I liked this story about the challenges facing Wikipedia, which turned 25 today. Some of the challenges are internal and inherent to the website’s philosophical principles (like the impossibility of ever writing from a fully neutral point of view); many are external and manufactured by far-right reactionaries. But there’s something really striking about the fact that Wikipedia has not only survived for a quarter century but has somehow become one of the only websites that both depends on user-generated content and is actually sane.

A few paragraphs from that story:

In its early years, Wikipedia was mocked for being unreliable. Unlike Nupedia, or Encyclopedia Britannica, which went online at around the same time, you didn’t need to be an expert to write or edit an article. Without even logging in, you could edit a page. As Wikipedia grew, it developed a rigorous system for what an article needed to contain. Debates in “talk” pages improved the quality, particularly on contentious issues like, say, abortion. From early on, a “talk” tab at the top of any Wikipedia article allowed readers to see the discussion between editors of the page about everything from the sources used to whether the language was objective, or what the title should be.

Today Wikipedia is, for many, a beacon of what the internet once promised to be: a democratising vehicle for information, bestowing free knowledge on one and all. If you Google something, the top result has long been a Wikipedia entry. Now, as people increasingly use AI tools like ChatGPT, the results they see are in no small part based on Wikipedia; today’s large language models have been trained on Wikipedia’s millions of articles.

At some point in the past few years — I’m not entirely sure when — I actually found myself defaulting to Wikipedia as a starting point for web searches, rather than Google or one of its more privacy conscious alternatives. If I’m looking for basic facts about something, I’d probably end up just clicking on the Wikipedia link anyway, so why bother with the middlemen (or middlebots I suppose)? That’s not to say Wikipedia is flawless but it is increasingly the best option for staying afloat in the sea of turgid garbage that is the modern internet.

Back in 2010 and 2011, when I was still in high school, I remember Wikipedia being verboten — at best, a starting point for research and a place to find links to more reliable sources. And when I was teaching English in the late 2010s and early 2020s, I adopted the same pedagogical approach, cautioning my students not to cite Wikipedia in their writing. Not that long ago, it felt like there was a distinct hierarchy of credibility on the internet (at least in a classroom setting) with .gov and .edu sites at the top and Wikipedia and other user-generated sources near the bottom.

But things have changed. Many the fun and interesting .edu sites — the ugly but functional faculty pages where you could find fascinating research and authoritative insights — have been obliterated by university IT departments or, if they survived, buried under mountains of SEO-optimized slop. Most .edu pages these days (at least the ones that surface in search results) are just poorly disguised advertisements for near-worthless online degree programs.

Meanwhile, the second Trump administration has seriously degraded the reliability of .gov webpages, sometimes through blatant historical revisionism, like the current January 6 page on the official White House website; sometimes by simply deleting online datasets that are ideologically inconvenient. And they’re just getting started! They still have another three years to wreck every source of information produced by an executive branch agency, a grim reality that will persist regardless of how well or poorly Democrats perform in the midterms.

In such an environment, I’m happy Wikipedia exists. I’m happy it’s still a model of what the internet could be. But its existence increasingly feels like anomaly — a dispatch from an alternate timeline where we didn’t wreck so many good things.