The Vultures Are Circling Wikipedia

I must admit, for several years now I’ve worried that my beloved Wikipedia could not survive in an AI era. Honestly, it’s hard to imagine that in a few years we all won’t just ask our AI assistant/overlord when we want information, although the AI tendency to hallucinate and spit out a totally plausible collection of truth and make-believe creates a bar that will have to be overcome.

Credit: Wikipedia

The good news is that AI doesn’t seem to be winning this particular battle yet. The bad news is that the war on “woke” may be a bigger threat, at least in the short term.

A new paper from researchers at Kings College London looked at the impact of ChatGPT on Wikipedia engagement, and offered cautious hope: “We find no evidence of an overall decline in Wikipedia engagement across the four metrics studied. Instead, page views and visitor numbers increased in the period following ChatGPT’s launch.” They did, however, find slower growth in areas where ChatGPT was available.

The authors cite several studies that indicate that, to date, ChatGPT responses are not viewed as favorably as Wikipedia’s, and point out that Wikipedia readers are not keen to see generative AI summaries of its articles. They note that ChatGPT’s capabilities are evolving, and cite other research that found that up to 5% of newly created articles in the English Wikipedia were written using generative AI tools. AI may be coming, but it’s not quite ready for Wikipedia-level prime time yet.

The authors see other risks to Wikipedia from AI. Professor Elena Simperl, Professor of Computer Science at King’s and Co-Director of the King’s Institute for Artificial Intelligence, said:

Our work did not confirm the most alarmist scenario, but we’re not out of the woods yet. AI developers are letting their scrapers loose on Wikipedia to train them on high quality data, pushing up traffic to levels where Wikipedia’s servers are struggling to keep up. Generative AI summaries are also using Wikipedia’s data in web searches but not crediting sources, siphoning web traffic away while borrowing the platform’s work.

For free services like this, no-one stops to ask how it’s being paid for – and now Wikipedia is having to make the tough decision of where to allocate their limited resources to deal with this. It’s vital as a community we take steps to protect this important platform, and we hope to turn our work into a monitoring tool where the community can track how AI is impacting Wikipedia. 

Postdoc and first author of the study Neal Reeves suggests there are steps available to protect Wikipedia. “Ultimately, we need a new social contract between AI companies and providers of high-quality data like Wikipedia where they retain more power over their material, while still allowing for their data to be used for training purposes. Collaboration, like that seen in programmes like MLCommons, is needed to reach across the aisle and ensure that the next generation of AI models are trained well, but in a way that doesn’t destroy one of the free internet’s greatest resources.”

Speaking of destroying great resources, Elon Musk has decided that, as he found with Twitter, Wikipedia is too woke, and has announced his AI rival to it: Grokipedia. The vision: “Grokipedia is going to be the world’s biggest, most accurate knowledge source, for humans and AI with no limits on use.”

The announcement rambles on:

With Grok, Grokipedia aims for maximum truth through first principles and physics. It replaces partially masked evidences of how legacy media operates, rewriting with complete accurate context that cuts through the BS. this will combat the evil organizations and the evil minds that operating under the hood and who’ve poisoned minds for decades with endless fake news and distorted narratives through legacy media and Wikipedia, causing immense harm to young minds and manipulated the world long enough.

I.e., if you liked how Elon “fixed” Twitter, you may like Grokipedia. Of course, if you are not a fan of X, or have found Grok to be underwhelming and, at times, scary, Grokipedia may not be for you.

Credit: DogeDesigner

Elon is not the only one who thinks Wikipedia is too woke. Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger – who left it shortly after its founding – issued his “9 theses” calling for counteracting what he sees as left wing bias. His theses:

1. End decision-making by “consensus.”
2. Enable competing articles.
3. Abolish source blacklists.
4. Revive the original neutrality policy.
5. Repeal “Ignore all rules.”
6. Reveal who Wikipedia’s leaders are.
7. Let the public rate articles.
8. End indefinite blocking.
9. Adopt a legislative process.

Mr. Sanger believes Wikipedia doesn’t allow certain right wing websites (think Fox News) as sources, and says: “What I can tell you is that over the years, conservatives, libertarians, were just pushed out. There is a whole…army of administrators, hundreds of them, who are constantly blocking people…that they have ideological disagreements with.”

Tucker Carlson had Mr. Sanger on his podcast last week, and pronounced: “Wikipedia shapes America. And because of its importance, it’s an emergency, in my opinion, that Wikipedia is completely dishonest and completely controlled on questions that matter.”

Tucker Carlson and Larry Sanger. Credit: Tucker Carlson Podcast

Ted Cruz wasted no time joining the bandwagon, expressing his concerns in a letter to Wikimedia Foundation CEO Maryana Iskander. “Wikipedia began with a noble concept: crowdsource human knowledge using verifiable sources and make it free to the public. That’s what makes reports of Wikipedia’s systemic bias especially troubling,” Senator Cruz wrote. He also charged that the Wikipedia Foundation “financially supports left-wing organizations that contribute to Wikipedia content.”

Adding to the pile-on, White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks has suggested Wikipedia is “hopelessly biased,” alleging that an “army of left-wing activists maintain the bios and fight reasonable corrections.” Politico reported that Ed Martin, then D.C.’s interim U.S. attorney appointed by Trump, and the House Oversight Committee have also gone after Wikipedia for similar reasons

If you are someone who thought that the Biden Administration, the mainstream media, and social media platforms were right to try to get credible information out during the height of the COVID pandemic, this will all sound frighteningly familiar to you. If you are someone who thinks every point of view should be heard equally and that RFK Jr. makes a lot of sense, then you have your new target.  

Honestly, if Wikipedia is going to go down, I’d rather it be from a top notch AI than for it to be smeared as “Wokepedia” and drowned in disinformation. But I’m not sure I’ll have that choice.