In an age of polarisation and AI, the free online encyclopedia might be more important than you think.
In England, a woman who goes by the name "Premeditated Chaos" is writing about every collection fashion designer Alexander McQueen produced. She works in a call centre and on the slow nights reading and editing help keep her awake. She is not writing a book, and she is not being paid. She is contributing to Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia.
Premeditated Chaos, who wants to keep her identity private to protect against trolling, has added entries on Inuit clothing, Georgian goddesses and video games. Not because she's an expert in those topics, but because she loves "getting completely swept away in researching and writing".
Premeditated Chaos says building Wikipedia is an act of love akin to crafting — where the process of construction matters as much as the product.
But the world Wikipedia inhabits is changing.
"I worry that in an age of AI content, we'll lose track of that," she says.
Wikipedia bills itself as the encyclopedia anyone can edit and according to its data millions of people have contributed since its inception in 2001. Wikipedia has more than 6.9 million articles in its English addition, and covers everything from history, religion, politics and science to sport and pop culture.
These days, people might be using it without realising. Ask a virtual assistant or an AI chatbot a question, and that information is likely to come, in part, from Wikipedia.
The concept of a crowdsourced reference text, where anyone can create and edit articles, has long been ridiculed. Students are warned not to treat Wikipedia as a reliable source, and the site has been accused of bias and inaccuracy. But as misinformation and fake news run rampant, some see the English version of Wikipedia — one of the most visited websites in the world — as an unlikely defender of truth, a bastion of generally reliable information that is increasingly under threat from influential critics like Elon Musk.
Then there is AI. As AI chatbots transform how people create, access and verify information, Wikipedia's very existence could be at stake.
'Wokepedia'
To its fans, Wikipedia is a relic of an earlier internet, with utopian ideals of free access, consensus decision making, and cooperation. It's a place where joy can be found by falling down a "wikihole" and discovering things you never knew you needed to know. (Like a list of houses modified to spite their neighbours or an explanation of cow tipping.)
"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing," founder Jimmy Wales told a reporter in 2004.
Musk — the world's richest man whose own social media site X has been accused of failing to stem disinformation — is not a fan of Wikipedia. He offered a billion dollars in 2023 for the site to change its to "Dickipedia".
"Wikipedia is controlled by far-left activists," he wrote on X last year. "Defund Wikipedia until balance is restored!," and "[it's] an extension of legacy media propaganda" Musk wrote on X in January.
In early 2025 The Heritage Foundation — the US think tank behind Project 2025 — produced documents explaining it planned to target Wikipedia editors it deemed responsible for creating antisemitic content, according to reporting by Jewish newspaper Forward. The Heritage Foundation's Mike Howell is quoted in the New Yorker in March saying the "investigation" would be "shared with the appropriate policymakers to help inform a strategic response". The Heritage Foundation was contacted for comment.
In April, the acting US attorney for the District of Columbia sent a letter to the Wikimedia Foundation — the non-profit which runs Wikipedia — accusing it of "allowing foreign actors to manipulate information and spread propaganda to the American public". The letter also states that because generative AI platforms use Wikipedia to train large-language models, its information is "now consumed by masses of Americans and American teachers" and this could amplify problematic information. The letter requests the Wikimedia Foundation prove it is complying with the laws governing its tax-exempt status.
The Wikimedia Foundation in the US appears to be taking threats seriously. "I'm keeping a close eye on the rising noise of criticism from Elon Musk and others and I think that's something that we need to grapple with and then I'm very obsessed with AI and what are the implications of AI for us," Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales told trustees early in the year.
Wikipedia has always had its detractors, Elliott Bledsoe, President of Wikimedia Foundation Australia says. No one person is in charge of Wikipedia, Bledsoe says, and that is a challenge for parties who want to control the narrative around certain topics.
Countries including China and Turkey have restricted access to Wikipedia at certain times, and a court in India recently ruled that the site must remove statements deemed defamatory. Reuters reported that the case had raised questions about free speech in India. Accusations of bias are also not new. Way back in 2006, a rival site Conservapedia was launched by a US attorney concerned with what he perceived to be liberal bias on Wikipedia.
But while Wikipedia's ungovernability might make it a target, it might also be its salvation.
As a US not-for-profit, the Wikimedia Foundation — which maintains the wiki platform's technology but doesn't control the information on the site – could experience regulatory impacts within the US, Bledsoe says.
"The potential ability for somebody like Musk to use government regulation to do what he hasn't been able to achieve in the market in terms of challenging the wiki platforms does pose a different kind of threat," he says. "[But] the platform is open source, and the content is open licensed or public domain, which means the community can snippet it at any point and mirror it and create other Wikipedias," Bledsoe says.
In other words, "you can't close it, you can't buy it out," he says.
Contributors to the site can be "targets of bad actors for many reasons", a spokesperson for the Wikimedia Foundation US told ABC. The foundation is committed to supporting them by offering digital security training, by collecting little personal information from editors, and by maintaining a legal fee assistance program, the spokesperson wrote.
Nothing is perfect
Wikipedia's core tenets — designed to ensure the encyclopedia's information is accurate and objective — are citing reliable sources, using neutral point of view, and acting in good faith.
When the policies are working, high-quality information is often achieved. "Probably the best out there on many subjects, that is without a doubt," Heather Ford says.
Ford is an associate professor at University of Technology, Sydney, and studies how people produce and share knowledge online. She says Wikipedia information is at its best when entries are read and edited by lots of people. But that is not always the case.
"Certain pages are not well followed by people, certain language versions of Wikipedia are very small and have fewer editors and fewer technology to support the kind of generation and maintenance of quality information," she says.
Then there are contentious pages, where consensus among Wikipedia editors is difficult to achieve. Talk pages — where editors raise concerns, propose changes and discuss content — are sometimes the length of novels. And Wikipedians — the volunteers who edit and maintain the site — don't save these discussions and disagreements for only the most controversial of topics like religion and politics.
"Edit wars", where edits are repeatedly overridden by arguing Wikipedians, are often over the most mundane things. The spelling of yoghurt, where the Bee Gees are from, how to correctly punctuate a person's date of birth. These and many more are listed on the Wikipedia page "lamest edit wars".
Ford says writing in neutral point of view is how Wikipedia policy assumes consensus can be reached and bias can be avoided. But bias always exists, she says.
Ford points to a question examined in detail in Nathaniel Tkacz's book Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness.
What should happen on the Wikipedia article of the Danish Muhammad cartoons controversy? Should the cartoons be shown on Wikipedia or not? Some Wikipedians argued against showing the cartoons, while others argued that an encyclopedia dedicated to sharing knowledge should show them. (The cartoons do appear on Wikipedia.) "Even those seemingly neutral perspectives are not actually neutral," Ford says. "They are taking a position."
Recent research Ford co-authored, which analysed 35,000 Wikipedia entries about Australia places, found depictions of Australian history, identity, and the inclusion of First Nations place names were especially contentious among editors.
Renaming the Wikipedia article on Fraser Island to K'Gari resulted in an edit war. As did describing horses in a national park as "wild" versus "feral". The research also found important historical context of places was sometimes missing.
Editorial disagreements like these are nothing new — they happen wherever knowledge is represented, and facts are decided. Usually, however, they occur in private. On Wikipedia, the talk pages are public.
"What Wikipedia enables is this incredible window into how people actually construct and oppose and fight against these knowledge constructions," Ford says.
But what if you could no longer verify the citations, or browse talk pages to see how decisions on the information were made?
Wikipedia in the age of AI
As AI becomes ubiquitous, it could pose threats to Wikipedia's sustainability. If people turn to AI chatbots to get their information rather than visiting Wikipedia, will that drive down visitation to the site and lead to less contributors and donations, Ford asks. (As a not-for-profit, the majority of Wikimedia Foundation's funding comes from donations — its average donation is $US11 a spokesperson said.)
Some AI chatbots make it difficult "to look up the source of claims in order to figure out where they come from" and this poses a risk to accurate information and truth, she says. Ford says that even if you ask an AI chatbot to provide references it's still working on probability, not necessarily giving you the accurate source of the information it was providing you with. AI tools have been known to create, or "hallucinate", fake references, because they produce the most plausible statement based on patterns, which isn't necessarily correct, or in the case of a reference, real.
Another potential risk, Ford says, is the degradation of information ecosystems. If poor quality information from generative AI is used to populate Wikipedia articles, and then those same articles are used to train generative AI tools, the accuracy of information on Wikipedia and within AI models could be at risk, Ford says.
However, Ford's research shows Wikipedians are also experimenting with how to use generative AI to their advantage to create article outlines, translations, and improve workflows.
The potential for poor quality generative-AI information to infect and degrade Wikipedia is unlikely, Bledsoe says. While it is true that AI content is already making its way to Wikipedia, the editorial systems established over the past 25 years should protect against the scenario that Ford mentions, he argues.
Human oversight, in the form of Wikipedia editors, should be able to correct accuracy issues and misinformation generated by AI the same way it does with articles written by people, he says. "The approach to AI on Wikipedia has always been that humans edit, improve, and audit the work done by AI," a Wikimedia Foundation US spokesperson said.
But Bledsoe agrees it's less clear how a shift in behaviour – from people visiting Wikipedia for information, to being served it by AI chatbots – may impact the site. "Current site usage doesn't seem to indicate that is occurring at a level that is concerning or surprising," he says.
He remains optimistic that some people, concerned with the unverifiability of AI-generated information, will be motivated to turn to Wikipedia to fact check.
AI is also creating technical and financial difficulties for the Wikimedia Foundation. In April, the foundation said the bandwidth used for downloading multimedia content from Wikimedia Commons — a repository of public domain images, videos and audio — had doubled since January 2024. The surge in traffic was coming from scrapers which collect data for AI training models not human users and "presents growing risks and costs", the foundation said.
Nicholas Vincent, assistant professor of computing science at Canada's Simon Fraser University, says the risks to Wikipedia posed by increased scraper traffic is "very serious".
Vincent says Wikipedia has been extremely influential in both the training and evaluation of large language models — the AI tools capable of generating language. While he's less concerned about training models being harmed by poor quality AI-generated information because of the ability AI companies possess to filter that out, he's preoccupied by the possibility of "ecological collapse".
This could occur, he argues, if the volunteer energy and community which maintains Wikipedia disappears and if user traffic decreases as people are no longer fed links back to Wikipedia. It could also occur if contributors lose interest because they begin to feel as if they're doing free labour for AI companies or poor-quality AI-generated articles create "negative utility for the community", he says.
Vincent says there is some evidence human contributions and traffic to Wikipedia are already decreasing, but this kind of analysis is hard to do. "We need to wait a while and see what happens," he says.
No longer a joke
In Adelaide, a 71-year-old we'll call Linda spends 20 to 30 hours a week contributing to Wikipedia. Linda is a pseudonym to protect her identity because she says some Wikipedians make assumptions about editing ability based on people's gender and location.
Linda says she had to retire early due to chronic illness. Wikipedia is a hobby which keeps her intellectually stimulated.
"I get personal satisfaction, but I also do believe it's my way of volunteering to the community at large," she says.
For Linda, contributing to the site is a way to combat misinformation. Dismayed by the spread of lies and fake news, seeking out facts to put on Wikipedia "so that it can be relied on and trusted" makes her feel less hopeless. And while Linda is quick to admit "not every article lives up to that standard" she believes perceptions of Wikipedia are changing.
"Five or 10 years ago …people used to be like, 'Ha! Read it on Wikipedia, what a lot of rubbish'. I think there is a little bit more respect now for what's on Wikipedia," she says.
Linda enjoys the painstaking work of finding reliable sources to build an article and she likes to imagine that a schoolchild or someone without access to a library might stumble across information which changes their life. To Linda, Wikipedia is a way to make the world a better place.
Richard Cooke, an author working on a cultural history of Wikipedia, calls the site "one of the digital wonders of the world". A vast and improbable marvel with the most unlikely origin story.
Cooke's 2020 article Wikipedia is the last best place on the internet, argues the free encyclopedia went from laughing stock to "a beacon of so much that's right" on the internet.
He told the ABC several people had the idea to create an online encyclopedia, but the ones who succeeded had the least staff, the worst technology, an income stream from selling space for online porn adds and zero experience creating reference texts.
"[That's] how unbelievably improbable Wikipedia's beginnings were," he says.
Wikipedia is less algorithmic than most of today's internet, Cooke says. "If you're logged on to Wikipedia's home page, you're not being served up a tailored algorithm just for you," he says.
But he stops short of calling it a shared reality. Wikipedia is not a place where you're "just seeing your preferential version of things served up to you as a delicious piece of confirmation bias," he says. "[But] there will be people who just reject Wikipedia out of hand when it doesn't conform with their concept of reality."
Wikipedia has often been accused of lacking diversity both among its contributors and the topics it covers. Given most editors don't reveal their identities, data on Wikipedians is limited, but surveys conducted by the Wikimedia Foundation have found editors are overwhelmingly male.
Multiple studies have pointed out that Wikipedia suffers from a gender gap — there are significantly fewer female editors and pages about women. A recent study estimates only 19 per cent of biographies on the site feature women and points out that its gender bias risks being amplified given its used to train large language models.
Edit-a-thons and other initiatives are often run to try to improve coverage on women and minorities. In Australia, there's been a push for more articles on female artists.
One woman, Annie Reynolds has spent her retirement writing hundreds of Wikipedia profiles of women. "There are so many deserving women who need profiles … there aren't enough hours in the day to make as much difference as I'd like to make," she told SBS.
Cooke says the number of editors peaked a long time ago, and he fears the culture of Wikipedia could die off.
"That's not just because the number of noteworthy things in the universe were mostly in Wikipedia already," he says. "It's because it became harder for new people to contribute to Wikipedia in a meaningful way."
Wikipedia has a framework to help editors decide if topics are noteworthy enough to merit a Wikipedia article, but noteworthiness has remained a subjective concept on the site. Articles can be nominated for deletion by editors with additional administrative powers if they are considered vandalism or breach copyright, or if they're considered duplications or articles too trivial for an encyclopedia.
But who decides? Over the years, Wikipedians have been drawn into a meta battle over what should be included on the site. Ask any Wikipedian, and they can tell you if they're an "inclusionist" or a "deletionist". According to Cooke, the deletionists have won and this is also why he believes it's getting harder for editors to contribute.
Busting the myths
According to Cooke, there are a series of myths about Wikipedia that need busting. At the top of his long list is the notion that Wikipedia is constructed via the wisdom of crowds.
"It doesn't rely on people's contributions to the same degree," he says. "The number of people who have steered its policy and its culture and frameworks over that time have been very, very small," he says.
The idea that anyone can edit Wikipedia also needs challenging, he believes. Being able to edit also demands an understanding "of what constitutes reliable sourcing, which is contentious outside Wikipedia," Cooke says.
Behind what the casual reader sees is a complex system of processes, where everything from harmonious team work to toxic trolling is taking place. Wikipedia has arbitration processes where contributors can be banned or restricted from altering contentious pages.
It's also untrue that vandalism is always corrected quickly, he says. One notorious example is Alan MacMasters, a man who never existed but who, for almost a decade, was credited on Wikipedia with having invented the electric toaster. The false claim was cited by various newspapers and organisations over the years before the hoax was exposed.
Cooke says Wikipedia is not immune to being overtaken by bad actors or embroiled in culture wars. "If you look at Japanese Wikipedia or Croatian Wikipedia or Polish Wikipedia, there have been extended stints where it has been taken over by what we would call people who have a revisionist view of history," he says.
But within its flaws, Cooke finds its utility. "Wikipedia's errors are also the things which mean that it has much more use and value then something that would have been more accurate, at least in theory, and probably not in practise," he says.
Like many of its devotees he has a favourite page: an entry about the embanking of the River Thames, which explains how it was transformed over centuries from a wide marshland to a tidal canal. "It seems very obscure, but it turns out to be very important," he says.
Cooke doesn't know who created this entry, and that's part of its appeal.
"In an age with not very many unqualified public goods, where there's a lot of emphasis on personal branding and attention garnering, [I like] that someone would for free donate this volume of time," he says, "and not even attach their name to it."
Credits
Words: Rhiannon Stevens
Editing: Catherine Taylor
Illustrations: Lindsay Dunbar
