«Celebrating human collaboration at its best”: with this motto 25 years ago Wikipedia was born, the free, participatory and free encyclopedia. A utopian idea now threatened by artificial intelligence and Elon Musk’s project for an alternative version, Grokipedia.
The origins and the economic model without advertising
It was January 15, 2001 when Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched the English language version. The Italian edition would arrive a few months later, on May 11, from an idea from Wales himself to launch the initiative in different languages. The platform has become a daily consultation tool in various sectors, is open to the contribution of volunteers and is still based only on the economic model of user donations. Zero advertising, no cookies to resell data. A model that recalls the spirit of the early Internet. Wikipedia is written and maintained by a community of nearly 260,000 volunteers and is among the ten most visited sites in the world. It is currently available in more than 300 languages, which together comprise more than 63 million articles and attract more than 15 billion views each month.
Civil commitment and the Wikimedia ecosystem
Over the years, Wikipedia has taken positions for internet freedom and on issues such as surveillance, censorship and copyright. And in these 25 years the universe founded by Wales and Sanger has grown on other fronts: Wikimedia Commons for multimedia files, the Wiktionary dictionary, the collection of Wikiquote quotes, Wiki Loves Monuments. Obviously, like all web platforms it is not perfect and several controversies have arisen over the years. Especially those regarding the editing of his entries which prompted the Wikimedia Foundation to produce a new code of ethics for contributors.
The impact of AI and the decline in traffic
The main danger for Wikipedia now comes from artificial intelligence, a worldwide alarm that sounds for all content sites. According to data from the Wikimedia Foundation last October, there has been a drop of about 8% in page views on the platform in one year because users spend more time on chatbots. And about 65% of the busiest traffic to the nonprofit’s servers now comes from bots, some of which use the site to power artificial intelligence systems. This is why human-generated content like Wikipedia “is becoming more important than ever”, says co-founder Jimmy Wales in an interview with the Times, urging people to spend less time on social media if “you receive information you don’t trust”, in particular to delete X from your phone.
Elon Musk’s challenge and the birth of Grokipedia
A challenge to the project comes from the owner of the former Twitter, Elon Musk, who considers Wikipedia to be too politically biased, so much so that he nicknamed it Wokipedià. In October it launched Grokipedia, ‘its’ AI-powered encyclopedia which announced it had reached 86% of English Wikipedia by number of articles and surpassed 6.09 million articles with over 128,137 edits approved by Grok. Unlike Wikipedia, in fact, on Grokipedia the contents are verified by Musk’s chatbot, which ended up at the center of controversy for anti-Semitic content and the possibility of creating sexual deepfakes. “Wikipedia will continue to strive to be neutral and of high quality,” emphasized Jimmy Wales.