LONDON: On the second Sunday of every month, you will find a small group of Wikipedia enthusiasts in a pub near London’s Fleet Street discussing the most wildly obscure facts. Armed with flasks of coffee, laptops and the belief that knowledge should be freely shared, they form a volunteer bastion against the twin internet evils of misinformation and artificial intelligence slop.
On a recent Sunday, 15 people showed up, including three women (“more than usual to be honest”, murmurs one). Everyone here has their own specialist interest – cotton mills in Lancashire, say, or the 19th-century newspaper launched by Benjamin Disraeli – something that got them hooked on creating or correcting Wikipedia entries. It is, they say, addictive to see your work read by millions of people. Still, it can be a bit lonely, so the meetups are important.
Wikipedia has always been a crowdsourced project. Created in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, the online encyclopedia is now a living relic of Gen X’s version of the internet: text heavy, cookie-less, largely anonymous and advert free. Anyone can create a Wikipedia article and anyone else can change it. No matter how fierce political division and online arguments become, consensus must be reached through debate. It remains one of the 10 most popular websites.
Over the past three years, however, Wikipedia has taken on a new role, acting as the feeding ground for generative AI models. Information curated by hand has been scraped, absorbed and regurgitated into chatbot summaries. Human traffic to the site is falling, though bot traffic is up. As if that wasn’t enough, Elon Musk has taken up arms against what he regards as Wikipedia’s liberal bias, vowing to launch a rival called Grokipedia.
