Wikipedia is in peril.<\/p>\n
In a world where trust<\/a> in<\/a> truth<\/a> is crumbling, the grande dame of collective online fact-gathering is under threat on every front. The MAGA right, with Elon Musk at the fore, is slinging accusations of political bias and antisemitism and has even questioned the site\u2019s nonprofit status. Artificial intelligence is raiding the encyclopedia\u2019s resources and draining attention. Repressive governments have hauled its volunteer editors into penal colonies.<\/p>\n In Wikipedia\u2019s 25-year history, it has never had to fight this hard.<\/p>\n The organization that supports the site, the Wikimedia Foundation, is increasing its lobbying budget and advertising in Times Square. It is charging companies like Google and Meta that gobble up the encyclopedia\u2019s 65 million articles, and throttling access for certain scrapers. And it is expanding its human rights team to better protect volunteers against rising harassment, surveillance and retaliation.<\/p>\n For an organization that holds neutrality as a cardinal rule, it is a lot of conflict, requiring Wikimedia to go on the offensive \u2014 diplomatically, of course.<\/p>\n So it found a diplomat: Bernadette Meehan, 50, became Wikimedia\u2019s chief executive in January, after stints as the U.S. ambassador to Chile and at the Obama Foundation, at the State Department, at the National Security Council and on Wall Street.<\/p>\n In a career full of hire-wire acts \u2014 helping to negotiate nuclear deals with Iran, facilitating talks with Cuba \u2014 being the custodian of one of the world\u2019s 10 most visited websites could be Ms. Meehan\u2019s trickiest task. The trilingual former public servant is the first with her background in the Wikimedia job, succeeding mostly women<\/a> from fields like law, journalism and Planned Parenthood.<\/p>\n Ms. Meehan will not say Wikipedia is at war \u2014 not after she spent much of 2007 in Iraq<\/a>, in an actual war zone where she witnessed \u201cthe supreme cruelty of human beings.\u201d<\/p>\n But she accepts that the site is in a metaphorical battle for its very existence.<\/p>\n \u201cWikipedia underpins everything that we have on the internet,\u201d she said in her first interview in the role. \u201cIt is beloved, it is credible; in increasingly polarized times, it is seen as a trustworthy source.\u201d<\/p>\n It is also, she said, at an inflection point.<\/p>\n \u201cHow do we keep this project alive?\u201d she asked.<\/p>\n A fight with the right<\/p>\n Mr. Musk has railed against Wikipedia as \u201cWokepedia\u201d and \u201can extension of legacy media propaganda.\u201d He has protested his entry<\/a> and urged his followers to withhold donations<\/a> over the foundation\u2019s diversity initiatives.<\/p>\n The tech mogul is one in a chorus of conservatives calling the reference site a hotbed of liberal bias. Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, expressed \u201calarm\u201d<\/a> about both Wikipedia\u2019s purported ideological lean and claims that editors were coordinating to spread antisemitic and pro-Hamas narratives<\/a>. David Sacks<\/a>, recently the Trump administration\u2019s A.I. czar, weighed in. So did Tucker Carlson<\/a>, a popular commentator, and even Larry Sanger, who founded Wikipedia with Jimmy Wales<\/a> in 2001.<\/p>\n Wikipedia has long been a proxy battleground for warring ideas about truth: What constitutes balance? What makes a good source<\/a>? But now, those online debates could result in real repercussions.<\/p>\n Last year, a Trump administration official<\/a> made inquiries into the nonprofit\u2019s tax-exempt status. A Republican-led congressional oversight committee initiated an investigation<\/a> in August, demanding that Wikimedia identify certain editors and produce any evidence of influence from foreign operatives or academic institutions. The foundation said it responded to both inquests last year and had no updates.<\/p>\n To de-escalate the antagonism, Ms. Meehan and her team are addressing misconceptions about the site. Wikipedia is largely decentralized, with independent contributors distilling facts through open debate and agreement. Elected arbitration committees<\/a> handle dispute resolution. The foundation, with a budget of $208.6 million and about 600 employees and contractors, provides servers and funding but steers clear of content decisions.<\/p>\n There is no shadowy mastermind, no leftist cabal, according to the foundation. Just the Wikipedians \u2014 nearly 250,000 unpaid strangers editing 324 times a minute under pseudonyms like \u201cDr. Blofeld\u201d and \u201cWooHooKitty.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe most important thing to understand about Wikipedia is it is truly a democracy,\u201d said Bill Adair, who created the fact-checking site PolitiFact and is writing a book about the encyclopedia. \u201cIt\u2019s messy, it\u2019s loud, it often works.\u201d<\/p>\n Ms. Meehan has been hauling her message to Capitol Hill, where she\u2019s distributed personally meaningful printouts of Wikipedia entries. The foundation also uses lobbyists, nearly doubling<\/a> its spending to $174,300 in the most recent fiscal year and retaining the Holland & Knight firm<\/a> last spring for $150,000 a quarter.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are not seeking to be part of culture wars, of political discourse,\u201d Ms. Meehan said. \u201cThese are people who want to put knowledge into the world, for people to do with it what they want.\u201d<\/p>\n To those convinced of bias on Wikipedia, her recommendation is simple: Become an editor.<\/p>\n \u201cMore dialogue, frankly, is what\u2019s needed in this moment,\u201d she said. \u201cSo the door is open.\u201d<\/p>\n Gorging on a data buffet<\/p>\n For many Wikipedians, the Trump administration may be the site\u2019s most acute threat, but its most existential one is artificial intelligence. They have resisted<\/a> the idea<\/a> of integrating the technology, calling it<\/a> \u201ctruly ghastly\u201d (or, simply, \u201cyuck\u201d).<\/p>\n The more urgent worry, though, is that Wikipedia is being exploited to train its own competitors, as A.I. systems hoover up its content to inform chatbots like Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT. The bots then regurgitate the information, often imperfectly, polluting the information ecosystem that feeds into the encyclopedia.<\/p>\n Exhibit A: Grokipedia<\/a>, a rival built by Mr. Musk and edited by xAI, his artificial intelligence company. It has no public edit history and lifts liberally from Wikipedia while also inventing errors (including several in its profile of Ms. Meehan).<\/p>\n A.I.-generated summaries atop search results also siphon away potential visitors, she said. Human page views of Wikipedia\u2019s English edition slumped 8 percent late last year compared with a year earlier. The decline is concerning enough that Ms. Meehan \u2014 whose favorite entry describes \u201ctsundoku,\u201d the Japanese term for collecting books and letting them pile up unread \u2014 is pushing to reach younger people through TikTok and Roblox.<\/p>\n Wikimedia wants more give-and-take from the A.I. industry. It now charges clients like Amazon and Microsoft for faster bulk access to its data through a four-year-old commercial subsidiary called Enterprise. Last year, Enterprise earned $8.3 million, more than doubling the prior year\u2019s revenue.<\/p>\n This spring, Wikimedia also began limiting automated freeloaders from scraping its site and overwhelming its back end \u2014 which accounts for nearly a third<\/a> of its most intensive bandwidth demands. But the foundation can currently halt only about 30 percent of abusive data requests \u2014 about 1.5 billion daily.<\/p>\n \u201cOur infrastructure is not free, and when scrapers come in and bulk-download, it really takes a toll,\u201d Ms. Meehan said. \u201cThere is a literal dollar cost to that behavior.\u201d<\/p>\n A global challenge<\/p>\n Wikipedia sprawls across 345 different editions. The English one is by far the most active, with nearly 115,000 contributors, while others, in languages like the western African Kusaal and the Taiwanese Seediq, have smaller reach.<\/p>\n In countries like China, Myanmar and North Korea, Wikipedia is blocked entirely. Turkey banned the site for nearly three years<\/a> until 2020. Wikimedia negotiated with the Indonesian government<\/a> this year over blackout threats.<\/p>\n Since 2020, at least 10 Wikipedia editors have been imprisoned for their work and countless others threatened. A pediatrician<\/a> in Saudi Arabia was sentenced to 14 years in prison after editing pages about government surveillance and a women\u2019s rights activist. Belarus<\/a> has detained several editors, sending one to a penal colony<\/a> for more than a year after he edited a post about murdered journalists. Curbs in free expression have been rising globally, affecting Wikipedia and its volunteers, a foundation spokesman wrote in an email.<\/p>\n Governments are also targeting Wikipedia content specifically. Of the 934<\/a> requests the foundation received last year to take down or alter content (it granted two<\/a>), 117 came from governments, up from 10 a decade ago.<\/p>\n Most were from Russia, whose antagonism toward Wikipedia deepened after the country invaded Ukraine in 2022. Moscow has repeatedly accused<\/a> the site of violating a sweeping censorship law<\/a> that criminalized content deemed to \u201cdiscredit\u201d Russia\u2019s military (Wikimedia refuses to pay the associated fines). A Russian clone of Wikipedia<\/a> called Ruwiki was introduced in 2023; a Russian network of fake news portals managed to infiltrate some Wikipedia citations<\/a>.<\/p>\n Wikimedia is expanding its human rights team, a division of the legal department that safeguards volunteers from digital and physical threats. The foundation recently deployed an anti-doxxing initiative offering contributors more anonymity; it has also connected Wikipedians to local evacuation and extraction services.<\/p>\n Defending volunteers and projects consumes 32 percent of the foundation\u2019s budget. Wikimedia\u2019s litigation costs have doubled since 2020, in part because there are more cases, which new privacy and speech regulations are making more complex. <\/p>\n \u201cA core component of what we do is preserving freedom to information,\u201d Ms. Meehan said. \u201cThat will never change, that commitment to advocating for those rights, and to helping to protect within our limited means editors who engage in that project and are persecuted for that very reason.\u201d<\/p>\n A search for new recruits<\/p>\n Wikipedia\u2019s future has often seemed precarious \u2014 its entry titled \u201cPredictions of the end of Wikipedia<\/a>\u201d is nearly nine years old. But especially now, with so many dangers at its gate and fewer people<\/a> joining its ranks, the site cannot afford to grow stale.<\/p>\n The foundation wants to entice a new generation of contributors that is not predominantly white, male and graying. Training sessions to demystify editing, for example, drew one 25-year-old Vietnamese American volunteer who has created hundreds of pages in two years about zeitgeisty topics like the \u201cswag gap<\/a>\u201d and the \u201cperformative male<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n In five months, Ms. Meehan has met more than 1,100 such Wikipedians across four continents. Unlike most modern content creators, they \u201caren\u2019t out there looking to be the next influencer or famous person,\u201d she said. When they congregate, as on a recent rainy weekend<\/a> in San Francisco, they want to discuss the finer points of A.I. detection and disappearing databases<\/a>.<\/p>\n