Andy Filipowich is a high school teacher by day, but a prolific Wikipedia editor by night.Galit Rodan/The Globe and Mail
The bronze bust of William Lyon Mackenzie sits on a tall plinth tucked away in Toronto’s Queen’s Park. He has a defiant expression, befitting the rebel leader against Upper Canada, and a swooping hairdo that looks like a bird perched atop his head.
Earlier this summer, Andy Filipowich was here to take in the statue. He’s a high school teacher by day, but a prolific Wikipedia editor by night.
The 36-year-old is one of the editors of Mackenzie’s Wikipedia page, whose meticulous writing and citing led the article to be featured on the website’s front page – arguably one of the highest distinctions for a Wikipedia editor. That day, more than 25,000 people read the article.
“You can only stumble upon it if you’re physically in the space,” Mr. Filipowich says about the statue. “But in the online world, anyone can stumble on any information.”
Since Wikipedia was founded nearly a quarter of a century ago, fortified by co-founder Jimmy Wales’s goal to “help the internet not suck,” it has consistently ranked as one of the top 10 most visited websites worldwide.
Free of ads and profit-seeking corporate overlords, and maintained by dedicated volunteers, Wikipedia is arguably one of the last best places on the internet.
In any given month, Wikipedia gets more than four billion page views globally, but only a tiny sliver of those visitors will actually make edits to the website. An army of volunteers writes and edits article pages, removes vandalism and misinformation, and adds citations. The internet runs on these kinds of quiet acts of online altruism: the unsung heroes who upload fresh menus on Google, moderate Reddit forums, or post honest product reviews on Amazon amid the flood of fake ones.
Over the past two decades, Wikipedia has faced various threats, including censorship from hostile governments and nefarious sock puppet accounts hijacking articles. But every time, the website has fought back and adapted to the changing tides of the internet. Now, however, it faces an existential threat. Editors are fearful that as more people use AI chatbots such as ChatGPT or Gemini to find information, they won’t need Wikipedia.
For Mr. Filipowich, and the more than hundred thousand active editors, the survival of Wikipedia has never been more important.
Andy Filipowich’s first big project was overhauling William Lyon Mackenzie’s Wikipedia page.Galit Rodan/The Globe and Mail
A Canadian history buff, Mr. Filipowich has been an active editor since 2020. While sitting at home during COVID lockdown, he clicked the “random article” button on Wikipedia’s main page and landed on a gas explosion in Toronto’s Etobicoke neighbourhood in the early 2000s. The article didn’t have much information, so he started adding new details. He caught the bug, as he describes it, and kept editing other Wikipedia articles.
Mr. Filipowich’s first big project was overhauling Mackenzie’s page to bring it up to “featured article” status, which Wikipedia considers the best work on the site and only grants to 0.1 per cent of all articles. For a year, he read multiple biographies, dug through newspaper archives and made tweaks based on feedback from other editors.
Hannah Clover, a 22-year-old from the Niagara region in Ontario, started editing Wikipedia when she was in high school. At 16, she created the page for Canadian journalist and archivist Katherine Hughes, which was featured on Wikipedia’s front page in the “Did you know” section. “I was completely ecstatic the whole day,” says Ms. Clover. “I kept refreshing the main page and going, ‘I wrote that one sentence!’”
Earlier this year, she wrote Wikipedia’s first article ever on ketchup chips, excavating every mention she could find of the food in newspaper archives and reading a book about the history of Canadian snacks. She writes book plot summaries, too, as well as descriptions of landmarks in the Niagara region. When she discovered the Niagara Falls Public Library didn’t have a photo on its article page, she hiked around the city, snapping shots of every branch to add to the website’s licence-free media archive. Last year, Ms. Clover was named “Wikimedian of the year,” an annual award that honours an editor’s contributions.
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For Ms. Clover, part of her motivation is the community she’s built. She’s made a lot of friends on Wikipedia, finding kinship with fellow nerds who are happy to geek out about the credibility of sources and discuss ways to improve the website.
“A big part of what makes me stay is the community, because people get me. It’s like a bunch of bookworms everywhere,” she says.
That sense of community is also what keeps Enoch Leung, 27, volunteering with Wikipedia. He started editing when he was 12, and over the next couple years, began working on some of the maintenance aspects of Wikipedia, such as monitoring new edits for vandalism. He’s attended meetups with other Toronto-based editors, including recently visiting the Toronto Islands to take photos for Wikimedia Commons.
“In a world where the internet feels increasingly dystopian as algorithms dictate what we see and think … it’s refreshing to be part of a website that isn’t any of that – and perhaps a little intimidating too,” says Mr. Leung.
Wikipedia is not without its flaws. There’s a stark gender gap among its editors – about 80 per cent are men – and in its content too, with women accounting for only 20 per cent of biographical entries. Wikipedia has also been accused of both being too conservative and too progressive. Earlier this year, Elon Musk said it’s “an extension of legacy media propaganda” and called for the website to be “defunded.”
But the biggest concern right now is AI chatbots.
People are increasingly using chatbots to seek out information they would have once found on Wikipedia. (Ironically the website is one of the most widely used data sources for AI training models owing to its open licence.) Some editors and researchers worry fewer people will visit the website directly. And that means fewer opportunities to attract potential new editors – the lifeblood of the platform.
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“Wikipedia is this economic anomaly. In many ways, it’s sort of magical that people will just volunteer without explicit economic incentives to create artifacts that are meant to share knowledge with everyone in the world,” says Nicholas Vincent, an assistant professor at Simon Fraser University who has studied how Wikipedia helps support Google searches. “And so fundamentally anything that threatens to cut off traffic to the actual Wikipedia platform threatens all those things.”
Mr. Filipowich, the high school teacher, is concerned that Wikipedia could become a relic of the past if overall readership declines. But he’s also hopeful that Wikipedia can find ways to use AI to grow as a site, such as using it to translate articles into other languages. It may just take time to figure out what those best-use cases are.
“I remember going through school and Wikipedia being the new big scary thing in education,” Mr. Filipowich says. “AI has become the new form of that, and I just think it’s because we don’t quite know how to use it yet.”
Dr. Vincent says there are ways in which tech companies like OpenAI and Google can help prevent the deterioration of Wikipedia, including by changing the design of their chatbots to encourage users to click through to the website.
Ms. Clover is concerned about AI slop infiltrating the website, how the chatbots can make up information, including sources, and how that could lead to a greater distrust online. However, she’s not too worried about AI leading to a decline in editors.
Over Google Meet, she pulls up a graph showing the change in the frequency of edits from 2006 to 2020. The line is remarkably consistent throughout the past 14 years.
“And how different is the world compared to how it was in 2006? I think we’ll get through this.”
Walking around Queen’s Park earlier this summer, Mr. Filipowich was quick to pull out his phone and look up facts on Wikipedia – how old Mackenzie was when he died (66) or to confirm the alibi of a former Toronto mayor accused of being at the Upper Canada Rebellion (he wouldn’t be wearing sunglasses at night, like his accuser claimed).
The statues dotted throughout the park also served as reminders of Mr. Filipowich’s to-do list of articles he wants to update. His current big project is the page of George Brown, the 19th century politician and founder of The Globe, to featured article status. He’s about three-quarters through one of Brown’s two-volume biographies. The work of the Wikipedia editor never ends.