Wikipedia must be defended from the onslaught of AI

When Wikipedia launched, most scholarly voices were clutching their heads. A people-made encyclopedia where anyone can splash around? This will be chaos! But the project has managed to overcome prejudice, and while it's not perfect—just as paper encyclopedias weren't, let's face it—it's operational and rigorous, making it one of the most consulted websites in the world. Furthermore, its free nature makes it one of the few true tools for the democratization of knowledge that the pioneers of the internet promised us. And I think this summer it's in serious danger because of AI.

Artificial intelligence chats are increasingly replacing search engines: they don't just find where the information we're looking for is, they also chew it up for us to make it more digestible. One of the sources most used by these services is Wikipedia, but there are two problems. First, they clearly also draw on other, less reliable sources because their answers are often wrong (and this damn obsession with making things up rather than admitting that there isn't a solid enough answer is incomprehensible). Second, the reader is often told where the information was obtained from. The result can only be a decline in Wikipedia's popularity and, therefore, a foreseeable drop in the donations that keep it going if people stop consulting it directly and lose their allegiance to its brand. And, despite all the criticisms that can be leveled, this would be a tragedy. If only because the ones who would swallow it up in one bite are the private services that, at any moment, could decide to start establishing different customer ranges, based on price, and create a new gap in access to digital knowledge. The tech oligarchs must already be rubbing their hands together. And salivating.