Richard Cooke's 'The Last Best Place on the Internet' Examines Wikipedia's Rise and A.I. Threat

Key facts

• Wikipedia has lost more than a billion monthly visits in the last four years, a 25% drop.
• ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini were trained on Wikipedia, called 'the single most important training corpus in the history of artificial intelligence.'
• Wikipedia went online in January 2001 as a crowdsourced offshoot of Nupedia.
• Jimmy Wales transferred control to the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation in 2002.
• The 2005 John Seigenthaler scandal led to stricter sourcing policies.
• Around 2007, a 'Deletionist' culture emerged, with a 65% conviction rate for deletion nominations.
• Physicist Donna Strickland's Wikipedia article was deleted months before she won the Nobel Prize in 2018.
• Elon Musk launched Grokipedia, an LLM-written encyclopedia, last year; it was 'paused' for five months.