Wikipedia is fighting for the soul of the Internet

ByTech Word News

Wikipedia is under threat.

In a world where trust in the truth is collapsing, the grand dame of collective online fact-gathering is under threat on all fronts. Right-wing MAGA, fronted by Elon Musk, has made accusations of political bias and anti-Semitism, and even questioned its non-profit status. AI attacks encyclopedia resources and drains attention. Repressive governments hauled off their volunteer editors to penal colonies.

In its 25-year history, Wikipedia has never had to fight so hard.

The organization that supports the site, the Wikimedia Foundation, is increasing its budget for lobbying and advertising in Times Square. It charges companies like Google and Meta to swallow the encyclopedia’s 65 million articles, and restricts access for some scrapers. And it is expanding its human rights team to better protect volunteers from increasing harassment, surveillance and retaliation.

For an organization that upholds neutrality as its cardinal rule, this is a major conflict that requires Wikimedia to go on the offensive – diplomatically, of course.

That’s how it found a diplomat: Bernadette Meehan, 50, became Wikimedia’s CEO in January after serving as U.S. ambassador to Chile and at the Obama Foundation, the State Department, the National Security Council and Wall Street.

Being the administrator of one of the world’s 10 most visited websites may be the most difficult task for Ms. Meehan in a career full of flamboyant deeds — helping to negotiate the nuclear deal with Iran, facilitating talks with Cuba. The trilingual former civil servant is the first to have experience working at Wikimedia, joining mostly women from fields such as law, journalism and family planning.

Ms. Meehan won’t say Wikipedia is at war — not after spending most of 2007 in Iraq, a real war zone, where she witnessed “the ultimate cruelty of human beings.”

But he acknowledges that the site is in a metaphorical struggle for its very existence.

“Wikipedia is the foundation of everything we have on the Internet,” she said in her first interview in the role. “It’s loved, it’s credible, it’s seen as a trusted source in increasingly polarized times.”

It is also, she said, at an inflection point.

“How do we keep this project alive?” she asked.

Mr Musk criticized Wikipedia as “wokepedia” and “an extension of older media propaganda”. He protested his entry and urged his followers to withhold gifts over the foundation’s diversity initiatives.

The tech mogul is among a chorus of conservatives who call reference sites hotbeds of liberal prejudice. Sen. Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, spoke out “alarm” both about Wikipedia’s alleged ideological bent and claims that editors coordinated the spread anti-Semitic and pro-Hamas narratives. David Sacksrecently the AI ​​czar of the Trump administration, considered. Likewise Tucker Carlsona popular commentator, and even Larry Sanger, who founded Wikipedia with Jimmy Wales in 2001.

Wikipedia has long been a proxy battleground for conflicting ideas about truth: What constitutes balance? what does he do good resource? But now these online debates could have real consequences.

Last year a Trump administration official inquired about tax-exempt non-profit status. A Republican-led Congressional Oversight Committee was launched investigation in August demanding that Wikimedia identify certain editors and submit any evidence of influence by foreign agents or academic institutions. The foundation said it responded to both inquiries last year and had no updates.

To alleviate this antagonism, Ms. Meehan and her team address misconceptions about the site. Wikipedia is largely decentralized, and independent contributors distill facts through open debate and agreement. Elected refereeing committees deal with dispute resolution. The foundation, with a budget of $208.6 million and about 600 employees and contractors, provides servers and funding but avoids making decisions about content.

According to the foundation, there is no shadow mastermind, no left-wing cabal. Just Wikipedians – almost 250,000 unpaid strangers editing 324 times a minute under pseudonyms like “Dr. Blofeld” and “WooHooKitty”.

“The most important thing to understand about Wikipedia is that it really is a democracy,” said Bill Adair, who created the fact-checking website PolitiFact and is writing a book about the encyclopedia. “It’s dirty, it’s loud, it often works.”

Ms. Meehan took her message to Capitol Hill, where she distributed personally meaningful copies of Wikipedia entries. The foundation also uses lobbyists, almost doubling its expenditures to $174,300 in the last fiscal year and conservation The firm of Holland & Knight last spring for $150,000 per quarter.

“We’re not trying to be part of the culture wars, the political discourse,” Ms. Meehan said. “They are people who want to put knowledge out into the world for people to do what they want with it.”

For those who believe Wikipedia is biased, her recommendation is simple: Become an editor.

“Frankly, more dialogue is needed at this point,” she said. “So the door is open.

For many Wikipedians, the Trump administration may be the site’s most acute threat, but its most existential threat is artificial intelligence. they have resisted and idea on the integration of technology, call it “really awful” (or simply “ugh”).

But the more pressing concern is that Wikipedia is being misused to train its own competitors, as AI systems broadcast its content to inform chatbots such as Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT. The bots then refute the information, often imperfectly, and pollute the information ecosystem that is the source of the encyclopedia.

Exhibit A: Grokipedia, a rival built by Mr. Musk and modified by xAI, his artificial intelligence company. She has no public edit history and makes extensive references to Wikipedia while inventing errors (including several in Ms. Meehan’s profile).

AI-generated summaries of search results also drain potential visitors, she said. Human views of the English edition of Wikipedia fell by 8 percent at the end of last year compared to the previous year. The decline is so worrying that Ms Meehan – whose popular entry describes “tsundoku”, a Japanese term for collecting books and piling them up unread – is pushing to reach younger people through TikTok and Roblox.

Wikimedia wants more give and take from the AI ​​industry. It now charges clients like Amazon and Microsoft for faster bulk access to its data through a four-year-old commercial subsidiary called Enterprise. Last year, Enterprise earned $8.3 million, more than double the previous year’s revenue.

This spring, Wikimedia also began cracking down on automated freeloaders from scraping its sites and overloading its backend—which corresponds to almost a third the most demanding bandwidth requirements. However, the foundation is currently only able to stop about 30 percent of misused data requests — about 1.5 billion a day.

“Our infrastructure isn’t free and when the scrapers come in and pull out en masse, it really takes a toll,” Ms Meehan said. “This behavior literally costs a dollar.

Wikipedia has 345 different editions. English is by far the most active with nearly 115,000 contributors, while others, in languages ​​such as West African Kusaal and Taiwanese Seediq, have less reach.

In countries like China, Myanmar and North Korea, Wikipedia is completely blocked. Turkey banned the site for almost three years until 2020. Wikimedia negotiated with it Indonesian government this year due to blackout threats.

As of 2020, at least 10 Wikipedia editors have been jailed for their work, and countless others have been threatened. Pediatrician in Saudi Arabia, he was sentenced to 14 years in prison after editing websites about government surveillance and women’s rights activists. Belarus detained several editors, sent one to a penal colony more than a year after he edited a post about murdered journalists. Restrictions on free speech are increasing worldwide, affecting Wikipedia and its volunteers, a spokesperson for the foundation wrote in an email.

Governments are also specifically targeting Wikipedia content. from 934 asks the foundation adopted last year to remove or modify the content (it complied two), 117 came from governments, up from 10 a decade ago.

Most came from Russia, whose antagonism toward Wikipedia deepened after the country invaded Ukraine in 2022. repeatedly accused instead of violating a sweeping censorship law that criminalized content deemed to “discredit” the Russian military (Wikimedia refuses to pay related fines). AND A Russian clone of Wikipedia named Ruwiki was introduced in 2023; a Russian network of fake news portals has succeeded infiltrate some Wikipedia citations.

Wikimedia is expanding its human rights team, the legal department that protects volunteers from digital and physical threats. The foundation recently launched an anti-doxxing initiative that offers greater anonymity to contributors; also connected Wikipedians with local evacuation and extraction services.

Advocacy for volunteers and projects swallows 32 percent of the foundation’s budget. Wikimedia’s litigation costs have doubled since 2020, in part because there are more cases made more complex by new privacy and speech regulations.

“A core component of what we do is preserving freedom of information,” Ms Meehan said. “That will never change, that commitment to defend those rights and to help, within our limited means, to protect the editors who are involved in this project and are being persecuted for that very reason.”

Wikipedia’s future has often seemed uncertain—its entry titled “Wikipedia end predictions” is almost nine years old less people after joining its ranks, the site cannot afford to become stale.

The foundation wants to attract a new generation of contributors who will not be predominantly white, male and grizzled. Training to demystify editing, for example, attracted one 25-year-old Vietnamese American volunteer, who in two years produced hundreds of pages on zeitgeist topics such as “swag gap” and “performative man”.

In five months, Ms. Meehan met more than 1,100 such Wikipedians on four continents. Unlike most modern content creators, “they’re not out there wanting to be the next influencer or celebrity,” she said. When gathered, as on recent rainy weekend in San Francisco want to discuss the finer points of AI detection and disappearing database.

Wikipedians are not flashy, but they are tough. Two of them attacked a shooter at a conference last fall. Ms. Meehan suits up, always wearing a simple black Ironman watch after the luxury Baume & Mercier watch she bought when she first joined the foreign service was stolen by armed assailants in Colombia 20 years ago.

Seeing how the corruption of war and the worst of humanity fundamentally changed her, she said, prompting her to “run to the light” and seek “the antithesis of evil”. That’s Wikipedia, she said—an experiment that will continue to fight to move society toward peace about the conflict.

“In today’s world where politicization is on the rise, where there is disagreement over facts, where people can’t even politely engage in conversation, it’s okay to disagree,” she said. “But let’s get together and talk based on reality and see where it takes us.