Bootstrapping the ouroboros
Last week I headed to Singapore with my UTS colleague, Heather Ford, to attend Wikimania, an annual conference for the thousands of active users of Wikipedia around the world. We were going to talk to Wikimedians – as they call themselves – to find out what they think about the rise of generative AI and its implications for the online encyclopedia.
To attend such an event as a volunteer requires a certain level of commitment. What struck me most about the Wikimedians we talked to was just how strong their commitment was to Wikipedia – its community, its processes, its mission. There’s a slightly religious feel to the way Wikimedians channel their energies towards a common goal. But this seems apt. In important ways, the goal – being a free and open compendium of all knowledge – is manifest in, but also transcends, the daily battles being waged on the site’s talk pages over the reliability of sources or the accuracy of edits. The Wikipedia:Purpose page quotes encyclopedist extraordinaire Denis Diderot, who said that the purpose of such a project is ‘to set forth its general system to the men [sic] with whom we live, and transmit it to those who will come after us, so that the work of preceding centuries will not become useless to the centuries to come.’
Of course, what happens in the here and now does not always match the ideal. Wikipedia struggles daily with inaccuracies, misinformation, and vandalism, and in the longer term with entrenched bias and knowledge gaps. I should say Wikimedians struggle – it’s the volunteer editors who add to and maintain the integrity of the knowledge stored on the site, and Wikipedia is in many ways nothing but this community of editors pulling each other’s bootstraps. In this way it differs markedly from Diderot’s project, which despite its age has a permanence that Wikipedia will never have. It’s the dynamic product of a community focused on a common goal – and this, after all, is the source of its strength, just as it is for other sources of knowledge, including more foundational ones such as science.
So it’s perhaps not surprising that the biggest worry for many Wikimedians over the rise of generative AI is that its potential success might lead to a gradual decline in commitment to Wikipedia – from the public to Wikipedia as a knowledge source, and from Wikimedians to maintaining the site. If Wikipedia loses its prominence as ‘the last best place on the internet’, as Richard Cooke has called it, perhaps merely because people no longer know where the information in their Google search results comes from, then donations may fall, editors may abandon the project and the quality of the site will degrade. Of course, generative AI, for now anyway, is trained to a large degree on Wikipedia. Like a snake eating its own tail, generative AI may devour itself. Or, more likely, and worse, knowledge may be sequestered into proprietary domains.
Michael Davis, CMT Research Fellow
This was featured in our fortnightly newsletter published on 25 August 2023. Subscribe here or download it to read it in full:
