A question comes to mind when writing an editorial about Wikipedia. Will this editorial, surely a reliable source, form part of Wikipedia’s entry on Wikipedia?
The huge online encyclopedia can sometimes feel like a Sisyphean operation, with one link leading to another and then another and then right back to where you started. And whether you are writing term papers, working in journalism or introducing a speaker, it remains the least cool source in the universe. Everybody we know uses it from time to time for most all of the above, but few admit to gleaning anything there. Too ubiquitous. And anonymous to boot.
Initially, those in jobs like ours were hardwired to resent the amateur nature of this approach to fact-based information gathering; free labor is a threat to professionalism. Craigslist, the seemingly benign classified listings operation, single-handedly destroyed the business model of most alternative news weeklies, which never recovered. But those horses bolted the stables long ago and they ain’t coming back.
So we’re not here to diss Wikipedia. We’re here to praise its commitment to fairness and neutrality and the volunteers who have preserved its integrity all these years.
We’re also here to note that, in many areas, it is now highly accurate and even authoritative. And to say that its founder, Jimmy Wales, stands out among his tech-god peers for his commitment to impartiality and his lack of interest in either algorithms or monetization. That has meant Wikipedia (unlike Twitter) has been able to arm itself against a takeover, notwithstanding its billions of users.
We had a good chat with the 59-year-old Wales the other day, in honor of Thursday’s Wiki birthday and his history as a former Chicagoan (Wales now lives in the U.K. and spoke to us over Zoom from his basement). We found him to be an interesting thinker when it comes to the alleged AI revolution soaking up so much attention, and also on the matter of how and why so much of academia and journalism is abandoning neutrality in favor of loaded language.
Although we all remember a world before Wikipedia, in many ways the site is now old-fashioned. “In a world with an enormous deluge of misinformation,” Wales said, “we just stay true to our simple concepts: We believe in quality information from reliable sources.”
Perhaps more significantly and unlike your social media feeds, Wikipedia does not serve up that information in a way as to hook you on content and then sell you goods and services. It does not seek you out; you have to go there yourself and, if you do, you see what anyone can see. Or, indeed, anyone can write: The site is penned and edited by thousands of volunteers, often experts in obscure and archaic fields (Wales noted that many are retirees). “We like volunteers with humility about what we know,” Wales said. “We have a lovely bunch of nerds.”
Said nerds, though, are intolerant of something called “POV pushing,” Wikispeak for writing about a controversial event through a particular lens. Point-of-view pushing has, of course, become ubiquitous not just in opinion sections like this one, where it has a rightful and clearly defined place, but in the news pages as well. It sells better because, alas, people generally prefer to be confirmed in their values rather than being asked to question them. Our view is that Wikipedia has done a better job policing POV-pushing language on its pages than, say, the Associated Press or most academic journals, although one person’s neutrality can be another’s POV pushing and many on the impassioned left, especially, are rendered furious by so-called “bothsidesism,” now most often used as a pejorative term. False equivalencies are a genuine trap to avoid, but “bothsidesism” is not the same thing as offering misinformation.
Wikipedia relishes the ancient craft of bothsidesism, as it does consensus building. Read some of its articles and you see that this is an obsession of the site: We went down a rabbit hole with Wales over the difference between the word “refuted” (often POV pushing and therefore mostly to be avoided) and “disputed” (more likely to be a neutral term). All of this is in service of trust-building; trust doesn’t just serve the interests of a website but a country. Without it, you are less likely to see cooperation or collaboration.
Our sense is that Wikipedia has greatly improved over its 25 years. Wales agreed only to a point: “We were never as bad as people thought we were and we’re not as good as they think we are.”
Is AI a threat to Wikipedia? Hard to say. There, Wales had a philosophy not unlike our own. We like and are proud of what we do and plan to keep doing it until we are unable to do it. Interestingly, he did note that the bots that now crawl all over the 66 million existing Wikipedia pages, day and night, use up an enormous amount of power and server space; prior to the coming of the bots, the site knew which pages would get the most traffic and adjust its engine-room resources accordingly. That now has become harder and more expensive; one of the many costs of the AI revolution being shouldered by those who can expect no financial benefit.
But we found Wales generous to a fault toward the algorithms that now run our lives and the AI companies stealing his open-source stuff. “We didn’t need algorithms to be mean to each other,” he said. “So we can still be nice to each other with algorithms.”
One can hope. There is, of course, a Wiki page for that: “an optimistic state of mind that is based on an expectation of positive outcomes with respect to events and circumstances in one’s own life, or the world at large.”
Beats the alternative.
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