At the turn of the century, the Internet underwent a metamorphosis often called “Web 2.0.” The World Wide Web of the Nineteen Nineties was largely read-only: static pages, handcrafted homepages, portal pages with content from a couple of publishers.
Then got here the dot-com crash of 2000-2001, when many heavily funded, not very useful Internet firms collapsed. In the period that followed, surviving firms and recent market participants followed a distinct logic than the writer and publisher Tim O'Reilly later followed described as “use of collective intelligence”: platforms as an alternative of pages, participation as an alternative of passive consumption.
And on January 15, 2001, an internet site that appeared to embody this recent era was born. The first entry on his homepage just read: “This is the brand new WikiPedia!”
Wikimedia Commons
Wikipedia was not originally intended to be a non-profit website. In its early phase it was like that hosted and supported through co-founder Jimmy Wales' for-profit search company, Bomis. But two years later, the Wikimedia Foundation was founded as a non-profit organization dedicated to the management of Wikipedia and its sister projects.
Wikipedia embodied the Web 2.0 dream of a non-hierarchical, user-driven Internet based on participation and sharing. A fundamental idea – volunteer human editors who progressively review and authenticate content after publication – was highlighted in a Los Angeles Times report 2007 about Wales himself trying to write down an entry for a butcher shop in Gugulethu, South Africa.
His additions were retracted or blocked by other editors because they disagreed concerning the importance of a business they’d never heard of. The entry finally appeared with a clause that was neatly summarized the self-management model of the platform: “A Wikipedia article concerning the shop was created by the encyclopedia's co-founder Jimmy Wales, which led to a debate concerning the crowdsourcing project's inclusion criteria.”
As a historical sociologist from artificial intelligence And the InternetI find Wikipedia insightful not since it is flawless, but since it shows how it really works (and shortcomings). Behind almost every entry is a largely unconsidered layer of human judgment: editors weigh sources, dispute wording, make clear ambiguous claims, and implement standards similar to verifiability and neutrality.
The most educational approach to read Wikipedia is usually to read its revision history. Science has even used this editing history as a technique – for instance, in investigating scientific discrepancies in the event of Crispy Gene editing technology or the unfolding story of 2011 Egyptian revolution.
Given the disarming simplicity of its presentation, it's easy to take with no consideration the quantity of human labor that goes into Wikipedia. Statista Estimates In 2024, 4.4 billion people accessed the location – greater than half of the world and two-thirds of all Internet users. More than 125 million people have done it has edited at the very least one entry.
Wikipedia carries no promoting and doesn’t trade in user data – a central aspect of its claim to editorial independence. But users usually see donation banners and appeals, and the Wikimedia Foundation has developed paid services to administer large-scale reuse of its content—particularly through Bots scrape it for AI training. The Foundation Total assets are actually over $310 million (£230 million).
“Wokepedia” vs. Grokipedia
At 25 years old, Wikipedia can still appear like a rare triumph for the unique Web 2.0 ideals—at the very least in contrast to most of today's major open platforms, which have turned participation into surveillance promoting.
Some universitiesincluding my very own, have used the location's anniversary to allay fears about students' use of generative AI. We panicked that students would depend on Wikipedia, then adjusted and moved on. The same argument now suggests that we shouldn't be too concerned about students counting on generative AI to do their work.
This comparison is exacerbated by the rapid growth of Elon Musk's AI-powered version of Wikipedia (or “Wokepedia”) Musk refers to this dismissively). While Grokipedia generates most of its entries using AI, some are nearly similar to Wikipedia's (all of which can be found for republication under the Creative Commons license).
Grokipedia entries can’t be edited directly, but registered users can suggest corrections for the AI to contemplate. Although this AI encyclopedia was only released on October 27, 2025, it’s already available greater than 5.6 million entriesin comparison with Wikipedia's total of over 7.1 million.
So if Grokipedia overtakes its much older competitor, at the very least in scope, which seems plausible now, should we consider this the top of the Web 2.0 dream or just one other moment of adaptation?
Credibility checked
AI and the human-made Internet has at all times been like this intertwined with one another. Voluntary sharing is exploited for AI training with controversial consent and thin attribution. Models trained on human writing generate recent text that pollutes the online as “AI junk.”
Wikipedia has already collided with this. Editors report AI-written additions and plausible quotes that fail the check. They responded with measures like this WikiProject AI Cleanthat gives guidance on identifying common AI formulations and other false information.
But Wales doesn't want a whole ban on AI inside the Wikipedia domain. Rather, he did expressed hope for human-machine synergy and highlights AI's potential to bring more non-native English contributors to the location. Wikipedia too acknowledges There is a serious gender imbalance, each in entries and amongst editors.
Wikipedia's own credibility has been usually tested over its 25-year history. Prominent examples include John Seigenthaler Sr Biography hoaxwhen an unregistered editor falsely wrote concerning the journalist's alleged connections to the Kennedy assassinations, and that Essjay controversyduring which it was discovered that a outstanding editor had falsified his educational credentials.
There were also recurring ones Controversies on paid or government-related conflicts of interest, including in 2012 Wiki PR casewhen volunteers traced patterns to an organization and suspended lots of of accounts.
These vulnerabilities have been seen Claims of political bias Gain traction. Musk has repeatedly referred to Wikipedia and mainstream media as such ideologically orientedand promoted Grokipedia as a “massive improvement” that needed to “eliminate the propaganda.”
As Wikipedia celebrates its twenty fifth anniversary, we could also be experiencing something recent “Tragedy of the Community”where voluntary knowledge becomes the raw material for systems that in turn produce potentially unreliable material on a big scale. Ursula K. Le Guin's novel The Dispossessed (1974) dramatizes the dilemma facing Wikipedia: an anarchist commons survives only through constant maintenance while subject to the pull of a wealthier capitalist neighbor.
According to the critical theorist McKenzie work: “It is just not knowledge that’s power, but secrecy.” AI often runs on closed, proprietary models that exploit whatever is offered. Wikipedia's counter-model is public curation with readable stories and accountability.
But if Google's AI summaries and rankings start favoring Grokipedia, habits could quickly change. This would repeat that “California Ideology” the journalist and writer Wendy M. Grossman was warned the yr Wikipedia was launched – namely, that the openness of the Internet became the fuel for market power in Silicon Valley.
Both Wikipedia and generative AI are changing the circulation of information. One is a human publishing system with rules and revision histories. The other is a text production system that imitates knowledge without reliably justifying it. The alternative, at the very least for now, is entirely ours.
