“On the one hand, the thing that makes Wikipedia truly magical is that it’s open to anyone who shares our vision and our values,” opined Iskander, who is stepping down on January 20 and had quipped onstage about giving a speech on her way out the door. The incident is an example of the tension that can emerge “when a thing can belong to everyone and no one all at the same time”. It shouldn’t paint a whole community
As Wikipedia neared its quarter century, I wanted to investigate whether the website can survive myriad challenges from regulators, AI, the far right and Elon Musk.
The internet has made it feel like each of our tribes inhabits different, irreconcilable realities. And yet somehow, on Wikipedia, people manage to reach a consensus every day. How did that happen?
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. This has led to a decline in eyeballs on Wikipedia, Iskander tells me. Some longtime Wikipedians privately also worry about declining editor numbers. For now, though, Wikipedia remains in the top 10 most viewed websites, while eschewing the business model of the other top platforms: Google, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Amazon. This crowdsourced, non-profit website has become the largest compendium of human knowledge ever created. That doesn’t mean it will survive the most challenging moment in its history.
The Heritage Foundation, which produced the Project 2025 plan for Trump’s second term, even mooted identifying and targeting Wikipedia editors it disagrees with using facial recognition.
Wikipedia was blocked in Turkey for almost three years, and remains blocked in China.
A global trend towards regulating online content risks making Wikimedia Foundation’s work untenable. Laws such as the EU’s Digital Services Act and the Online Safety Act in the UK fail to differentiate the website from for-profit platforms, Wikipedians claim. Where governments compel platforms to take more responsibility for content posted by users, they could force Wikipedia to go dark in their countries.
Wales posted to the article’s talk page criticising the lede and overall presentation of the article for stating, in Wikipedia’s voice, that Israel was committing genocide. It was a “violation” of the website’s neutral point of view, he wrote, which “requires immediate correction”. Al Jazeera mistakenly reported (and later corrected) that Wales himself had locked editing on the page. The report seemed to misunderstand how Wikipedia really works. Whatever his personal feelings about Israel and Palestine, even Wales, the website’s founder, couldn’t force the wording to be changed: revisions could only be made through painstaking discussion by Wikipedia’s editors. An administrator had instead restricted the page to longtime “extended confirmed” editors on October 28 2025. The article remains restricted, with debate ongoing among users over issues with its content.
Wales said its problems were a sign he needed to use his role more to emphasise Wikipedia’s neutrality. “I think that’s particularly true at a time where we’re being called ‘Wokipedia’,” he said. “And I’m really keen that we double down on neutrality in these times, because it’s part of what is so valuable and so trusted about Wikipedia, which is to say it doesn’t matter what your political views are, you can turn to Wikipedia and get a pretty straight thing.”
Drawing him back to the question about the “Gaza genocide” article, I asked what exactly he saw his role as being when he got involved. “I just raised the question,” he replied. “I’m like, ‘This is not OK,’ right?” Recently Wales has been leading a “neutral point of view” working group with Wikimedia Foundation’s research team and Wikipedia community representatives to improve understanding and support for NPOV across a wide range of cases. It’s a conversation he thinks Wikipedians need to have: “If people feel like we’ve decided that we want to take sides on issues, it’s going to be a big problem in the long run,” Wales said, adding, “Nothing magically changes overnight, but I think we’ll get there. I’m always optimistic.”