WIKIPEDIA

Arc Digital -  Elon Musk is attacking Wikipedia, calling it “Wokepedia” and urging people not to donate “until they restore balance” (by which he means be biased in favor of his views). It’s not the first time he’s denounced the online encyclopedia, and it’s not surprising he and his allies hate it. Wikipedia is a bastion of truth, one they can’t buy or bully, where reality is what the facts are, not whatever some rich reactionaries wish it were. Everyone who prizes finding reliable information on the internet, and values truth more broadly, should defend it.

Wikipedia is the “last good website,” the one online staple that hasn’t gone through the process of “enshittification.” It’s not profit-seeking or publicly traded, so it doesn’t try to monetize the massive number of eyeballs it attracts. It isn’t full of ads, and doesn’t elevate sponsored content. It doesn’t incentivize sensationalism and conflict like algorithmic social media. It isn’t full of slop generated by software the tech industry overhypes as “AI.” It’s the last big website from the early internet that still does the good thing it set out to do; the thing that appealled to so many users and made it part of the wider culture.

By contrast take Google, the crown jewel of internet 1.0. The search engine can still deliver useful information, but it has degraded in pursuit of revenue, placing sponsored links at the top. Old Google, the one that took over the world, used a web crawler that tracked links between websites, and put weight on the search results users chose, surfacing the most relevant and reliable places on the internet in a version of the wisdom of crowds. But now, on top of a pay-to-play element, Google uses its Gemini AI to tell users a sometimes inaccurate answer to their query first. Only after scrolling past the less reliable Gemini answer and some sponsored links can users get to the list of sites they were searching for.

Wikipedia uses a variation on the wisdom of crowds for its ever-growing encyclopedia, with a community of volunteers overseen by administrators. Some people are more knowledgeable, some are more dedicated, and while one or two people may get something wrong, the balance of a knowledgeable, dedicated community will usually get it right. Wikipedia’s community is self-policing, and suspends “vandals” who insert falsehoods or abusive language. When there’s community disagreement prompting back-and-forth edits, or a topic subject to concerted vandalism, administrations restrict who can contribute to it.

Wikipedia isn’t perfect—what is?—and the collective editing process makes the entries on controversial topics, such as Israel-Palestine, more volatile, but it’s a valuable resource. A study published in Nature found the website’s accuracy comparable to Encyclopedia Britannica.