Hostilities and disagreements are a hallmark of the Internet more than cooperation and collaboration. So the fact that a public encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone has become one of the most useful repositories of knowledge in the world is frankly incredible. “Thank God it works in practice, because in theory it would never work,” he says Anusha Ali Khan at the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization that runs Wikipedia.
The website was founded in 2001 by Jimmy Wales, who is still involved with it today, and Larry Sanger, who left the project the following year – but continues to criticize it from afar. He recently wrote that the site had been “hijacked by ideologues”.
Needless to say, Sanger’s opinion is not shared by most. Each month, Wikipedia’s 64 million articles in more than 300 languages receive 15 billion hits. As of this writing, it is the ninth most visited website in the world. “The fact that it’s now one of the most trusted sources on the web is not something that anyone would think about, but here we are,” says Alikhan.
Fostering trust on a mass scale is no mean feat. The Internet may have given billions of people access to the sum total of human knowledge, but it has done so largely in ways that are fragmented, unverified, unreliable, and limited. Wikipedia bucks this trend by allowing anyone to create or edit entries on the site. There are now around 260,000 volunteers worldwide and 342 edits are made every minute. The smart system then gives volunteers wider editing powers once they’ve built up a history of responsible changes. Trust fosters engagement and commitment, so strangers on the Internet are willing to cooperate.
In some cases, Wikipedia encourages special interest groups to create and edit pages. For example, a group called Women in Red works to address gender imbalance. Other groups work to spread information about climate change and African history. Those articles are held to the same standards of accuracy, but that hasn’t stopped critics, including Sanger, from accusing the site of bias.
Wikipedia is a deeply unusual website, to avoid influence and bias, it runs no advertising, has no shareholders, and is non-profit. It’s an outlier in the tech world, and things have gone surprisingly well for more than 20 years.
But AI is poised to change all that: it can quickly pump out misleading or malicious listings, consume resources as bots collect training data from the web, and reduce the number of visitors—and therefore potential donors—by creating AI-generated search reports.
topics:
- artificial intelligence/
- Internet
Leave a Reply