wikipedia

Wikipedia marked its 22nd anniversary in January. It remains, in many ways, a throwback to the Internet’s utopian early days, when experiments with open collaboration — anyone can write and edit for Wikipedia — had yet to cede the digital terrain to multibillion-dollar corporations and data miners, advertising schemers and social-media propagandist... See more

Jimmy Wales described it in 2004, was to create “a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.” The following year, Wales also stated, “We help the internet not suck.

The key is that knowledge is a human endeavor, and the development of Wikipedia and its sister projects depends on human collaboration and consensus. Machine learning tools can augment the process, but AI cannot replace volunteer Wikimedians.

Welcoming language, customized wayfinding, instructional onboarding, familiar contribution and consumption interfaces, suggested actions, and explicit gratitude and feedback are all areas where small changes could make significant improvements in the Wikimedia experience—and potentially improve the quality of new editor contributions and overall re... See more

“Sharing knowledge is by nature an act of kindness,”

Over the past decade it has become a kind of factual netting that holds the whole digital world together.

Some Wikipedians remark that their endeavor works in practice, but not in theory.

they view the encyclopedia as a “consensus truth,” as one of them put it: It acts as a reality check in a society where facts are increasingly contested. That truth is less about data points — “How old is Joe Biden?” — than about complex events like the Covid-19 pandemic, in which facts are constantly evolving, frequently distorted and furiously de... See more

“We’ve had artificial-intelligence tools and bots since 2002, and we’ve had a team dedicated to machine learning since 2017,” Selena Deckelmann, Wikimedia’s chief technology officer, told me. “They’re extremely valuable for semiautomated content review, and especially for translations.