When Wikipedia launched 25 years ago today, I heard about it almost immediately, because the Internet was small back then, and I thought “Well… good luck to those guys.” Because there had been online encyclopedias before Wikipedia, and anybody who really cared about this stuff would, of course, buy Microsoft Encarta on CD-ROM, right? I’d been fascinated by the technology of wikis for a good while at that point, but was still not convinced about whether they could be deployed at such a large scale.

So, once Wikipedia got a little bit of traction, and I met Jimmy Wales the next year, I remember telling him (with all the arrogance that only a dude that age can bring to such an obvious point) “well, the hard part is going to be getting all the people to contribute”. As you may be aware, Jimmy, and a broad worldwide community of volunteers, did pretty well with the hard part.

Wikipedia has, of course, become vital to the world’s information ecosystem. Which is why everyone needs to be aware of the fact that it is currently under existential threat from those who see any reliable source of truth as an attack on their power. The same authoritarians in power who are trying to purchase every media outlet and social network where ordinary people might have a chance to share accurate information about their crimes or human rights violations are deeply threatened about a platform that they can’t control and can’t own.

Perhaps the greatest compliment to Wikipedia at 25 years old is the fact that, if the fascists can’t buy it, then they’re going to try to kill it.

The Building Block

What I couldn’t foresee in the early days, when so many were desperate to make sure that Wikipedia wasn’t treated as a credible source — there were so many panicked conversations about how to keep kids from citing the site in their school papers — was how the site would become infrastructure for so much of the commercial internet.

The first hint was when Google introduced their “Knowledge Panel”, the little box of info next to their search results that tried to explain what you were looking for, without you even having to click through to a website. For Google, this had a huge economic value, because it kept you on their search results page where all their ad links lived. The vast majority of the Knowledge Panel content for many major topics was basically just Wikipedia content, summarized and wrapped up in a nice little box. Here was the most valuable company of the new era of the Internet, and one of their signature experiences relied on the strength of the Wikipedia community’s work.

This was, of course, complemented by the fact that Wikipedia would also organically show up right near the top of so many search results just based on the strength of the content that the community was cranking out at a remarkable pace. Though it probably made Google bristle a little bit that those damn Wikipedia pages didn’t have any Google ads on them, and didn’t have any of Google’s tracking code on them, so they couldn’t surveil what you do when you were clicking around on the site, making it impossible for them to spy on you and improve the targeting of their advertising to you.

The same pattern played out later for the other major platforms; Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa both default to using Wikipedia data to answer common questions. During the few years when Facebook pretended to care about misinformation, they would show summaries of Wikipedia information in the news feed to help users fact-check misinformation that was being shared.

Unsurprisingly, a lot of the time when the big companies would try to use Wikipedia as the water to put out the fires that they’d started, they didn’t even bother to let the organization know before they started doing so, burdening the non-profit with the cost and complexity of handling their millions of users and billions of requests, without sharing any of their trillions of dollars. (At least until there was public uproar over the practice.) Eventually, Wikimedia Foundation (the organization that runs Wikipedia) made a way for companies to license their data and actually support the community instead of just extracting from the community without compensation.

The culture war comes for Wikipedia

Things had reached a bit of equilibrium for a few years, even as the larger media ecosystem started to crumble, because the world could see after a few decades that Wikipedia had become a vital and valuable foundation to the global knowledge ecology. It’s almost impossible to imagine how the modern internet would function without it.

But as the global fascist movement has risen in recent years, one of their first priorities, as in all previous such movements, has been undermining any sources of truth that can challenge their control over information and public sentiment. In the U.S., this has manifested from the top-down with the richest tycoons in the country, including Elon Musk, stoking sentiment against Wikipedia with vague innuendo and baseless attacks against the site. This is also why Musk has funded the creation of alternatives like Grokipedia, designed to undermine the centrality and success of Wikipedia. From the bottom-up, there have been individual bad actors who have attempted to infiltrate the ranks of editors on the site, or worked to deface articles, often working slowly or across broad swaths of content in order to attempt to avoid detection.

All of this has been carefully coordinated; as noted in well-documented pieces like the Verge’s excellent coverage of the story, the attack on Wikipedia is a campaign that has been led by voices like Christopher Rufo, who helped devise campaigns like the concerted effort to demonize trans kids as a cultural scapegoat, and the intentional targeting of Ivy League presidents as part of the war on DEI. The undermining of Wikipedia hasn’t yet gotten the same traction, but they also haven’t yet put the same time and resources into the fight.

There’s been such a constant stream of vitriol directed at Wikipedia and its editors and leadership that, when I heard about a gunman storming the stage at the recent gathering of Wikipedia editors, I had assumed it was someone who had been incited by the baseless attacks from the extremists. (It turned out to have been someone who was disturbed on his own, which he said was tied to the editorial policies of the site.) But I would expect it’s only a matter of time until the attacks on Wikipedia’s staff and volunteers take on a far more serious tone much of the time — and it’s not as if this is an organization that has a massive security budget like the trillion-dollar tech companies.

The temperature keeps rising, and there isn’t yet sufficient awareness amongst good actors to protect the Wikipedia community and to guard its larger place in society.

Enter the AI era

Against this constant backdrop of increasing political escalation, there’s also been the astronomical ramp-up in demand for Wikipedia content from AI platforms. The very first source of data for many teams when training a new LLM system is Wikipedia, and the vast majority of the time, they gather that data not by paying to license the content, but by “scraping” it from the site — which uses both more technical resources and precludes the possibility of establishing any consensual paid relationship with the site.

A way to think about it is that, for the AI world, they’re music fans trading Wikipedia like it’s MP3s on Napster, and conveniently ignoring the fact there’s an Apple Music or Spotify offering a legitimate way to get that same data while supporting the artist. Hopefully the “Taylor’s Version” generation can see Wikipedia as being at least as worthy of supporting as a billionaire like Taylor Swift is.

But as people start going to their AI apps first, or chatting with bots instead of doing Google searches, they don’t see those Knowledge Panels anymore, and they don’t click through to Wikipedia anymore. At a surface level, this hurts traffic to the site, but at a deeper level, this hurts the flow of new contributors to the site. Interestingly, though I’ve been linking to critiques of Wikipedia on my site for at least twenty years, for most of the last few decades, my biggest criticism of Wikipedia has long been the lack of inclusion amongst its base of editorial volunteers. But this is, at least, a shortcoming that both the Wikimedia Foundation and the community itself readily acknowledge and have been working diligently on.

That lack of diversity in editors as a problem will pale in comparison to the challenge presented if people stop coming to the front door entirely because they’re too busy talking to their AI bots. They may not even know what parts of the answers they’re getting from AI are due to the bot having slurped up the content from Wikipedia. Worse, they’ll have been so used to constantly encountering hallucinations that the idea of joining a community that’s constantly trying to improve the accuracy of information will seem quaint, or even absurd, in a world where everything is wrong and made up all the time.

This means that it’s in the best interests of the AI platforms to not only pay to sustain Wikipedia and its community so that there’s a continuous source of new, accurate information over time, but that it’s also in their interest to keep teaching their community about the value of such a resource. The very fact that people are so desperate to chat with a bot shows how hungry they are for connection, and just imagine how excited they’d be to connect with the actual humans of the Wikipedia community!

We can still build

It’s easy to forget how radical Wikipedia was at its start. For the majority of people on the Internet, Wikipedia is just something that’s been omnipresent right from the start. But, as someone who got to watch it rise, take it from me: this was a thing that lots of regular people built together. And it was explicitly done as a collaboration meant to show the spirit of what the Internet is really about.

Take a look at its history. Think about what it means that there is no advertising, and there never has been. It doesn’t track your activity. You can edit the site without even logging in. If you make an account, you don’t have to use your real name if you’d like to stay anonymous. When I wrote about being the creator of an entirely new page on Wikipedia, it felt like magic, and it still does! You can be the person that births something onto the Internet that feels like it becomes a permanent part of the historical record, and then others around the world will help make it better, forever.

The site is still amongst the most popular sites on the web, bigger than almost every commercial website or app that has ever existed. There’s never been a single ad promoting it. It has unlocked trillions of dollars in value for the business world, and unmeasurable educational value for multiple generations of children. Did you know that for many, many topics, you can change your language from English to Simple English and get an easier-to-understand version of an article that can often help explain a concept in much more approachable terms? Wikipedia has a travel guide! A dictionary! A collection of textbooks and cookbooks! Here are all the species! It’s unimaginably deep.

Whenever I worry about where the Internet is headed, I remember that this example of the collective generosity and goodness of people still exists. There are so many folks just working away, every day, to make something good and valuable for strangers out there, simply from the goodness of their hearts. They have no way of ever knowing who they’ve helped. But they believe in the simple power of doing a little bit of good using some of the most basic technologies of the internet. Twenty-five years later, all of the evidence has shown that they really have changed the world.

If you are able, today is a very good day to support the Wikimedia Foundation.