Hostility and discord are hallmarks of the internet more so than collaboration and cooperation. So the fact that a public encyclopaedia, editable by anyone, has become one of the most useful repositories of knowledge in the world is, frankly, unbelievable. “Thank God it works in practice, because it would never work in theory,” says Anusha Alikhan at the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that runs Wikipedia.
The website was set up in 2001 by Jimmy Wales, who remains involved today, and Larry Sanger, who left the project the following year – but continues to criticise it from afar. He recently wrote that the site had been “hijacked by ideologues”.
Needless to say, Sanger’s view isn’t shared by most. Every month, Wikipedia’s 64 million articles in more than 300 languages receive 15 billion visits. At the time of writing, it is the ninth-most visited website in the world. “The fact that it is now one of the most trusted resources on the web is not something that anyone could have contemplated, but we’re here,” says Alikhan.
Fostering trust on a mass scale is no mean feat. The internet may have given billions of people access to the sum total of human knowledge, but it has done so largely in ways that are fragmented, unverified, unreliable and limited in scope. Wikipedia bucks the trend by allowing anyone to create or edit entries on the site. There are now around 260,000 volunteers around the world, with 342 edits made every single minute. A clever system then grants wider editing powers to volunteers once they have built a history of responsible changes. Trust fosters engagement and commitment so that strangers on the internet are willing to work together.
In some cases, Wikipedia encourages special interest groups to create and edit pages. For instance, a group called Women in Red works to address gender imbalance. Other groups work to spread information on climate change and African history. These articles are held to the same standards of accuracy, but this hasn’t stopped critics, including Sanger, of accusing the site of bias.
Wikipedia is a deeply unusual website in that, to avoid influence and bias, it runs no advertising, has no shareholders and makes no profit. It is an outlier in the technology world, and things have gone surprisingly well for more than 20 years.
Yet artificial intelligence is poised to change all this: it can rapidly pump out misleading or harmful entries, consumes resources as bots scrape the site for training data and reduces the number of visitors – and therefore potential donors – by creating AI-generated search summaries.
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