Wikipedia is in peril.
In a world where trust in truth is crumbling, the grande dame of collective online fact-gathering is under threat on every front. The MAGA right, with Elon Musk at the fore, is slinging accusations of political bias and antisemitism and has even questioned the site’s nonprofit status. Artificial intelligence is raiding the encyclopedia’s resources and draining attention. Repressive governments have hauled its volunteer editors into penal colonies.
In Wikipedia’s 25-year history, it has never had to fight this hard.
The organization that supports the site, the Wikimedia Foundation, is increasing its lobbying budget and advertising in Times Square. It is charging companies like Google and Meta that gobble up the encyclopedia’s 65 million articles, and throttling access for certain scrapers. And it is expanding its human rights team to better protect volunteers against rising harassment, surveillance and retaliation.
For an organization that holds neutrality as a cardinal rule, it is a lot of conflict, requiring Wikimedia to go on the offensive — diplomatically, of course.
So it found a diplomat: Bernadette Meehan, 50, became Wikimedia’s chief executive in January, after stints as the U.S. ambassador to Chile and at the Obama Foundation, at the State Department, at the National Security Council and on Wall Street.
In a career full of hire-wire acts — helping to negotiate nuclear deals with Iran, facilitating talks with Cuba — being the custodian of one of the world’s 10 most visited websites could be Ms. Meehan’s trickiest task. The trilingual former public servant is the first with her background in the Wikimedia job, succeeding mostly women from fields like law, journalism and Planned Parenthood.
Ms. Meehan will not say Wikipedia is at war — not after she spent much of 2007 in Iraq, in an actual war zone where she witnessed “the supreme cruelty of human beings.”
But she accepts that the site is in a metaphorical battle for its very existence.
“Wikipedia underpins everything that we have on the internet,” she said in her first interview in the role. “It is beloved, it is credible; in increasingly polarized times, it is seen as a trustworthy source.”
It is also, she said, at an inflection point.
“How do we keep this project alive?” she asked.
A fight with the right
Mr. Musk has railed against Wikipedia as “Wokepedia” and “an extension of legacy media propaganda.” He has protested his entry and urged his followers to withhold donations over the foundation’s diversity initiatives.
The tech mogul is one in a chorus of conservatives calling the reference site a hotbed of liberal bias. Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, expressed “alarm” about both Wikipedia’s purported ideological lean and claims that editors were coordinating to spread antisemitic and pro-Hamas narratives. David Sacks, recently the Trump administration’s A.I. czar, weighed in. So did Tucker Carlson, a popular commentator, and even Larry Sanger, who founded Wikipedia with Jimmy Wales in 2001.
Wikipedia has long been a proxy battleground for warring ideas about truth: What constitutes balance? What makes a good source? But now, those online debates could result in real repercussions.
Last year, a Trump administration official made inquiries into the nonprofit’s tax-exempt status. A Republican-led congressional oversight committee initiated an investigation in August, demanding that Wikimedia identify certain editors and produce any evidence of influence from foreign operatives or academic institutions. The foundation said it responded to both inquests last year and had no updates.
To de-escalate the antagonism, Ms. Meehan and her team are addressing misconceptions about the site. Wikipedia is largely decentralized, with independent contributors distilling facts through open debate and agreement. Elected arbitration committees handle dispute resolution. The foundation, with a budget of $208.6 million and about 600 employees and contractors, provides servers and funding but steers clear of content decisions.
There is no shadowy mastermind, no leftist cabal, according to the foundation. Just the Wikipedians — nearly 250,000 unpaid strangers editing 324 times a minute under pseudonyms like “Dr. Blofeld” and “WooHooKitty.”
“The most important thing to understand about Wikipedia is it is truly a democracy,” said Bill Adair, who created the fact-checking site PolitiFact and is writing a book about the encyclopedia. “It’s messy, it’s loud, it often works.”
Ms. Meehan has been hauling her message to Capitol Hill, where she’s distributed personally meaningful printouts of Wikipedia entries. The foundation also uses lobbyists, nearly doubling its spending to $174,300 in the most recent fiscal year and retaining the Holland & Knight firm last spring for $150,000 a quarter.
“We are not seeking to be part of culture wars, of political discourse,” Ms. Meehan said. “These are people who want to put knowledge into the world, for people to do with it what they want.”
To those convinced of bias on Wikipedia, her recommendation is simple: Become an editor.
“More dialogue, frankly, is what’s needed in this moment,” she said. “So the door is open.”
Gorging on a data buffet
For many Wikipedians, the Trump administration may be the site’s most acute threat, but its most existential one is artificial intelligence. They have resisted the idea of integrating the technology, calling it “truly ghastly” (or, simply, “yuck”).
The more urgent worry, though, is that Wikipedia is being exploited to train its own competitors, as A.I. systems hoover up its content to inform chatbots like Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT. The bots then regurgitate the information, often imperfectly, polluting the information ecosystem that feeds into the encyclopedia.
Exhibit A: Grokipedia, a rival built by Mr. Musk and edited by xAI, his artificial intelligence company. It has no public edit history and lifts liberally from Wikipedia while also inventing errors (including several in its profile of Ms. Meehan).
A.I.-generated summaries atop search results also siphon away potential visitors, she said. Human page views of Wikipedia’s English edition slumped 8 percent late last year compared with a year earlier. The decline is concerning enough that Ms. Meehan — whose favorite entry describes “tsundoku,” the Japanese term for collecting books and letting them pile up unread — is pushing to reach younger people through TikTok and Roblox.
Wikimedia wants more give-and-take from the A.I. industry. It now charges clients like Amazon and Microsoft for faster bulk access to its data through a four-year-old commercial subsidiary called Enterprise. Last year, Enterprise earned $8.3 million, more than doubling the prior year’s revenue.
This spring, Wikimedia also began limiting automated freeloaders from scraping its site and overwhelming its back end — which accounts for nearly a third of its most intensive bandwidth demands. But the foundation can currently halt only about 30 percent of abusive data requests — about 1.5 billion daily.
“Our infrastructure is not free, and when scrapers come in and bulk-download, it really takes a toll,” Ms. Meehan said. “There is a literal dollar cost to that behavior.”
A global challenge
Wikipedia sprawls across 345 different editions. The English one is by far the most active, with nearly 115,000 contributors, while others, in languages like the western African Kusaal and the Taiwanese Seediq, have smaller reach.
In countries like China, Myanmar and North Korea, Wikipedia is blocked entirely. Turkey banned the site for nearly three years until 2020. Wikimedia negotiated with the Indonesian government this year over blackout threats.
Since 2020, at least 10 Wikipedia editors have been imprisoned for their work and countless others threatened. A pediatrician in Saudi Arabia was sentenced to 14 years in prison after editing pages about government surveillance and a women’s rights activist. Belarus has detained several editors, sending one to a penal colony for more than a year after he edited a post about murdered journalists. Curbs in free expression have been rising globally, affecting Wikipedia and its volunteers, a foundation spokesman wrote in an email.
Governments are also targeting Wikipedia content specifically. Of the 934 requests the foundation received last year to take down or alter content (it granted two), 117 came from governments, up from 10 a decade ago.
Most were from Russia, whose antagonism toward Wikipedia deepened after the country invaded Ukraine in 2022. Moscow has repeatedly accused the site of violating a sweeping censorship law that criminalized content deemed to “discredit” Russia’s military (Wikimedia refuses to pay the associated fines). A Russian clone of Wikipedia called Ruwiki was introduced in 2023; a Russian network of fake news portals managed to infiltrate some Wikipedia citations.
Wikimedia is expanding its human rights team, a division of the legal department that safeguards volunteers from digital and physical threats. The foundation recently deployed an anti-doxxing initiative offering contributors more anonymity; it has also connected Wikipedians to local evacuation and extraction services.
Defending volunteers and projects consumes 32 percent of the foundation’s budget. Wikimedia’s litigation costs have doubled since 2020, in part because there are more cases, which new privacy and speech regulations are making more complex.
“A core component of what we do is preserving freedom to information,” Ms. Meehan said. “That will never change, that commitment to advocating for those rights, and to helping to protect within our limited means editors who engage in that project and are persecuted for that very reason.”
A search for new recruits
Wikipedia’s future has often seemed precarious — its entry titled “Predictions of the end of Wikipedia” is nearly nine years old. But especially now, with so many dangers at its gate and fewer people joining its ranks, the site cannot afford to grow stale.
The foundation wants to entice a new generation of contributors that is not predominantly white, male and graying. Training sessions to demystify editing, for example, drew one 25-year-old Vietnamese American volunteer who has created hundreds of pages in two years about zeitgeisty topics like the “swag gap” and the “performative male.”
In five months, Ms. Meehan has met more than 1,100 such Wikipedians across four continents. Unlike most modern content creators, they “aren’t out there looking to be the next influencer or famous person,” she said. When they congregate, as on a recent rainy weekend in San Francisco, they want to discuss the finer points of A.I. detection and disappearing databases.
Wikipedians aren’t flashy, but they are tough. Two of them tackled a gunman at a conference last fall. Ms. Meehan fits in, always wearing a simple black Ironman watch, after the fancy Baume & Mercier timepiece she purchased when she first joined the foreign service was stolen 20 years ago in Colombia by armed assailants.
Seeing the depravity of war and the worst of humanity fundamentally changed her, she said, compelling her to “run toward the light” and seek out “the antithesis of the bad.” That’s Wikipedia, she said — an experiment that will keep fighting to push society toward conciliation over conflict.
“In the world right now, where politicization is on the rise, where there’s disagreement on facts, where people can’t even engage civilly in a conversation, it’s OK to disagree,” she said. “But let’s come together and have a conversation based on fact and see where that takes us.”
