Wikipedia Faces AI Threat as Its Future Grows Uncertain

Wikipedia has become one of the internet’s most familiar resources, with approximately 68 million articles consulted trillions of times by readers around the world. Yet the free online encyclopedia is facing a new challenge: Artificial Intelligence is changing how people find information, threatening the website’s traffic and creating fresh problems for its volunteer editors.

Founded in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, Wikipedia has grown far beyond the modest ambitions of its creators. What began as an unconventional experiment in collaborative knowledge has become a central part of everyday internet use. Despite its enormous influence, however, the platform is often taken for granted, with its reputation still shaped by the familiar criticism that anyone can edit it.

Richard Cooke explores this contradiction in his book The Last Best Place on the Internet: A Human History of Wikipedia. His account examines the people, philosophical ideas and unusual community dynamics behind Wikipedia’s rise, while considering why a project that has survived for more than two decades may now face a fragile future.

How Wikipedia Became One of the Internet’s Most Important Resources

Wikipedia’s success is remarkable partly because it grew from a model that initially attracted scepticism. Unlike traditional encyclopedias, which rely on selected authors and established editorial processes, Wikipedia allows volunteers to create and revise articles collaboratively.

That openness became one of its defining strengths, but it also fuelled doubts about reliability. Critics questioned whether an encyclopedia that anyone could edit could be trusted to provide accurate information. Nevertheless, the platform became an everyday reference point for students, journalists, researchers and ordinary readers seeking quick explanations of unfamiliar subjects.

The scale of its growth is difficult to comprehend. English Wikipedia alone contains approximately 5.2 billion words, while the wider project has expanded to around 68 million articles across its language editions. According to estimates from the Pew Research Center cited by Cooke, Wikipedia received 1.9 trillion page views between 2015 and 2025.

These figures illustrate how deeply the encyclopedia has become embedded in digital life. Its influence extends beyond people who visit its pages directly, as its information also helps shape search results, online discussions and the wider circulation of knowledge.

Yet public understanding of Wikipedia has not necessarily kept pace with its growth. Many readers continue to associate it with the idea that its content cannot be trusted, even as they repeatedly rely on it for basic information.

Why Wikipedia’s Origins Were About More Than Technology

Wikipedia is often described as a technological achievement, but Cooke argues that its origins also lie in philosophy, intellectual collaboration and ideas about how knowledge should be created.

Ward Cunningham, who developed the wiki concept in the 1990s, helped establish the technical foundation for collaborative editing. A wiki is a website whose pages can be created or modified by users, making it possible for a community to develop a shared body of information.

Cunningham’s thinking extended beyond the mechanics of software. He considered how computers could distribute power more widely and allow people to participate in creating knowledge. Ideas associated with constructivism, which examines how people build understanding, influenced the broader intellectual environment around collaborative systems.

Another concept relevant to this culture was wabi-sabi, a Japanese aesthetic idea that finds beauty in imperfection and incompleteness. The connection is particularly fitting for Wikipedia, where articles are continually revised and no page is necessarily considered permanently finished.

Rather than presenting knowledge as a completed monument, Wikipedia treats it as an ongoing collective effort. Readers can identify mistakes, add missing information, challenge interpretations and improve existing material.

This approach does not eliminate errors or disagreements. Instead, it creates a system in which improvement depends on continued participation. The encyclopedia’s enduring character reflects the tension between its imperfections and its ability to correct them over time.

Jimmy Wales, Larry Sanger and the Role of Philosophy

Wikipedia’s co-founders brought different experiences to the project, but philosophy formed an important part of their intellectual backgrounds.

Jimmy Wales worked in technology and finance while maintaining an interest in philosophical questions. Larry Sanger, an academic philosopher, brought his own intellectual interests and experience of online debate to the developing encyclopedia.

Cooke highlights how unusual this combination was during the dotcom boom, when entrepreneurs were launching numerous online encyclopedias and information services. Wales’s decision to employ a philosopher rather than build the project around technology alone reflected a different understanding of what the encyclopedia needed.

The early project emerged from an online environment in which people debated facts, knowledge and the importance of intellectual exchange. Its development therefore involved more than creating a website capable of storing articles. It required a community willing to argue about information, establish shared practices and keep improving a common resource.

That human element helps explain why Wikipedia became different from many other internet projects launched around the same time. Its long-term success depended not only on software but also on the people who contributed their knowledge, challenged one another and developed rules for working together.

The Volunteers Who Built Wikipedia’s Vast Knowledge Base

Although Wales and Sanger are the best-known figures associated with Wikipedia’s beginnings, countless less prominent contributors helped determine what the encyclopedia became.

One early editor highlighted by Cooke is Gaytha Langlois, described as the first woman to edit Wikipedia. Her contributions included subjects close to her interests, particularly Rhode Island and standard poodles. Her story illustrates how a volunteer could help build a global knowledge resource by writing about seemingly ordinary topics.

Another contributor, Ruth Ifcher, created an early biographical page for a woman on Wikipedia. Cooke describes her as a highly educated grammar enthusiast who had been forced out of the workforce by severe agoraphobia.

Wikipedia offered Ifcher an opportunity to undertake meaningful intellectual work at a different stage of her life. Her experience illustrates how online communities can open avenues for participation that may not be readily available through conventional workplaces or institutions.

These stories complicate the idea that Wikipedia was built primarily by professional researchers or technology specialists. Its contributors came from different backgrounds, bringing individual interests, specialist knowledge and personal circumstances to the project.

Many developed deep expertise in subjects that attracted relatively little attention elsewhere. Their accumulated efforts helped create an encyclopedia broad enough to cover both major historical events and highly specialised topics.

How Neurodiversity and Specialist Interests Shaped Wikipedia

Cooke also examines the relationship between Wikipedia’s culture and the intense interests of some of its most dedicated contributors.

Subjects such as aircraft, trains, cars, weather and comic books have attracted editors willing to invest considerable time in documenting details that might otherwise be overlooked. This enthusiasm has helped Wikipedia develop an extraordinary breadth of coverage.

Some contributors, however, produce material so detailed that other editors consider it excessive. Within Wikipedia, the term “fancruft” is used for content regarded as overly specialised or insufficiently relevant to an encyclopedia.

Disagreements over such material reveal a deeper question: should an encyclopedia attempt to preserve as much information as possible, or should it concentrate on subjects that meet stricter standards of significance?

Wikipedia’s volunteer culture has also been associated with neurodiversity. Cooke recounts how a former head of the Wikimedia Foundation described the encyclopedia as a “city built by Asperger’s”. The phrase reflects an observation about the intense focus and specialist knowledge found among some contributors, rather than a description of every editor.

The same dedication that makes Wikipedia unusually comprehensive can also produce conflict. Editors disagree over article length, relevance, sourcing and the boundaries between useful detail and unnecessary information.

These tensions are not merely personality clashes. They concern the fundamental purpose of an encyclopedia and how a large, decentralised community should decide what deserves to be recorded.

Inclusionists vs Deletionists: Wikipedia’s Continuing Debate

One of Wikipedia’s most persistent disagreements centres on whether articles and information should be retained or removed. The debate is commonly associated with inclusionists, who favour preserving a broader range of material, and deletionists, who place greater emphasis on removing content that fails to meet established standards.

The disagreement reflects two competing priorities. A broad approach can preserve information about obscure subjects, specialist interests and local history. A stricter approach seeks to prevent Wikipedia from becoming cluttered with material that lacks sufficient significance, reliable sourcing or encyclopedic value.

Neither position eliminates the need for editorial judgement. Even apparently straightforward decisions about whether an article belongs on Wikipedia can involve questions about notability, evidence and the intended audience.

Cooke describes how some road enthusiasts, frustrated when articles about minor roads were deleted, left to establish a separate online encyclopedia dedicated to roads. Their departure illustrates how disputes over inclusion can lead communities to split off and develop their own rules.

These disagreements have shaped Wikipedia’s identity. Its collaborative model gives volunteers the power to contribute, but it also requires them to negotiate shared standards. Keeping an encyclopedia open to a wide range of knowledge while maintaining quality remains a difficult balancing act.

Why Wikipedia Still Struggles With Gender Imbalance

Wikipedia’s openness has not automatically produced an equally representative community. Gender imbalance has remained a longstanding challenge, affecting both participation among editors and the coverage of subjects considered important enough to document.

The experiences of early contributors such as Langlois and Ifcher demonstrate that women played a role in Wikipedia’s development from its early years. However, their stories also raise questions about why many contributors who helped shape the project have received comparatively little recognition.

Efforts to create a more balanced encyclopedia have continued. Cooke points to Mappa Mundi, an initiative associated with Sandi Toksvig, as an attempt to develop an alternative with a more inclusive approach to knowledge.

Such projects may also influence Wikipedia itself by encouraging discussion about whose experiences are represented, which subjects receive attention and how editorial practices can become more inclusive.

Improving representation involves more than adding biographies or increasing the number of articles about women. It also requires understanding the barriers that discourage participation and examining how communities determine which topics deserve sustained coverage.

Why Wikipedia’s Future Is Becoming More Fragile

For much of its history, Wikipedia appeared remarkably durable. Its website and core model have remained recognisable since its early years, even as the wider internet has changed dramatically.

However, the conditions that supported its growth are shifting. Artificial intelligence is changing how people access information, potentially weakening the relationship between searching for knowledge and visiting the websites that provide it.

One concern is declining referral traffic. If users increasingly obtain answers directly from AI-powered search tools and chatbots, fewer may click through to Wikipedia pages. That could weaken the flow of visitors who discover articles, explore related topics or become interested in contributing.

Traffic also matters because Wikipedia operates within a broader digital ecosystem. The encyclopedia depends on people continuing to value its work, visit its pages and support the organisation that maintains its infrastructure.

Another concern is the growing volume of AI-generated text entering the editing process. If volunteers contribute large amounts of poorly written, misleading or inadequately sourced material, experienced editors may have to spend more time checking and correcting it.

AI-generated content is not necessarily inaccurate simply because a machine produced it. The problem is that fluent writing can conceal factual errors, unsupported claims and fabricated references. When such material enters a collaborative encyclopedia, editors must determine whether it meets the same standards expected of other contributions.

The result could be additional pressure on a volunteer community already responsible for maintaining an enormous collection of articles. If the volume of questionable material grows faster than the community’s ability to review it, Wikipedia’s reliability could become harder to protect.

Can Artificial Intelligence Replace Wikipedia?

AI systems and Wikipedia serve overlapping but different purposes. AI assistants can summarise information, answer questions conversationally and combine details into a response tailored to a user’s request. Wikipedia provides articles that readers can inspect, revise and examine through their references and editing histories.

The distinction matters because a direct answer is not always equivalent to a transparent account of how knowledge was assembled. AI-generated responses can be useful, but they may also contain mistakes or present uncertain claims with unwarranted confidence.

Wikipedia’s collaborative structure offers a different model. Readers can examine how an article is organised, consult its references and review disputes or changes through its editing history. These features do not guarantee accuracy, but they offer ways to scrutinise the information.

At the same time, Wikipedia cannot assume that its established reputation will automatically protect it. If AI tools become the primary way people seek explanations, the encyclopedia may need to adapt to changing reading habits while preserving the qualities that make it valuable.

Its challenge is therefore not simply to compete with AI-generated answers. It must also consider how to protect the human editorial work that makes its knowledge base useful in the first place.

Why Wikipedia’s Volunteer Community Matters More Than Ever

Wikipedia’s history demonstrates that its greatest resource is not merely its software or the number of articles it contains. It is the community that creates, reviews, debates and maintains those articles.

Volunteers provide specialist knowledge, identify errors, assess sources and resolve disputes over what belongs in the encyclopedia. Their work is often invisible to readers, who may visit a page, find an answer and leave without considering the effort required to maintain it.

This helps explain a persistent misunderstanding about Wikipedia’s funding. Some readers may assume that donations primarily pay professional fact-checkers. However, Wikipedia’s editing work is largely carried out by volunteers rather than a staff of paid fact-checkers.

The Wikimedia Foundation supports the infrastructure and operations behind the project, while the volunteer community performs much of the editorial work. Preserving the encyclopedia therefore requires both organisational support and continued participation from people willing to improve its content.

AI could make some tasks easier, including identifying potential errors or helping editors organise information. But any such benefits depend on careful use and human oversight. Automated tools cannot remove the need to assess evidence, resolve disagreements or make difficult decisions about significance and context.

Wikipedia’s Legacy and the Challenge of Keeping It Alive

When Wikipedia began, its founders reportedly imagined that an encyclopedia with 100,000 articles would be a reasonable size, comparable to the scale of Britannica. The project eventually grew to tens of millions of articles, far exceeding those early expectations.

That expansion reflects the power of collaborative knowledge creation. People with different interests and levels of expertise were able to contribute to a shared resource without needing to work for a traditional publisher or research institution.

Yet Wikipedia’s size is also part of its challenge. Maintaining quality across millions of articles requires sustained effort, and the digital environment that once helped the encyclopedia attract readers is evolving rapidly.

Cooke’s account offers a reminder that Wikipedia was not an inevitable outcome of technological progress. It emerged from a particular combination of people, philosophical ideas, online culture and a willingness to tolerate imperfection while continually improving the result.

The encyclopedia may survive the growth of artificial intelligence, as Cooke believes it will, but its future cannot be taken for granted. Its continued value will depend on whether readers, editors and supporters recognise the work behind the resource and help sustain the community that makes it possible.

Wikipedia’s history is therefore more than a story about a website that grew unexpectedly large. It is an account of how people built a shared reference library through cooperation, disagreement and persistent effort. In an internet increasingly shaped by automated answers, that human achievement may become even more important.