As the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia celebrates its 25th anniversary this month, the academic community must confront an uncomfortable truth: we have systematically failed to realize our greatest knowledge commons.
Why do these scholars devote time to editing and updating Wikipedia?
Although 2005 nature Investigation shows that Wikipedia’s accuracy was comparable to Encyclopedia Britannica(Look nature 438900-901; 2005) – and years of follow-up research confirming that its specialist articles in fields such as health and psychology are often reasonable alternatives to professional sources – academia still treats Wikipedia with unjustified skepticism. Many students trust him; Most scientists don’t do that.
I have witnessed this academic snobbery first-hand, during a decade of service on the Wikimedia Foundation’s board of directors and extensive research and publications on Wikipedia.
However, Wikipedia’s heavily trained generative AI systems now threaten the future of this free, volunteer-based resource. The stakes have changed, and academics need to take notice. Large language models provide instant answers pulled from Wikipedia without any attribution. When AI chatbots provide seemingly authoritative responses pulled from the same Wikipedia pages, why would anyone go to the source, let alone contribute to it?
This parasitic relationship endangers the last bastion of freely accessible, human-curated knowledge and undermines the premise of collaboration on which many Wikipedia knowledge-sharing practices depend.
The most cited scientific articles on Wikipedia have been revealed
Wikipedia represents something unprecedented: it is the only major platform on which truth emerges through transparent debate, rather than through algorithmic obfuscation or corporate interests. Every edit is recorded, and every discussion is archived. In an age of hallucinatory AI, black box algorithms, and widespread disinformation, Wikipedia’s radical transparency has become even more important.
Humans bring irreplaceable elements to knowledge creation that AI cannot emulate: the ability to discover archival materials, photograph undocumented places, engage in nuanced—if heated—debate about neutrality and verifiability, and understand cultural contexts across more than 300 language versions.
We academics, who claim custodianship of knowledge, have abdicated our responsibility for what can be said The most consulted reference work in the world. We prohibit students from citing Wikipedia while privately consulting it ourselves, because we know that it has a significant impact on the scientific literature: papers receive increased citations and social impact. After it was mentioned by Wikipedia.