(Roughly) Daily

Since it was launched in 2001, Wikipedia has gone from curiosity to “bane of teachers” to cherished resource– the largest and most-read reference work in history, consistently among the top ten websites visited globally. Free and run by a network of volunteers (it’s hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American nonprofit funded mainly by donations from readers), it has always been an anomaly– and has always been under some kind of threat.

Tobias Carroll of Inside Hook interviewed author, tech lawyer, and long-time student of Wikipedia Stephen Harrison on what the future might hold– is a tipping point coming?…

Has there ever been a time when Wikipedia wasn’t controversial? The long-running online encyclopedia has sparked plenty of debates since its founding in 2001, and has at various points been the subject of critiques from all across the political spectrum. It’s also an invaluable resource to millions around the world, host to a wealth of knowledge about everything from military battles to defunct sports teams.

Over the years, Stephen Harrison has written extensively about Wikipedia, including in a series of articles at Slate and his newsletter Source Notes. He’s also the author of a recent thriller, The Editors, about the international intrigue surrounding a Wikipedia-like website in the months leading up to the 2020 pandemic.

Harrison spoke with InsideHook about Wikipedia’s shifting place in internet culture, the many threats to it (including those from Elon Musk) and where he sees the encyclopedia going in the years to come…

… [Carroll] We’re now seeing people like Elon Musk targeting Wikipedia with existential criticism. What do you see as the biggest threats to Wikipedia — do you think it’s AI? Is it powerful people looking to make radical changes to how it works?

[Harrison] To some extent, it’s all of the above. I think it’s always under threat; even at the beginning they wondered if it would last and if people would keep contributing to it. There have been alternatives to it, like Conservapedia and RationalWiki and things like that, but they haven’t gotten the same traction. It’s a question of Joan Didion’s point about whether the center will hold. Hopefully Wikipedia will.

Now we have Elon Musk, who’s taken a pretty negative stance against Wikipedia. Of course, that’s very self-serving on his end because he wants people to go to his platform X, right? And he doesn’t like some of the content on his Wikipedia page, even the content that’s true about him being primarily an investor in a lot of these companies. He just doesn’t want to be couched or described as an investor because he has a certain narrative that he’s trying to put out there.

I think that there was always tension in the site. I think that to some extent people wanted to attack Wikipedia for something else, but it was very convenient to say, “Oh no, it’s all about women and minorities and underrepresented groups.” On the other hand, I want to say it does challenge some notions of what is encyclopedic. Wikipedia has kind of a small-c conservative view on topics that are notable.

The definition of notability has been repeat coverage and mainstream reliable sources, which a lot of people in underrepresented groups didn’t have for a long time. There’ll be people on Wikipedia, old-school editors, who’ll take issue with that. Editors aren’t just young guys in Silicon Valley. There are a lot of people — like the character Ed in The Editors — that have just been with the project for a long time, and they have their own views, too. They’ll say, “We’re an encyclopedia. We’re not here to try to right history’s wrongs.”

I’m not saying that it needs to get to 50-50 in terms of male and female articles. But for a long time, it was less than 10% [biographical articles about] women. Now it’s like climbing up to 20%, so it’s getting a little bit closer…

… I think the issue is that I’m increasingly finding myself asking AI applications questions that I might have initially gone to Wikipedia for. That pushes Wikipedia further into the background. Are humans going to keep contributing to Wikipedia if it’s perceived that all the information is going to ChatGPT or Perplexity or Grok? 

I’ll be interested to see how Wikipedia editors overcome that. Maybe if there’s a silver lining it’s that Wikipedia editors have never been that egotistical. They’re always a little bit behind the scenes. So maybe they won’t mind their information going out to other sources as it does with Google knowledge panels or Alexa or Siri or something like that.

On the other hand, I don’t think they like the idea of it just doing free labor for tech companies. It gets to be a really tough problem: should Google or OpenAI donate more money to the Wikimedia Foundation? But you don’t want there to be any editorial control or any undue influence by Big Tech. So It’s a little bit of a mess. I think that part of it will involve requiring that these LLMs start citing or stating that this information comes from Wikipedia to give some sort of provenance to Wikipedia….

… I’ve been concerned that Wikipedia isn’t recruiting the younger generation. But then every time I’ve expressed worry about that, I find new contributors joining. I think that there’s a certain personality dimension that’s attracted to editing Wikipedia. And those people, hopefully, always find the site.

I think that there’s this political-industrial complex right now where everything is being politicized, right? And the right wing has an interest in portraying Wikipedia as left-wing and a kind of liberal media. What I would hope is that Wikipedia can withstand some of those criticisms. I don’t want only half of the readership to think about Wikipedia as a resource that can be used. But if I had to guess, I think it’s going to get worse before it gets better in terms of partisan rhetoric about Wikipedia…

“How Long Can Wikipedia Hold On?” @tobiascarroll.bsky.social and @stephenharrison.com.

* Clay Shirky

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As we look it up, we might recall that it was on this date in 1991 that Tim Berners-Lee showed the world the first web browser (and first WYSIWYG HTML editor), “WorldWideWeb” (the name of which was changed to “Nexus” after the debut of the World Wide Web later that year to avoid confusion between the brower and the network it was browsing).

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