Interview: Wikipedia weathers AI, political storms

Iskander points to the company's values as keys to its enduring success — things like requiring sources, ensuring a neutral point of view and transparent debate.

• "Everybody keeps predicting it's all gonna end one day, and the opposite keeps being true," Iskander said. "It keeps getting stronger."
• While other sites and services are struggling to hold on to traffic as usage of ChatGPT and other AI tools grows, Iskander says Wikipedia's page views and usage have not yet shown signs of decline: "We've just become more and more relevant and more and more important."

Driving the news: Iskander announced last week she will leave her post as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, which funds and oversees Wikipedia.

• Under her tenure, the organization has broadened its donor base, expanded its footprint of data centers and built a business model that seeks to keep the entirety of the site free.
• "I do not see us moving away from core principles like free access to knowledge for everybody," Iskander said. "It's about being smart about who needs to access what in what kinds of ways."

While individuals, nonprofits and others can access Wikipedia without charge, the organization encourages tech companies that make massive use of its entire corpus to pay their fair share.

• Rather than trying to threaten tech companies, Iskander has sought to convince them that they need to support Wikipedia if they want it as a resource, while also providing them improved access.
• "It has taken some creativity to make sure that the large players also are coming to the table," she said.

Between the lines: Iskander also sees lessons in Wikipedia's approach for AI companies as they seek to mitigate bias, reduce errors and ensure a healthy information ecosystem.

• "We've tried to talk about why making the models more open is the right thing to do because we do it," Iskander said. "We've tried to talk about how to keep humans in the loop because we do it. We've tried to talk about why caring about provenance and attribution and who creates is important."

Zoom in: Wikipedia faces growing attacks in the U.S. from those who don't like the information it surfaces.

• While that's disturbing for what it signals about the direction of the country, Iskander says Wikipedia has decades of experience standing up to governments.
• "What's happening in the U.S. feels big because it's the U.S.," she said. "But Wikipedia has been dealing with these issues in an endless number of countries — India, Russia, Pakistan, Turkey — and so I think that's made us better prepared."

Iskander has a suggestion for regulators weighing changes to internet law, such as amending or limiting Section 230 protections: They should employ what Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has called the "Wikipedia Test" to make sure proposed changes actually protect the flow of information in the public interest.

• That means asking whether a particular law or rule is good or bad for Wikipedia. Iskander says that's "just a way of thinking through what are the consequences and the impacts" on many similar outfits.
• Well-meaning but poorly thought-out changes, she said, could threaten open-source and crowdsourced information sources.
• "Whatever we change, we've got to keep making space for different kinds of models," she said.