{"id":522411,"date":"2026-03-08T11:22:09","date_gmt":"2026-03-08T11:22:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/522411\/"},"modified":"2026-03-08T11:22:09","modified_gmt":"2026-03-08T11:22:09","slug":"at-25-wikipedia-faces-a-double-threat-the-rise-of-ai-and-the-decline-of-local-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/522411\/","title":{"rendered":"At 25, Wikipedia faces a double threat: the rise of AI and the decline of local media"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Sunday Magazine27:46In a sea of misinformation, Wikipedia wants to shore up trust<\/p>\n

When Wikipedia first emerged in 2001, it was still a time when most had to be patient for information \u2014 waiting for the high-pitched scree and its answering cry as the computer connected, painstakingly, to the internet via dial-up.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And the idea of an open source encyclopedia that could be updated by anyone in real time \u2014 or its equivalent in those pre-fibre-optic days \u2014 sparked questions and plenty of criticism about how accurate that information could be.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Fast-forward 25 years and Wikipedia is now the ninth most visited site on the internet, with nearly 15 billion visitors each month, searching and editing its more than 65 million articles.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

But despite its speedy ascent in the early years and steady growth thereafter, Wikipedia isn\u2019t as visible as it used to be. Now, when you Google a question, the top search result will likely be a Wiki link, but its AI will also handily synthesize the answer for you above it. And ChatGPT? That cuts Wikipedia out altogether.<\/p>\n

Now, human visitors to the site are on the decline, dropping by roughly eight per cent in parts of 2025, while large language models (LLMs) \u2014 chatbots or other forms of AI that can condense words and information \u2014 are hammering Wikipedia\u2019s servers and using it as a training ground.\u00a0<\/p>\n

If these trends continue, alongside the decline in local news outlets that are Wikipedia\u2019s main sources, the future is \u201cmore dire than you think,\u201d says Zachary McDowell, an associate professor of communication studies at the University of Illinois in Chicago and the author of Wikipedia and the Representation of Reality<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"AZachary McDowell is an associate professor of communications at the University of Illinois in Chicago and the author of Wikipedia and the Representation of Reality. (Wikimedia Commons)<\/p>\n

Look at it like a pyramid of information accessibility, with LLMs at the top, Wikipedia in the middle and traditional news media on the bottom, he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs you erode all the secondary sources below and then you start to erode Wikipedia, what you have is something that will inevitably crash in upon itself,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s been shown over and over again that when you feed these [AI] systems synthetic data, when you feed them things that have been created by other AI sources, they end up with what they refer to as model collapse.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

In layman\u2019s terms, it\u2019s considered digital inbreeding \u2014 when AI-generated information gets fed back in on itself again and again, increasing the number of errors and inaccuracies.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Human failsafe<\/p>\n

Wikipedia\u2019s founder, Jimmy Wales, expresses more concern about the financial implications of the increasing demand that LLMs are placing on the online encyclopedia. He notes the need for more databases and servers to support that extra traffic from \u201cAI crawlers\u201d was the reason behind the deals it announced<\/a> with several AI partners in January, including with Amazon, Meta and Microsoft.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe average donation to Wikipedia is about $10 [US],\u201d he said. \u201cPeople aren’t donating to subsidize OpenAI.”<\/p>\n

But McDowell\u2019s concerns about those AI crawlers making it more difficult to access neutral, accurate information? Wales said he doesn\u2019t share them when it comes to Wikipedia.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t listen to AI; Wikipedia is written by humans and one of our strongest policy points is that everything in Wikipedia needs to … have a quality source,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s the pathway into Wikipedia \u2026 human-created, human-vetted knowledge.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"AEntrepreneur and co-founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, attends the Wired Next Fest 2019 at the Giardini Indro Montanelli on May 25, 2019 in Milan, Italy. (Rosdiana Ciaravolo\/Getty Images)The first draft of history<\/p>\n

But McDowell and Wales agree that media concentration \u2014 especially in small local newspapers and news stations \u2014 affects Wikipedia, but in a larger sense, it also affects the ability to accurately capture a record for history.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Conglomeration erodes the \u201cneutrality\u201d for which Wikipedia and traditional media strive, McDowell said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThese conglomerates, many of which have very political leanings, are now pushing a particular ideology and agenda.”<\/p>\n

WATCH | How AI can be used to interrupt an election:\"\"<\/p>\n

Can you spot the deepfake? How AI is threatening elections<\/p>\n

AI-generated fake videos are being used for scams and internet gags, but what happens when they\u2019re created to interfere in elections? CBC\u2019s Catharine Tunney breaks down how the technology can be weaponized and looks at whether Canada is ready for a deepfake election.<\/p>\n

In Canada, more than 250<\/a> local news publications or broadcasts have shuttered between 2008 and Oct. 1, 2025, according to the advocacy group News Media Canada.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cYou know, it’s easier in some ways to write a history of a small town from 30 years ago than it is from three years ago if, as in many places, the local newspaper has died and gone,\u201d Wales said in an interview with CBC Radio. <\/p>\n

\u201cThat first draft of history isn\u2019t even being captured in the first place. So there’s no question that that’s a problem.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The ‘Wikipedia detour’<\/p>\n

AI, however, is just speeding up what McDowell calls \u201cthe Wikipedia detour\u201d \u2014 something that began a decade ago, as Google started summarizing answers on the search results page itself.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Cutting Wikipedia out of the equation doesn\u2019t just affect its ability to recruit editors or donors, it undermines digital and information literacy, because people don\u2019t see the citations that form the foundation of these articles. \u00a0<\/p>\n

Nor are they encouraged to dig deeper, in the way that what might start as a search about black holes eventually brings you to the dates for an upcoming lunar eclipse. Wikipedia can be a rabbit hole, but in a good way.<\/p>\n

\"AJess Wade is a British physicist and assistant professor at Imperial College London. She has written more than 2,200 Wikipedia articles, the vast majority of which are biographies of female scientists. (Submitted by Jess Wade)<\/p>\n

It\u2019s how Jess Wade has helped boost the profile of female scientists. The British physicist and assistant professor at Imperial College London in the U.K. has written more than 2,200 biographies on Wikipedia of women and other marginalized groups who work in the sciences over the past eight years, saying that most of her articles get visited as people are investigating a scientific concept and then stumble upon the fact that it was invented by a woman.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And that boosts their visibility in real time. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Wade and a colleague added biographies about the women and people of colour on the front lines of the public health crisis. As time wore on, she said, the \u201cold white men\u201d who had been appearing in newspapers or on TV began to be replaced by some of the experts she had included.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was really struck by how many broadcasters or teachers or lawyers use Wikipedia as a first point of call when looking for information.”<\/p>\n

How AI can help<\/p>\n

There are ways, though, that Wikipedia is exploring how to use AI to improve, including its search experience, as its interface hasn’t changed much in recent years. That could include using a chatbot, Wales said.<\/p>\n

And while the site\u2019s 250,000 volunteer editors would still be the ones curating it into the future, he said he can see AI doing some simple automation \u2014 fixing a dead link in an article, for example, by finding potential replacements that a human could validate and decide whether to include.<\/p>\n

\u201cAutomating some of the drudgery of working on Wikipedia could be very helpful and sort of make it higher quality.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Sunday Magazine27:46In a sea of misinformation, Wikipedia wants to shore up trust When Wikipedia first emerged in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":522412,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,49,48,61],"class_list":{"0":"post-522411","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-ca","12":"tag-canada","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/522411","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=522411"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/522411\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/522412"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=522411"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=522411"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=522411"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}