Opinion At 25, Wikipedia shows us what the internet was — and could be

From December 1, 2012 to January 31, 2013, there was a war of words over a tiny preposition on a Wikipedia “talk” page. Two editors battled over whether the “into” in the Wikipedia page for the 2013 film Star Trek Into Darkness should be lower or upper case. It got nasty — over 40,000 words were exchanged before the upper-casers won.

During its 33 years in the public domain, the internet has had several transformations, from the blog posts era to the social media era to the AI revolution. With each new iteration, information has become more unreliable, more bite-sized, more polarising. Amidst this, Wikipedia, which turned 25 this month, seems like a throwback to the early internet: Not offering the eye-catching features of ever-evolving technology, but stolidly building a database of knowledge. What began as a website distrusted by serious seekers of knowledge, who viewed it as being synonymous with sloppy, low-effort work, now offers, as per a Nature investigation, accuracy comparable to that of Encyclopaedia Britannica.

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In other ways, too, it is something of an outlier in today’s digital landscape, with its volunteer-based, not-for-profit structure. Today, it has over 66 million articles in 342 languages. A study by SEO firm Graphite found last year that over 50 per cent of the internet has been taken over by AI slop. Amidst this, perhaps Wikipedia’s model — ponderous and unhip in the age of flashier and faster chatbots — offers an opportunity to reflect on the value of slowness (as far as anything can be slow on the internet), even if that means engaging in a fight over a preposition.