Can Wikipedia survive the age of AI? |
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales doesn’t view artificial intelligence as a fundamental threat to Wikipedia’s existence.
In a chaotic world where global politics can be upended by a single tweet and mass shootings are livestreamed, few corners of the internet feel comforting and stable.
A key exception: Wikipedia.
The free online encyclopedia — which celebrates its 25th anniversary on Thursday — looks and feels exactly how I remember it looking and feeling in elementary school, when I first became aware of its existence. It receives nearly 15 billion views each month from more than 1.5 billion unique devices, according to statistics shared with me by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation.
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But as the site celebrates its quarter-century birthday, could its relevance be drawing to a close?
For most of its existence, Wikipedia was often the first site to pop up when you typed a question into Google. Now, artificial intelligence responds directly to your question. Yes, AI overviews link back to sources — which typically include Wikipedia. But there’s less of a reason to navigate to Wikipedia itself; AI has already summarized its work for you.
A similar dilemma faces news organizations: Why would people pay for subscriptions when free summaries of stories are readily available?
I expected Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, to share my concerns. But in a recent Zoom conversation from his home in England, he was surprisingly unperturbed. In fact, he seemed happy.
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“The whole point of Wikipedia is we’re a charity,” Wales told me. “Wikipedia is our gift to the world. And so we’re happy if our work is being used to expand access to knowledge.
“Nobody owns facts. You can’t copyright facts. And so if other people are learning from the facts that you’ve........