling their information from Wikipedia, it’s even more important for us as Wikipedia to be as accurate as possible and be as representative as possible,” Rudder said. “There’s just a lot more pressure on Wikipedia to be as perfect as possible.”

The effort is truly global.In São Paulo, Danilo Mendonça, 26, often swims at his local pool. Lap by lap, he thinks about Wikipedia pages that need work.

When he passes a rare football flag hanging outside a house in his city, Mendonça uploads it to Wikimedia Commons, a free, public access media library, for use on Wikipedia pages. During the group stage, Mendonça watched the Netherlands beat Sweden over beers with his coworkers, and then went home and uploaded photos of the soccer bookstore-bar. Mendonça estimates that he spends about 40 hours per week editing.

A history teacher by day, Mendonça has worked on hundreds of football pages in Portuguese and English, including those for an Italian football doctor, a Brazilian sports journalist, a Colombian World Cup referee and a longtime Brazilian team masseur. His browser windows are full of tabs and tabs of digital archives, news websites and many, many Wikipedia pages.

“It’s my video game,” Mendonça said.

In a soccer-obsessed country like Brazil, the competition is strong for editing popular pages like Messi or Mendonça’s home club, São Paulo FC. During a game, masses of editors sit ready with drafts, their fingers on the mouse, ready to update. Those types of updates are first-come, first-served, the back end of pages often a madhouse as editors argue over facts and rush to update.

Mendonça leaves most of that battle to others and focuses on lesser-known players, translating between English and Portuguese.

“It’s very competitive in Brazil,” Mendonça said. “Other teams, I win the race. Brazil, it’s very competitive. It’s very fun.”

Sometimes, he strikes big. In June, Mendonça translated into Portuguese the page for Vozinha, the Cape Verdean goalie who shocked the world by holding Spain to a 0-0 draw.

“It is a very important event for Brazil and for the world,” Mendonça said about the World Cup. “I feel very grateful to be able to help preserve history (as a historian), disseminate high-quality information and share a little more — especially about Brazil — with the world.”

Six thousand miles north in Southern California, Jordan Trujillo, 26, spends hours sorting through web search results and newspaper archives. He reads through each result chronologically and uses the information to create and edit more than 500 Wikipedia pages.

He stays out of the live editing fray, focusing on smaller pages. During the World Cup, he has worked on editing pages for players like Mexico’s Brian Gutiérrez and Curaçao’s Deveron Fonville and Ar’jany Martha — athletes competing for World Cup teams that differ from their birth country.

Trujillo relates to these cross-border players, those who might not fluently speak the language of the country they’re representing in the World Cup, or who faced media criticism for not playing for one country or another, or experienced online hate as an immigrant. In a World Cup colored by the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration, working on those pages holds extra relevance for Trujillo.

“I grew up right on the border, so I went to Tijuana to see family when I was little,” said Trujillo, whose parents immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico. “Almost every month we’d go to Tijuana, for the doctor, for the dentist, for the store. We had kids who would cross the border every day to go to my high school. So it’s an everyday part of life when you live here on the border, and now that the world has grown so much, it extends way beyond that.”

Editing pages at the intersection of sports and politics, Trujillo sees Wikipedia’s public access at the forefront of the fight against media suppression and censorship. The website faces other difficult challenges. The rise of AI has forced editors to beat back a flood of AI-written pages. Somewhat conversely, it has also made them much more aware of the importance of making sure the information feeding these chatbot summaries is detailed and accurate. The stakes of misinformation have never been higher.

“It’s a huge, huge, huge problem that we’re still figuring out how to deal with,” Trujillo said.

But during the World Cup, he has noticed an increase in collaboration on pages, too. Someone starts a page for a little-known player, and over days, weeks, years, dozens of editors often known only to each other by their username fill it out with meticulously cited information, weeding out errors and false information. With each match, each breakout athlete, each controversy and cultural moment and surprise run, the resource gets stronger.

“I’d say it’s the greatest collection of human knowledge,” Trujillo said, “and it only grows every day.”