As Wikipedia turns 25, its future will depend on AI — for better or worse
The online encyclopedia is celebrating 25 years since launch, but its next quarter century will likely be defined by the AI giants it’s now signing content deals with.
January 15 is known to dedicated “Wikipedians” — among them, presumably, many of the ~250,000 volunteers that write and edit the site’s ~65 million articles across more than 300 languages — as Wikipedia Day.
On this day in 2001, cofounder Jimmy Wales first wrote “Hello, World!” onto a blank web page that would soon become one of the world’s most popular websites for the next 2.5 decades — ballooning with knowledge, citations, and backlinks provided for free (as always) by scores of contributors.
This year, though, with Wikipedia looking toward a mounting tech superpower that could pose its biggest existential threat to date, the online encyclopedia might want to turn to its own “quarter-life crisis” page.
This article has been skimmed through by AI
On Thursday, Wikimedia Foundation, the site’s nonprofit operator, announced partnerships with several Big Tech giants — including Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Perplexity, and Mistral AI — that will see the companies pay to use Wikipedia’s vast collection of articles to train their AI models.
As reported by The Verge, these deals are part of the Wikimedia Enterprise program, which was launched in 2021 to allow companies to use a premium version of Wikipedia’s content library for a fee. According to Wikimedia, many of the listed companies joined the program over the past year, or even before that — meaning that the site has actually been helping to grow the AI tech that threatens to supersede it.
Looking at Wikipedia’s site visits, the past 20 months in a row have seen total page views slump behind figures recorded for the year prior — coinciding, perhaps not so coincidentally, with the dizzying rise of AI chatbots. Indeed, traffic was down 9% year over year in April, the same month that visits to ChatGPT officially overtook visits to Wikipedia.
Like Stack Overflow, Wikipedia is now caught up in tech’s circular coal mine, where the companies that feed on the platform’s information trove might ultimately end up being the ones that replace it. Still, Wales seemed rosy enough about the situation, telling the Associated Press, “I’m very happy personally that AI models are training on Wikipedia data because it’s human curated.”
