Wikipedia is the crown jewel of the old internet. An encyclopaedia for the digital age, it was founded in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger and has since been the go-to website for anyone looking for clear, unbiased information. Even academics use it – if only (they’ll have you believe) as a starting point. But times are changing. The post-truth economy has cast doubt on the website’s future – and that of its parent company, the Wikimedia Foundation.
For a long time the seventh most visited website on the internet, Wikipedia has been knocked down to eighth place since it was overtaken by ChatGPT. “Our number of potential customers has definitely been expanding,” says Lane Becker, president of Wikimedia LLC — the foundation’s for-profit division — “and largely thanks to AI.” Indeed, Wikipedia articles are one of the main sources of content for the “AI overviews” you now get whenever you type a question into Google. This means, however, that while content mined from Wikipedia is front and centre of search results, the actual website is not getting as many clicks.
