Cry Us a River: AI Chatbots May Be Killing Wikipedia – Science and Culture Today
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It’s not clear how this will impact a commonly heard criticism of Wikipedia — bias, very much including the subject of intelligent design. However, at Gizmodo, Bruce Gil reports that “AI Is Killing Wikipedia’s Human Traffic”:
In a blog post published today, Marshall Miller, the foundation’s senior director of product, said Wikipedia’s human visits are down about 8% over the past few months compared to the same period in 2024…
“We believe that these declines reflect the impact of generative AI and social media on how people seek information, especially with search engines providing answers directly to searchers, often based on Wikipedia content,” Miller wrote. … Unfortunately, these shifts could lead to negative ripple effects for Wikipedia. With fewer visits, Wikipedia’s volunteer base, the community that writes and edits its content, could shrink, Miller warned. And with less traffic, individual donations that keep the nonprofit running could also decline.
Of course, chatbots can be tweaked to spout biased information too.
Larry Sanger, a co-founder of the online encyclopedia — the 13th most visited site on the internet, according to Gizmodo —
has been leading efforts to address and counter the bias.
According to Greg Piper at Just the News, one issue he faces is lack of transparency about heavy political involvement:
The crown jewel of the Wikimedia Foundation is losing its sheen in the face of Sanger’s “nine theses,” promoted by nascent Wikipedia competitors including X owner Elon Musk, and the stories of dissenting editors and article subjects who claim Wikipedia’s elite suppressed their work and locked or scrubbed articles to prevent challenges to its orthodoxy.
The House Oversight Committee recently opened a probe of alleged coordination by Wikipedia editors to skew U.S. public opinion on sensitive topics by manipulating articles.
This spring, then-interim U.S. Attorney for D.C. Ed Martin accused its parent of violating nonprofit obligations by peddling disinformation aimed at Americans, a month after the conservative Media Research Center documented it trashing President Trump’s Cabinet nominees and censoring their Wikipedia pages.
Here are Sanger’s Nine Theses about what’s wrong with Wikipedia and how to fix it.
It may be useful to remember all this if we are tempted to just take Wikipedia at face value.
Cross-posted at Mind Matters News.
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