Wikipedians Believed AI Would Come and Go. They Were Wrong
In a world of AI Overviews, Wikipedia usage declines. But the real loss may be far more existential than website traffic.
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Long before the storm of AI struck Wikipedia , the Wikimedia Foundation was making preparations. Wikipedians battened down the hatches and made confident-sounding predictions that it would break and wash over them. Large language models might even improve Wikipedia, it was said, automating more of the housekeeping—formatting, sources, citations, missing links—and so freeing up humans to do creative work. It was not so simple. In 2019, then-Wikimedia Foundation head Katherine Maher wrote an op-ed in The New York Times under the headline “ Without Humans, A.I. Can Wreak Havoc .” “Too often,”…
