Wikipedia is turning 25 this month, and it’s never been more important.
The online, collectively created encyclopedia has been a cornerstone of the internet decades, but as generative AI started flooding every platform with AI-generated slop over the last couple of years, Wikipedia’s governance model, editing process, and dedication to citing reliable sources has emerged as one of the most reliable and resilient models we have.
And yet, as successful as the model is, it’s almost never replicated.
This week on the podcast we’re joined by Selena Deckelmann, the Chief Product and Technology Officer at the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that operates Wikipedia. That means Selena oversees the technical infrastructure and product strategy for one of the most visited sites in the world, and one the most comprehensive repositories of human knowledge ever assembled. Wikipedia is turning 25 this month, so I wanted to talk to Selena about how Wikipedia works and how it plans to continue to work in the age of generative AI.
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- Wikipedia’s value in the age of generative AI
- The Editors Protecting Wikipedia from AI Hoaxes
- Wikipedia Pauses AI-Generated Summaries After Editor Backlash
- Wikipedia Says AI Is Causing a Dangerous Decline in Human Visitors
- Jimmy Wales Says Wikipedia Could Use AI. Editors Call It the ‘Antithesis of Wikipedia’