Wikipedia:Wikipedia is important

According to Weird Al Yankovic, Wikipedia is edited by nerds. On that, perhaps opinion is divided. However, it is increasingly uncontested that Wikipedia has attained a position of significant global influence.

Wikipedia is a global top-10 website, receiving more than 10 billion views per month. It is consumed by nearly everyone who uses the internet. It is cited in public and in private (rightly or wrongly). For those wanting a quick précis of an unfamiliar topic, it is frequently the first port of call - and often the last.

Media outlets and academia have a lot to say about this influential position:

• "We trust the website much more: amid the early panic of the ebola outbreak, the Wikipedia page for the virus was seen as an authoritative, reliable source, receiving as many hits as the World Health Organisation’s online ebola fact sheet. Wikipedia has become one of the most recognised brands in the world and for many people it is the portal to knowledge in the 21st century."
• "People trust Wikipedia authors more than trained journalists—and perhaps they're right to."
• Wikipedia is "a major player in the internet landscape" and "if you want to control “the truth”, you want to control Wikipedia."
• "It is high time not only to acknowledge Wikipedia's quality but also to start actively promoting its use and development in academia"

Surveys tell us:

• "A 2014 YouGov survey found that respondents in the UK trust Wikipedia more than almost any other media institution"
• "A survey conducted by YouGov in 2019 found consistently high trust in Wikipedia across five countries polled: between 78% and 98% of respondents said they trusted Wikipedia ”A great deal” or ”somewhat”"

In an article in The Atlantic titled "Wikipedia Quietly Shapes How We View the World" we are told that Wikipedia is "the brain behind Siri and Alexa" and that "Wikipedia results spread across the internet, often influencing what we think of as reality."

Google, the dominant gateway to knowledge online, assigns an exceptionally high degree of trust to Wikipedia, ranking it highly in search results, and adapting its content into knowledge panels which are presented as unambiguously factual.

And now, "every LLM is trained on Wikipedia content". These models are the foundation of the next generation of digital assistants which will perhaps become a new primary gateway to knowledge. Language models don't just link to Wikipedia; they have Wikipedia built into their operational parameters. To an LLM, training data isn't an explicit source about which they are self-aware - it is literally encoded into the weights that give the model its capability and character. An LLM cannot introspect the ways in which it is being influenced by Wikipedia any more than Sam Altman can debug his own neurons.

A highly consequential enterprise

All this trust and influence attracts good attention - and bad.

Politicians view Wikipedia as sufficiently influential to warrant manipulating their own biographies.

In a 2023 article titled "Wikipedia's influence grows", we read the marketing perspective: "Wikipedia is very central to how companies, brands and public figures are seen online". An industry of paid editing has sprung up.

Thus, as well as Wikipedia being an ultra-high-profile target for spammers, activists and malign influencers, and despite it being just a hobby for nerds, it is woven into the fabric of the information age in a way that makes it a supremely important project.