Existential threats to Wikipedia seem greater than ever

In 2010, The FBI sent Wikipedia a letter that would be frightening for any organization to receive.

The letter demanded that the free online encyclopedia remove the FBI logo from any entries about the agency, claiming that reproducing the logo is illegal and punishable by fines, imprisonment “or both.” Instead of backing down, a lawyer for the Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts Wikipedia, responded with a sharp rebuttal explaining how the FBI’s interpretation of the relevant law was incorrect and saying that Wikipedia was “prepared to defend our view in court.” It worked, as the FBI dropped it.

But the dispute presupposed a society based on the rule of law, in which a government body heard legal arguments in good faith rather than overriding them with authority. Fast forward to the present day, and things look very different. Elon Musk called the site “Wokepedia” and claimed it was controlled by far-left activists. Last fall, Tucker Carlson devoted a 90-minute podcast to attacking Wikipedia as “completely dishonest and completely controlled on important questions.” After Republican congressmen James Comer and Nancy Mace accused Wikipedia of “manipulating information” in a congressional investigation, the organization responded with a respectful explanation of how Wikipedia operates, taking a more conciliatory approach rather than arguing about government overreach. The practical shift reflects a world in which the Trump administration chooses winners and losers on the basis of political preference.

As the world’s most popular free online encyclopedia turns 25 years old today, it faces a host of challenges. Right-wing political forces have attacked Wikipedia for its alleged liberal bias, and the conservative Heritage Foundation went so far as to say it would “identify and target” the site’s volunteer editors. AI bots have been relentlessly collecting Wikipedia information, straining the site’s servers. These problems are further exacerbated by the struggle to replenish the project’s volunteer community, the so-called Wikipedia graying.

Beneath these threats lies an alarming sense that the culture has drifted away from Wikipedia’s founding ideals. These notions of impartiality, valuing sources, volunteering for public benefit, and supporting a non-commercial online project seem at best old-fashioned and at worst useless in today’s overtly partisan, lawless, anti-humanitarian, “greed is good” era.

However, the possibility remains that Wikipedia’s most influential days lie in its future, assuming it recasts itself within the crucible.

Bernadette Meehan, the Wikimedia Foundation’s new CEO, whose résumé includes stints as a foreign service officer and ambassador, is well-prepared to confront such attacks, according to chief communications officer Anusha Alikhan. “I think diplomacy and negotiation skills are things that will fit well in the current environment,” she told WIRED. But even the best diplomats may face an existing list of challenges: the United Kingdom has proposed age-rating Wikipedia under its Internet Safety Act. In Saudi Arabia, Wikipedia editors were imprisoned after documenting human rights violations in the country on the platform. The Great Firewall continues to block every copy of the site in mainland China.

Perhaps more telling is that even within the Wikipedia community, long-time contributors worry about its diminishing importance. In a widely circulated article, veteran editor Christopher Henner said he feared Wikipedia would increasingly become a “temple” filled with elderly volunteers, so complacent about work that no one looks at it anymore.

Beyond these ongoing censorship battles, Wikipedia is also struggling to explain why human labor remains relevant in the age of artificial intelligence. Although almost every major AI system trains on freely licensed Wikipedia content, the tech industry’s message since 2022 has been that human-powered knowledge production is becoming irrelevant to AI. However, this is not true. While we’re still in the early days of the AI ​​revolution, it currently appears that AI applications perform best when trained on human-written and vetted information, the kind that comes from human-centered editing processes like Wikipedia. When an AI system repeatedly trains on artificial intelligence-generated data, it is likely to suffer model breakdown.