Across the flip of the century, the web underwent a metamorphosis dubbed “web 2.0”. The all over the world internet of the Nineties had in large part been read-only: static pages, hand-built homepages, portal websites with content material from a couple of publishers.
Then got here the dotcom crash of 2000 to 2001, when many closely financed, frivolously helpful web companies collapsed. Within the aftermath, surviving firms and new entrants leaned into a unique common sense that the author-publisher Tim O’Reilly later described as “harnessing collective intelligence”: platforms slightly than pages, participation slightly than passive intake.
And on January 15 2001, a web site was once born that appeared to encapsulate this new technology. The primary access on its homepage learn merely: “This is the new WikiPedia!”
Screenshot of the Wikipedia homepage in 2001.
Wikimedia Commons
Wikipedia wasn’t at first conceived as a not-for-profit web site. In its early segment, it was once hosted and supported thru co-founder Jimmy Wales’s for-profit seek corporate, Bomis. However two years on, the Wikimedia Basis was once created as a devoted non-profit to steward Wikipedia and its sibling tasks.
Wikipedia embodied the internet 2.0 dream of a non-hierarchical, user-led web constructed on participation and sharing. One foundational thought – volunteer human editors reviewing and authenticating content material incrementally after e-newsletter – was once highlighted in a 2007 Los Angeles Occasions document about Wales himself seeking to write an access for a butcher store in Gugulethu, South Africa.
His additions have been reverted or blocked by means of different editors who disagreed in regards to the importance of a store they’d by no means heard of. The access in the end gave the impression with a clause that smartly encapsulated the platform’s self-governance mannequin: “A Wikipedia article on the shop was created by the encyclopedia’s co-founder Jimmy Wales, which led to a debate on the crowdsourced project’s inclusion criteria.”
As a ancient sociologist of synthetic intelligence and the web, I in finding Wikipedia revealing no longer as a result of it’s flawless, however as it displays its workings (and flaws). At the back of nearly each access sits a in large part uncredited layer of human judgement: editors weighing assets, disputing framing, clarifying ambiguous claims and imposing requirements equivalent to verifiability and neutrality.
Steadily, probably the most instructive technique to learn Wikipedia is to learn its revision historical past. Scholarship has even used this edit historical past as one way – as an example, when finding out clinical discrepancies within the developnent of Crispr gene-editing generation, or the unfolding historical past of the 2011 Egyptian revolution.
Co-founder Jimmy Wales explains how Wikipedia was once created, July 2005. Video: TedX.
The dimensions of human labour that is going into Wikipedia is simple to take without any consideration, given its disarming simplicity of presentation. Statista estimates 4.4 billion folks accessed the web page in 2024 – over part the arena and two-thirds of web customers. Greater than 125 million folks have edited no less than one access.
Wikipedia carries no promoting and does no longer industry in customers’ knowledge – central to its declare of editorial independence. However customers continuously see fundraising banners and appeals, and the Wikimedia Basis has constructed paid products and services to regulate high-volume reuse of its content material – specifically by means of bots scraping it for AI coaching. The basis’s overall belongings now stand at greater than US$310 million (£230 million).
‘Wokepedia’ v Grokipedia
At 25, Wikipedia can nonetheless appear to be an extraordinary triumph for the unique internet 2.0 beliefs – no less than against this to maximum of as of late’s primary open platforms, that have became participation into surveillance promoting.
Some universities, together with my very own, have used the web site’s anniversary to assuage fears about scholar use of generative AI. We panicked about scholars depending on Wikipedia, then tailored and carried on. The similar argument now suggests we must no longer over-worry about scholars depending on generative AI to do their paintings.
This comparability is sharpened by means of the fast expansion of Elon Musk’s AI-powered model of Wikipedia (or “Wokepedia”, as Musk dismissively refers to it). Whilst Grokipedia makes use of AI to generate maximum of its entries, some are near-identical to Wikipedia’s (all of which might be to be had for republication beneath ingenious commons licensing).
Grokipedia entries can’t be immediately edited, however registered customers can recommend corrections for the AI to believe. Regardless of solely launching on October 27 2025, this AI encyclopedia already has greater than 5.6 million entries, in comparison with Wikipedia’s overall of over 7.1 million.
So, if Grokipedia overtakes its a lot older rival in scale no less than, which now turns out believable, must we see this as the top of the internet 2.0 dream, or just any other second of adaptation?
Credibility examined
AI and the human-created web have all the time been intertwined. Voluntary sharing is exploited for AI coaching with contested consent and skinny attribution. Fashions skilled on human writing generate new textual content that pollutes the internet as “AI slop”.
Wikipedia has already collided with this. Editors document AI-written additions and believable citations that fail on checking. They’ve spoke back with measures equivalent to WikiProject AI Cleanup, which provides steerage on how you can discover generic AI phraseology and different false knowledge.
However Wales does no longer desire a complete ban on AI inside of Wikipedia’s area. Fairly, he has expressed hope for human-machine synergy, highlighting AI’s possible to deliver extra non-native English members to the web page. Wikipedia additionally recognizes it has a major gender imbalance, each in relation to entries and editors.
A video made by means of Wikipedia to mark its twenty fifth anniversary.
Wikipedia’s personal credibility has continuously been examined over its 25-year historical past. Prime-profile examples come with the John Seigenthaler Sr biography hoax, when an unregistered editor falsely wrote in regards to the journalist’s intended ties to the Kennedy assasinations, and the Essjay controversy, wherein a distinguished editor was once discovered to have fabricated their schooling credentials.
There have additionally been ordinary controversies over paid- or state-linked conflicts of pastime, together with the 2012 Wiki-PR case, when volunteers traced patterns to a company and banned loads of accounts.
Those vulnerabilities have observed claims of political bias achieve traction. Musk has time and again framed Wikipedia and mainstream retailers as ideologically slanted, and promoted Grokipedia as a “massive improvement” that had to “purge out the propaganda”.
As Wikipedia reaches its twenty fifth anniversary, most likely we’re witnessing a brand new “tragedy of the commons”, the place volunteered wisdom turns into uncooked subject matter for programs that themselves would possibly produce unreliable subject matter at scale. Ursula Okay. Le Guin’s novel The Dispossessed (1974) dramatises the catch 22 situation Wikipedia faces: an anarchist commons survives solely thru consistent repairs, whilst dealing with the pull of a wealthier capitalist neighbour.
In step with the crucial theorist McKenzie Wark: “It is not knowledge which is power, but secrecy.” AI frequently runs on closed, proprietary fashions that scrape no matter is to be had. Wikipedia’s counter-model is public curation with legible histories and duty.
But when Google’s AI summaries and ratings get started privileging Grokipedia, conduct may trade rapid. This may repeat the “Californian ideology” that journalist-author Wendy M. Grossman was once warned about within the 12 months Wikipedia introduced – particularly, web openness changing into gasoline for Silicon Valley marketplace energy.
Wikipedia and generative AI each regulate wisdom move. One is a human publishing device with regulations and revision histories. The opposite is a textual content manufacturing device that mimics wisdom with out reliably grounding it. The selection, for the instant no less than, is all of ours.
