The world’s most important knowledge platform needs young editors to rescue it from chatbots – and its own tired practices
Established in 2001, Wikipedia is an “old man” by internet standards. But the role it plays in our collective knowledge of the world remains astonishing. Content from the free internet encyclopedia appears in everything from high-school term papers and pub trivia questions to search engine summaries and voice assistants. Tools like Google’s AI Overviews and ChatGPT rely heavily on Wikipedia, although they rarely credit the site in their responses.
And therein lies the problem: as Wikipedia’s visibility diminishes, reduced to mere training data for AI applications, it also loses prominence in the minds of readers and potential contributors. When someone notices a topic that is poorly described on Wikipedia, they might feel motivated to correct it. But this can-do spirit goes away when the error comes through an AI summary, where the source of the information isn’t clear.
It’s a fun toy. It’s not a research aid, it’s not a productivity tool, and it’s not particularly useful in the workplace.
It’s honestly very similar to the VR craze of a few years back. Silicon Valley invented a fun toy and then tried to convince everyone that it would transform the workplace. Meetings in VR and simulated workstations and all that. Ultimately everyone figured out that VR is completely useless in the workplace and Silicon Valley was just trying to find ways to sell their fun toy. Now we’re going through the same learnings with AI.
I love VR. I have so many hours in some of the slower paced fps titles that it’s almost matched my video game time total for non-vr games on steam.
The one thing I learned for sure is that I don’t want anyone else telling me when I have to put on the headset and when I’m allowed to take it off.
Never will wear a vr headset in the workspace.
Oh yeah, I love my Index as well. I think it’s a lot of fun as a gaming device. But the big money is in B2B sales, which is why tech companies try to convince everyone that blockchain/VR/LLMs have all these corporate applications that just make no damn sense.