Sublime

Unlike most sites on the Internet that solicit "user generated content", no registration, no email, no identification is needed before someone can change a Wikipedia page. It would seem self-evident that this "open editing" model would lead to uncontrollable chaos and absolute disaster, yet completely counter to intuition, it has produced the oppos... See more

Welcome to Wik

Wikipedia operates on a central database, but its peer production model and edit transparency bears some similarities to decentralized networks. And this option feels decidedly less radical a step for the major social platforms than, say, exit to community.

Wikipedia had to deal with unique problems, since anybody could edit. With its popularity, spam and shameless self-promotion became a constant problem. These were challenges predecessors didn't have to face. Pasting a sales brochure into the Web pages of Britannica was impossible, yet this phenomenon was a continual battle for Wikipedia's patroller... See more

The lack of top down editorial oversight resulted in uneven development of Wikipedia's articles, oftentimes with stark examples: The biography of Britney Spears takes up nearly twice the space as the one for Socrates.

the Wikimedia Enterprise initiative, which launched in 2021. It offers paid, enterprise-grade APIs suitable for building commercial solutions on top of Wikipedia content. And Google is one of its first customers (the second is the Internet Archive).

Wikimedia is not alone with this challenge. As noted in our 2025 global trends report, technology companies are racing to scrape websites for human-created and verified information. Content publishers, open source projects, and websites of all kinds report similar issues.