In the winding streets and alleyways of the interweb, there is one entity that you can always find on the side of the road, begging for scraps. Lo and behold, Wikipedia is almost always holding the tin can out, touting a sign that says “Anything Helps” at passerbys who visit the website. I can’t count on my two hands the amount of times that I’ve opened up my inbox to Jimmy Wales begging me for the large sum of $3 , praising me for the immense kindness that I showed to him and his website after donating once in 2022. Yet it begs the question: why does Wikipedia of all places, a now 25-year-old online encyclopedia with over 7 million English articles, have to resort to these desperate measures just to keep itself afloat?
Alas, a contributing factor is that this free behemoth of information had long been exiled from the land of academia. At its core, Wikipedia is simply a source of information; naturally, that status lends itself to students who are researching everything from the life of Dostoevsky to the poop emoji. Yet despite Wikipedia’s vast offerings of information, I’ve found that almost all of my teachers in research or writing heavy courses have passionately denounced the use of the site for coursework.
This skepticism has accumulated into a profound misunderstanding of what Wikipedia truly represents; not simply as a website, but as a collaborative and, more importantly, human project that champions intellectual preservation. As the last bastion against the complete monopolization of knowledge by artificial intelligence (AI), Wikipedia should be lauded in academic spaces rather than villainized. Its unique structure is one that celebrates human collaboration, an effort that is desperately needed in an age where information is sanctioned out to the masses by a faceless, soulless chatbot.
The overdone argument that is often used against Wikipedia stems from an outdated system that is no longer in place, as its open-editing model has long been criticized by educators; this, however, flagrantly ignores the sophisticated systems of verification that have been instated as the site grew. High-traffic pages are now protected and patrolled by dedicated volunteer moderators who quickly catch vandalism, users can comment on the changes that other people made in the “Talk” tab of a page to provide context or additional information that wasn’t previously considered, and chances are, if you take three seconds and scroll to the bottom of any given article, you’ll find a bibliography with a plethora of reliable, academic citations. Each and every edit of all of Wikipedia’s articles remains public and easily accessible to the masses.
Really, I’m baffled as to why teachers don’t absolutely adore the project, because it does something that they love: Wikipedia shows all of its work.
Yet strangely enough, many of my teachers have now begun actively using AI in their classrooms. Educators today use AI to do everything from make their assignments, grade papers, and create lecture slides, despite the fact these tools have been continuously proven to conflate truth with fiction. They were all so worried about “credibility” and “transparency” up until now, so what gives? Its hypocrisy in education to the highest degree.
When you read a Wikipedia article, what you’re truly consuming is a beautiful example of the democratic exchange of free ideas. Students choosing to use and support Wikipedia is a conscious act of trusting real, human experts with information rather than an autonomous algorithm. Even in what’s considered the most niche topics, there are still editors on Wikipedia that ensure that the information presented on them is as accurate as possible, because the site itself is built on love.
The amount of care, respect, and passion for knowledge, and the act of making that knowledge accessible is what Wikipedia was created for in the first place. That sentiment is clear in every update to the millions of articles that exist on the website; it’s clear in the way that over 260,000 people contribute to the site every single month; and it’s clear in how Jimmy Wales will always continue to beg me for money. It’s difficult to find any malice behind it. In supporting Wikipedia, there are no water sources being drained or invasive data centers being built like there is with the rapid advancement of AI. The only result of that support is being able to read the collective work of thousands of people who just love doing what they do. That, for me, will always be better than a chatbot.
If academia doesn’t begin to recognize the immense value of this resource, we run the risk of conceding our minds to these non-human, algorithmic systems. Without it, people’s relationship with information becomes purely transactional; you ask a chatbot to do something, it spits something back out at you and you take it as truth, whether or not it’s credible in its sourcing. In doing this, people are actively eroding their ability to critically engage and question the information that’s being presented to them, making them increasingly susceptible to treating misinformation and propaganda as truth. By bringing attention back to these resources that center collaborative discourse and effort, we’ll put knowledge back into the hands of those that have the capability to wield it: humans.
