Wikipedia: does the site have a future?

Wikipedia is the most popular and largest online encyclopedia, currently represented in almost every country in the world, and in national languages. If you ask users what they think about this resource, the vast majority will answer that you can find absolutely any information on this site. Alexa most likely shares this opinion, since, according to her rating, the Wikipedia site today ranks 6th in the world in terms of traffic. In addition, she herself often turns here for answers to user questions. It can also be said that Wikipedia is recognized by the most popular search engines, such as Google, Yandex, adding the relevant pages to the search results in response to user queries.

But is everything so clear in this matter? Yes, you can find a lot of different information here. But the question is different: will it be reliable? Opinions differ greatly on this matter. Not everyone trusts this platform due to the fact that absolutely every Internet user can edit the materials presented here, regardless of what knowledge he has, whether he is competent in a particular area.

As part of today's review, we will become more detailed about what Wikipedia is, how it appeared and developed. Let's highlight the main advantages and disadvantages of this platform. Let's talk about how the multilingual Internet encyclopedia is developing today and make an assumption about its future. We hope that the information provided will help you understand whether Wikipedia is worth using for you and how much you can trust the information presented on this site.

Let's start with the history of Wikipedia

Wikipedia is essentially a huge collection of information on various topics. It can rightfully be called one of the most accessible sources of knowledge in the world. At least today, there is no worthy analogue. The platform is supported by a community of users and is based on the principles of open cooperation and free information. The name itself is a combination of such concepts as wiki, that is, "fast" in the Hawaiian dialect and, of course, "encyclopedia". Millions of people around the world use this platform every day. It is enough to simply enter any query and add the pronouns “this” to it, and the search engine will literally provide you with the corresponding link in the first positions of the results. We have added a block with the history of Wikipedia to our review so that you can understand how unique in its essence and large-scale project this online library can be called.

Today, the site includes over 70 million articles presented in more than 300 languages of the world. Also, statistics suggest that on average, over 30 million users visit Wikipedia daily. And it all began on January 15, 2001, when Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched a new website wikipedia.com on the Internet. The very idea of creating a free library presented in the online space belonged to Jimmy Wales. Moreover, it was he who took on most of the financial costs associated with the launch of the project. In turn, Larry Sanger came up with the name of the site, and also formulated the concept of the encyclopedia.

Initially, Wikipedia was launched in English. It was a site that was created by the community. At this stage, the developers did not think about making a full-fledged product. They just wanted to supplement Nupedia, which already existed at that time. By the way, this was also their development, but the materials on it were presented exclusively of an expert class, since before each publication the material was checked by specialists in their field. Moreover, the entire verification process involved going through 7 separate stages. Yes, the material here was really high-quality, reliable, but the speed of its creation left much to be desired. On average, only 25 articles appeared on the site over 2 years of work. In addition, the information presented in some of them already required additions, changes, and updating.

That is, by creating Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger wanted to eliminate existing problems. They assumed that initially the material would be prepared by experts, and other users would be able to supplement it, edit it, thereby increasing its relevance. To implement this idea, specialized Wiki software was created, as well as open source code. Such a transformation allowed publishing several thousand articles in just 1 month. But, despite the fairly successful development, Larry Sanger quickly left the project.

Does Wikipedia have an owner today?

After Larry Sanger left the project, it would be reasonable to assume that Wikipedia is currently owned by the second founder, namely Jimmy Wales. But this is not entirely true. At the moment, Wikipedia is the property of the non-profit organization Wikimedia Foundation. A similar transformation took place in 2003, and about a year before that the site moved to a new domain and became known as wikipedia.org.

The main task of the foundation was to support projects related to this site and related solutions, which also provided open access to information and collective editing. Wikipedia exists today thanks to voluntary donations, which makes it closed for commercial purposes. These are mainly grant funds, but donations from ordinary users also come in. Such an implementation made the online encyclopedia somewhat independent. Voluntary donations today provide infrastructural and financial support for the platform and all related projects, including Wikibooks, Wikiquote, etc. All this makes the platform independent of business and political influence, which a priori makes the information presented on it quite objective.

Today, the following people are part of the Wikipedia Management Fund:

• the second founder of the online library, Jimmy Wales;
• 2 people elected by branches from different countries of the world;
• 4 members elected by the board;
• 3 people who are engaged in the development of related projects, in particular programmers, managers, editors.

All these trustees, with the exception of the founder of Wikipedia, are re-elected every 3 years. By and large, anyone can become a member of the board of the online library. The main thing here is knowledge of English. But professional skills are constantly updated, in parallel with the modification of the service itself. This is necessary in order to maintain the relevance of Wikipedia over the next 3 years. The final composition is selected by ranking.

So, who writes and publishes articles on Wikipedia?

At the beginning of our review, we said that articles on the platform are written and published by ordinary users, and from different parts of the world. They are also informally called "Wikipedia participants" or "Wikipedians". You can become one of them. The main thing is that you have access to the Internet and a desire to contribute to the creation of new articles and updating existing material. But there is still an additional classification by access rights. In particular, if you are registered on the service, you can add and edit pages. At the same time, you must also actively participate in the community of the platform and contact other internal communities. Here, everything is resolved by coordinating your participation with those who are already present in such groups. If you do not have registration, then all you can do is work with articles that do not have protection from editing.

Despite the fact that almost anyone can get access to publications, Wikipedia has provided additional measures to improve the accuracy and reliability of information. In particular, all materials undergo a stage of moderation and verification within the thematic community. That is, it turns out that before publication, the article is sent to people who are well versed in this issue and they determine the possibility of posting this material on Wikipedia pages or return it for revision indicating inconsistencies where this can be done. Thanks to this approach, a kind of collective article is formed with fairly objective and accurate information that can be used by other people.

A little about the principle of Wikipedia

Whatever the idea of the founders of the World Online Library was, they managed to implement it perfectly. Despite the fact that the site is characterized by fairly low protection from free editing of information, it still manages to maintain amazing accuracy of the presented data. This is largely ensured by three key aspects:

1. Impartiality of the presented information: any materials containing a commercial note are not moderated.
2. All data that is published in the article must be confirmed through external sources, which minimizes the likelihood of expressing your own thoughts and ideas.
3. The information is not based on individual research or speculation: dry facts are presented.

That is, the material here is written in the same way as for any other classic encyclopedia. It includes only verified facts collected from various sources. Everything is presented in a strict style without using colloquial forms, without regard for loud proceedings, disagreements, which is typical for social media.

The non-profit Wikimedia Foundation is used as the main resource of the site. It was created in order to provide global users with simple and convenient access to free educational content. It is this foundation that takes care of the project's problems, legal issues, technical implementation.

To better understand the nuances of Wikipedia, it would be useful to get acquainted with its main advantages and disadvantages.

The main advantages of Wikipedia

From the main advantages characteristic of Wikipedia, we will highlight the following points:

• Convenient and simple interaction between people who prepare content. Here, each person contributes a piece of their knowledge, work to improving existing pages and preparing new material. This is not copyrighted content protected by the relevant rights.
• Decentralized interaction in decision-making. Here, there is no need to send requests to a central person for permission to edit, because in most cases, such a person will not be a bottleneck that hinders efficiency and reduces the convenience of working with the material. Imagine that you, as their expert in a certain niche, are reading Wikipedia material on your topic and see that it is somewhat outdated, you have newer data. Instead of sending a number of requests to wait for them to be processed, you write down the relevant material literally here and now. Firstly, no time is wasted, and secondly, interest in completing the task itself is preserved.
• The quality control of the material is ensured by a community of experts. In the event that you make even a minor mistake in preparing the content, then with a high degree of probability it will be corrected by one of those who will study it. That is, before showing it to readers. It is not possible to implement such multi-level checks with other materials published on third-party sites.
• The ability to use archived materials. If necessary, you can easily find old publications. If they exist, Wikipedia immediately provides a link to them. A similar solution has not been implemented on any other portal, including social networks, where old posts and topics are stored in archives, access to which is closed to ordinary users.
• The external nondescriptness, and in the opinion of some even clumsiness of Wikipedia is what makes it look like ordinary manual work. One that has not been embellished by designers. Regardless of what topic you will search for materials in this library, they will all look quite similar in their structure and external display.

It seems that everything here sounds beautiful and correct, but we have not yet talked about the shortcomings.

What are the disadvantages of Wikipedia?

Over the time that Wikipedia has existed on the Internet, not only its advantages, but also its weaknesses have become visible. It has its own sections on history and politics. And these are the topics on which you can never find identical opinions. As a result, it turns out that the same event can be covered from absolutely opposite points of view, which negatively affects the objectivity of the presentation of information. And this is evident even in the case of Wikipedia, where the emphasis is on maximum neutrality. And here disagreements, rather tough discussions, disputes arise, including within thematic communities that oversee the online encyclopedia. The problem is complicated by the fact that existing articles can be edited anonymously. This means that in any case, relying on Wikipedia materials as something 100% reliable, at least in such categories as politics, history, religion is clearly not worth it.

Along with this, the service also has other problems, namely:

• The presence of a fairly serious internal confrontation within the platform communities and among other participants. This manifests itself in the fact that people with opposing opinions begin to add edits to materials, including in related topics. It's all about personal experience, individual understanding of things. It turns out that people are simply defending their point of view. There is no sincere desire to harm others. But it still turns out that a certain opinion is imposed on people who will read such materials. Today, the site's management is making a lot of efforts to combat such manifestations. But, alas, the success of such measures leaves much to be desired.
• Problems with administration. Wikipedia has its own administrators in each language section. They monitor which articles are added, what edits are made to existing material, and check the content for compliance with the main requirements of the site. The role of administrator here is performed by people who have been working with the site for a long time, in particular, have taken part in the creation and editing of materials. But here it is also worth considering the human factor. Administrators may also have their own opinion about what information is correct and what is false. As a result, publications most often include materials that coincide with the personal opinion of administrators. In practice, there are often situations when the same article exists in some languages, while in others it is simply deleted. It turns out that for people from a particular language region, such material is simply made inaccessible. This is already direct discrimination, censorship. Moreover, explanations under the deleted material are often literally sucked out of thin air and have no real basis. Therefore, if you see that the material you are interested in is presented exclusively in English, do not be lazy to translate it yourself. By the way, there are administrators who are against such restrictions. They leave the main platform and create related Wiki projects, where they post all the materials that were removed from Wikipedia. Today, there are already quite a few Wiki sites with similar publications on the network.
• Difficulties with neutrality. In order for the project to correspond to its original purpose, namely, providing independent information, the platform has developed its own criteria of neutrality. Any material that will be posted on the site must follow them. On the one hand, this is good, since personal assessments and opinions are excluded here. But on the other hand, there are topics that are simply impossible to talk about without emotions. For example, wars, dictators who expose people to serious dangers, destroy lives, deprive them of any prospects for the future. How can such materials be published without emotions and without any conclusions? And again, let's not forget about the human factor.
• Problems with freedom of speech. Despite the fact that almost every participant can make adjustments and express their own opinion on Wikipedia, in practice everything looks clearly different. They will not accept publications that are the result of your own research, even if they are as reliable and trustworthy as possible. That is, the lack of sources from which you got this information is the main reason for refusing to post material. As a result, we get that people who are really well versed in a particular topic and would like to share their developments with others simply lose interest, since administrators simply delete their publications over and over again, sending the standard phrase “No sources”. Why then shake the air in vain? As a result, it turns out that most of the material remains static, and in some cases even one-sided.

What conclusions can be made at this stage? The first is this is that you should not trust the materials presented here 100%, especially on controversial topics, such as those where there may be several opinions. But still, the general picture in the context of a certain question can be obtained from Wikipedia.

How is Wikipedia developing today?

Today, Wikipedia has united over 200,000 active participants in its communities, millions of people who support the project financially, billions of readers. The site presents an unrealistic number of materials in different languages, most of which are truly impartial. Materials on current trends and modern events are especially active here today. As soon as any significant world event occurs, a small note is published here, which is instantly picked up by other participants, supplemented with current materials literally in real time. It turns out that events that have stirred up the world community are covered quickly, the material is expanded, a huge number of footnotes appear. But again, there will always be a human factor, that is, the personal opinion of the people who prepare such content.

Today, even leading Wikipedia editors agree that one of the most serious problems facing the platform is maintaining the relevance of the classic model on which the service has been operating for more than 20 years. We are talking about open editing. The most serious vulnerabilities that are relevant for Wiki today include:

1. Large-scale legal threats. Largely related to copyright infringement, slander.
2. Maintaining the most uniform development of Wikipedia in different languages, that is, the availability of material for a global user audience.
3. Gradually declining involvement. Today it has become obvious that even ardent supporters of the online encyclopedia are losing interest in it, which manifests itself in a decrease in the number of publications, additions to the material.

Many also add narrow representativeness to modern problems in Wikipedia. The materials that are published here are mostly the same as those covered in the media. And it has already been noted more than once that the site focuses on rich, famous people, mostly men, that is, those who play an important role in the political and economic development of countries and the world as a whole.

So is it worth believing Wikipedia at all?

Despite all the difficulties, shortcomings, internal disagreements, Wikipedia still remains one of the most valuable sources of information today, and minimally biased. Yes, the data presented here may be slightly inaccurate, dictated by personal opinion, outdated. But we must understand that much here depends directly on the subject. Again, everything related to history, religion, politics is strongly influenced by personal opinions. Information in the field of medicine, science, is unstable, as new methods, equipment, technologies constantly appear. That is, what was relevant yesterday, today may already seem outdated. This also applies to the field of education. But still, there are many universal topics that are not subject to the influence of time. For example, information about writers, musicians, historical figures from past times. Such information will be more static.

There are various reasons for the inaccuracy of information presented in Wikipedia. Here are just the main ones:

• Different people with different interests and education can work with the same material. It cannot be ruled out that biased and incompetent people will be allowed to edit, distorting the facts out of ignorance. Be prepared for the fact that in the general mass of material presented on the site today, there will be a lot of insufficient quality.
• Checking the publication by experts will take some time. Considering the fact that Wikipedia articles are edited very often, hundreds of new materials are added daily, administrators physically do not have time to check them in time. And all this despite the fact that the number of people willing to take on such obligations is gradually decreasing.
• In areas that are subject to constant change, the information will become outdated quite quickly. This is the same medicine, science, news, which we discussed above.
• When translating from one language to another, materials can lose their accuracy. This is also largely due to the human factor. But it is also relevant when processing geographic data.

And now we have systematically approached the question of whether Wikipedia has a future in principle? Will this platform continue to develop, or has it already reached the limit of its capabilities and is gradually fading away?

What awaits Wikipedia in the future?

Wikipedia experienced its peak in the first period after its appearance on the Internet. And this continued for more than 10 years. But even at that time there were people who said that the platform would soon collapse due to internal disagreements and the emergence of similar services. The significant development of the platform was slowed down by the mass use of smartphones by people. Making adjustments to materials through personal gadgets is quite inconvenient. This has led to even interested parties significantly reducing their activity on the platform.

But what about the future? In the English version of the Wikipedia meta universe, there is a fairly large community dedicated directly to the prospects of the platform. Here, active participants speak out about the transformation of the library, suggest ways to optimize it, improve it, identify serious problems that it faces today and try to find ways to solve them. But there are also opinions about the future of Wikipedia. If we analyze them all, the most likely options are:

1. A serious decrease in users, which will inevitably lead to the collapse of the platform.
2. Too much influx of participants who will try to edit materials, which will make it impossible for administrators to control their activity. This also threatens the collapse of Wikipedia.
3. Significant improvements will be made to the platform, including in the area of control, which will be an excellent incentive for the further development of the library.

There are also thoughts that at any moment a funding crisis may occur, that the platform will no longer be able to attract grants, and voluntary donations will become fewer and fewer. But still, despite the noticeable decline in the quality of information, the presence of internal discord and misunderstandings between editors and administrators, the experts of the platform remain optimistic in their forecasts. They are seriously counting not so much on Wikipedia itself, but on related projects, such as Wikipedia Commons, Wikidata, Wiktionary and other similar services. Moreover, there is even an opinion that in the foreseeable future Wikipedia will turn into a kind of closed club for obvious adherents, where new people will be denied access. By the way, they are already trying to implement something similar on the British platform. It is believed that such a step can improve the quality of the material in the library and, thus, attract more readers.

Many people have serious doubts about the future of Wikipedia, also due to the active development of artificial intelligence, neural networks and, as an option, the same ChatGPT. Despite the fact that their work is based on the same online library, further development of AI can really completely destroy the platform. Today, there is a noticeable trend that people are increasingly turning to neural networks for answers to their questions. They do not want to waste time searching for the necessary materials on the Internet, studying different publications in order to get a complete picture of a particular issue. It is much easier to ask such a question to ChatGPT and get a ready-made selection at the output. That is, modern highly intelligent neural networks, which are guaranteed to continue to develop, will make information as simple and accessible as possible for the population, regardless of which country we are talking about, what language its residents speak.

How everything will develop further in reality, we will see in the foreseeable future. But everything suggests that if all those who work on Wikipedia today do not take any drastic measures to improve their brainchild, there is a high probability that the project will simply cease to exist. But at the same time, the main goal that the creators of the online library set, namely, the general availability of information for different segments of the population, will still be achieved, as an option thanks to the same artificial intelligence.

Let's sum it up

We will not draw any of our own conclusions about the future of Wikipedia. For this, there are experts working in this niche, those who assess the situation from the inside. We will only note that today there are no analogues to this online library for most topics. Even the same neural networks, when issuing information, first of all turn to the primary sources posted on this site. And this means that at the moment, Wikipedia should not be discounted. The only thing is that it is necessary to monitor the relevance of the information, how it is presented in different regional zones. Unfortunately, in a number of countries, Wikipedia is subject to serious edits, including seriously distorting the real facts. Therefore, in order to get the most reliable picture, you should not rely only on it. It would also be useful to study other versions of the same material. And another problem is that in some regions the site is completely blocked.

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