According to IEEE Spectrum: Technology, Engineering, and Science News, Wikipedia is celebrating its 25th anniversary this month, but a recent internal crisis highlights a growing generational disconnect. Last June, the Wikimedia Foundation launched an experiment called “Simple Article Summaries,” which placed AI-generated, clearly-labeled overviews at the top of complex articles for opted-in mobile users. The volunteer editor community shut the experiment down within a single day, calling it a “ghastly idea” and warning of “immediate and irreversible harm.” This clash follows a historical pattern of resistance, including the rollback of the VisualEditor tool in 2013 and the Media Viewer in 2014 after community protests. Meanwhile, the core volunteer base is aging, and AI companies are extracting billions in value from Wikipedia’s data while potentially diverting readers away from the site itself.
The Conservative Commons
Here’s the thing about building a “commons” like Wikipedia: it can make you really, really resistant to change. The article references Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel-winning work, which found that communities managing shared resources develop strong institutional identities that spawn “reflexively conservative impulses.” That’s basically Wikipedia in a nutshell now. It was revolutionary in 2001, but its governance model—where volunteer editors have ultimate say—has become a barrier to adaptation. The immediate veto of AI summaries isn’t an isolated event; it’s a symptom. The community has a history of shooting down Foundation-led innovations, even ones that technically won majority support, like the 2011 image filter referendum. The process has shifted from messy debate to sudden shutdown.
A Generational Cliff
So why is this resistance such a big deal now? Because the readers are changing. Wikipedia’s text-heavy, Britannica-style format made sense for the web of 2001. But Gen Z and Alpha, as demographic data shows, are mobile-first and video-native. They’re used to TikTok and YouTube. Walls of text are a non-starter. The Foundation’s research knows readers want quick overviews. But the editor community, many of whom are now in their 40s and 50s (a shift from the mid-20s average in 2010), rejected the very tool designed to solve that. That’s a dangerous gap. If Wikipedia feels irrelevant to the next generation, the entire virtuous cycle—readers becoming editors becoming donors—collapses.
The AI Irony
And the biggest irony? AI is both the perceived threat and the proven beneficiary of Wikipedia’s work. As the Wikimedia Foundation itself notes, Wikipedia is a gold-standard dataset for training AI. Studies, like the one in Nature, confirm that models trained without it are less accurate and verifiable. But companies like Google and OpenAI use this volunteer-created knowledge to build products—AI Overviews, ChatGPT—that answer questions *without* sending users back to Wikipedia. They profit from the commons without necessarily sustaining it. It’s a brutal extraction. The article suggests solutions like better crediting and using official channels like Wikimedia Enterprise, but that’s a band-aid on a systemic bleed.
Can Wikipedia Evolve?
Look, Wikipedia has survived every prediction of its doom. It’s an unparalleled human achievement. But Ostrom’s research is a warning: successful commons can ossify. The fight over Simple Summaries isn’t just about AI hallucination risks (which are legitimate!). It’s about whether the institution can serve the people it’s meant to serve. Does it need new content modalities? Updated Creative Commons licenses? Probably. The alternative is bleak: becoming a pristine, trusted archive that fewer and fewer people visit directly, while its value is monetized elsewhere. For an institution built on open collaboration, that’s the ultimate failure. Its 25th birthday isn’t just a celebration—it’s a crossroads.
