The rise of AI night not de bad for Wikipedia Chatbots are highlighting, by contrast, the most distinctive qualities of the famous online encyclopedia

Today, among the ten most visited websites in the world, Wikipedia continues to be present, yet it remains an exception in many ways. It is the only platform of this scale with no commercial purposes: it displays no advertisements, collects very little user data, and is run by a non-profit foundation. Its revenue depends largely on small individual donations, while the daily work of writing and editing content is carried out by a community of volunteers who follow very precise rules designed to ensure the reliability and consistency of the information provided.

This model is sustained by the contributions of hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. In the English-language edition alone, for example, more than 260,000 contributors participate regularly, alongside many others who contribute occasionally or for limited periods. Twenty-five years after its founding, Wikipedia has not only grown into the largest and most up-to-date encyclopedia ever created, but has also succeeded in remaining true to itself.

Today it stands as an example of a certain vision of the Internet—one that is increasingly rare and harder to find online: a fully free, independent web dedicated to a simple yet ambitious goal—providing the most accurate information possible to the greatest number of people, free from economic constraints or profit-driven logics.

Why Wikipedia is an exception on the web

The model behind Wikipedia is increasingly distant from the dominant one on the Internet, where bots and artificial intelligence systems are heavily used to capture attention and generate revenue. The renowned online encyclopedia, by contrast, continues to operate on very different principles: users see the same content without algorithms shaping their experience, and without tracking designed for profit.

Over time, Wikipedia has also actively supported initiatives for freedom of information, making transparency a core pillar of its functioning. Its rules on verifiability and source neutrality are public—something far from obvious for a platform of this size.

Yet these very characteristics make Wikipedia a target for hostility from regimes. However, since it has no central editorial office, relies on no state or advertising funding, and its content is produced by volunteers spread across the world—often anonymously—it is extremely difficult to exert direct pressure on the foundation or the editors. This is one reason why, despite criticism and attempts to restrict it, many authoritarian governments frequently choose not to block it entirely.

How Wikipedia is facing the rise of AI

Not everyone realizes that Wikipedia’s content has always been freely accessible and reusable, even for commercial purposes. In recent years, however, the massive surge in traffic from bots used to train and power AI systems has placed significant strain on the site’s technical infrastructure, dramatically increasing operational costs.

To address this, the Wikimedia Foundation has recently signed new agreements with major AI companies including Amazon, Meta, Perplexity, Microsoft, and Mistral. These companies will pay to access Wikimedia Enterprise, a service that delivers data and content in a more stable, fast, and structured manner—reducing direct load on the foundation’s servers and enabling more sustainable reuse of encyclopedia information.

In a world increasingly dominated by auto-generated content, Wikipedia—by contrast—could actually grow stronger. As observed by Vox, the encyclopedia is not error-free, but unlike most online platforms, the difference lies in how those errors are handled: they are not hidden or disguised, but openly exposed, corrected, and discussed. Sources for each entry are always listed, edits remain visible, and discussions among editors are public and accessible.

Vox also notes that the arrival of AI programs has profoundly—and likely irreversibly—changed school subject learning. In many institutions teachers are rethinking methods and tools, but AI’s impact is uneven: the issue is not merely whether to use these tools, but how to build the ability to distinguish reliable information from automatically generated content. It is in this context, Vox argues, that Wikipedia can prove especially valuable.

Rather than discouraging use of the online encyclopedia—as is common in schools—Vox suggests it would be far more useful to teach students to use it consciously: not just as a starting point for exploring a topic, but also as a tool for verifying sources and cross-references—and as a living example of knowledge production based on shared, transparent rules.

At a time when more and more people rely on AI systems for answers—despite those systems often treating sources in opaque ways—Wikipedia allows students and everyone else to clearly see how knowledge is constructed: which resources are selected to back each piece of information, how they are debated, and how content can be corrected or improved over time.

Takeaways

- Wikipedia remains an absolute exception in the modern web: it is the only platform among the world's most visited that has no commercial purposes, displays no advertising, collects very little data, and is sustained almost entirely by small individual donations.

- Its model relies on hundreds of thousands of volunteers distributed globally who follow strict rules of neutrality, verifiability, and transparency, thus enabling the maintenance of a free, up-to-date encyclopedia faithful to its founding principles even after 25 years.

- Precisely because of its independent and decentralized nature (no central editorial office, anonymous editors, zero state or advertising funding), Wikipedia resists censorship and pressure from authoritarian regimes better than other platforms.

- With the explosion of AI bots heavily exploiting its content to train models, the Wikimedia Foundation has introduced paid agreements with major companies (Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Perplexity, Mistral) through Wikimedia Enterprise, to reduce server load and make commercial data access sustainable.

- In an era dominated by automatically generated and often opaque content, Wikipedia strengthens itself as a bastion of transparent knowledge: errors are exposed and publicly corrected, sources are always indicated, and the process of knowledge construction is verifiable by anyone.