User:Barkeep49/Death of Wikipedia

Orignally written in January 2021

Inspired by a podcast about "2030: How Today's Biggest Trends Will Collide and Reshape the Future of Everything" by Mauro Guillén I decided it was time to put into writing my thoughts about the end of Wikipedia. I'm calling it the Death of Wikipedia but in reality it's more like "How Wikipedia loses its place as the preeminent English Language Encyclopedia". However Death of Wikipedia is a bit more clickbaity so here we are. I present 3 scenarios from what I consider the most likely to the least likely.

Scenario 1: AI Written Encyclopedia

This is the scenario that I've talked about most when discussing the subject on IRC. For some other encyclopedia to usurp Wikipedia it would have to be able to match some of the advantages we have built up over years. Namely that we have millions of articles and that the articles that people care most about get updated pretty quickly. Why Slate has even written about people who race to edit celebrity deaths. I don't think it's likely that humans could catch up to us. But artificial intelligence could. AI is currently improving exponentially and is, in January 2021 as I write this, already capable of writing some pretty competent text (see GPT-3 and the many ways it's already used in newsrooms). This new encyclopedia, since it was written by AIs, would also presumably be attractive for use by other AIs, such as Siri, meaning users who ask a question and currently reach our articles would instead be pointed in some other direction. AI has a little bit longer to go before it can really nail identifying reliable sources on its own and to work out other kinks with writing. However, when good AI comes, it wouldn't have to start from scratch. It could fork us and just start updating there, especially given how many AIs are already trained by Wikipedia's articles. I think AI's day of writing a high quality encyclopedia is coming sooner rather than later and I worry that we in the Wikipedia movement will find ourselves caught in the Innovator's dilemma just as Britannica did when we came along.

Scenario 2: Internet Fragmentation

If Scenario 1 is the most likely, this is the most likely to happen soon. The Internet is beginning to fragment from a global common internet to more nationally based internets. This has already started to hit close to home in late 2020 with India demanding Commons change a map. Wikipedia being cut off from the large blocks of English speakers would clearly diminish our cultural place and make us more susceptible to competition. The reason I don't view this as a bigger threat, despite being more immediate than AI, is because I think it less likely that we'd see a splintering among the countries that produce the most English Wikipedians now. If the UK had remained part of the European Union I'd probably judge this a bigger threat. However, losing our Indian, Pakistani, Filipino, or even German editors would really hurt both our reputation and our ability to produce high quality content.

Scenario 3: Foundation shenanigans

I don't view this as terribly likely, but it is possible that the Foundation would do something so stupid as to drive away a significant percentage of the most active Wikipedians and so some fork of Wikipedia would suddenly become viable. We started to go down that road with WP:FRAM before the leadership of James Heilman and Jimmy Wales created board pressure for the foundation to reverse course. If history teaches us anything another FRAM or super protection is always a couple years away at most and maybe one of those times the foundation doesn't back down. It's possible that some fork could attract enough editors to give it legitimacy and to harm Wikipedia's ability to operate effectively.

It's possible but I don't think it's likely — even if I think our next enwiki/Foundation crisis is just a matter of time. The reason it's unlikely is first that one fork is improbable. I think we'd end up with several and so the collective effort of high output Wikipedians would splinter thus harming any individual fork's ability to prosper. Wikipedians, myself included, are a pretty cantankerous bunch and I just don't see us agreeing, in substantial numbers, on a single fork to go to. That's problem one. Problem two is that Wikipedia would retain its institutional advantages. This new fork would have to operate for quite some time before it might start regularly appearing above Wikipedia in Google results or AI assisted searches. It would take a while for our readers to figure out that Wikipedia's quality has diminished. And, if I'm being particularly cynical or maybe just realistic, it's possible some of the readers would never figure out that the information they're getting isn't what it once was. I suspect that if there was a foundation based schism some people would just stop volunteering their time for encyclopedic work, while most of the people who kept volunteering their time would end up returning to Wikipedia. We need Wikipedia more than Wikipedia needs us.

See also: Wugapodes on forks and schisms

So what?

Wikipedia in all these scenarios probably doesn't cease to exist - the foundation has too much money for it just to go away. In all the scenarios it likely carries on for a while even as it attracts fewer new editors and readers, because many hobbyists would continue to edit. I could, after all, be using my time in other ways but I volunteer it to Wikipedia now. The biggest reason I'd like to avoid Wikipedia dying is that I think it's unlikely that any successor encyclopedia will have our commitments to transparency and simultaneous commitment to being non-commercial (i.e. any serious fork in Scenario 3 likely has some form of advertising just to keep the servers running) and reuse through our extremely permissive license. Those values have helped our reputation and created tremendous value for readers around the world and I think the world would be a worse place with an encyclopedia which didn't share those values.