‘Journalism is first draft of history, Wikipedia second’ | India News
AI is rapidly changing the way information is created and shared, but speed and scale don’t necessarily mean reliability. Jimmy Wells, who co-founded Wikipedia — harnessing crowdsourced knowledge to elevate traditional encyclopedias like the Britannica and become the internet’s default reference point — now finds it at the center of a new debate over trust, including attacks by Elon Musk over alleged bias. Speaking to Rohit Sharan and Saikat Dasgupta on the sidelines of the AI Impact Summit in Delhi, Wells reflects on the opportunities and risks AI presents, why neutrality is non-negotiable, and why trust is more important than ever.For centuries, humanity has caught itself between the promise of tomorrow and its perils when talking about the future. Socrates died a worried man because he thought writing would kill the pursuit of knowledge. It’s the same with AI now. How do you see it?■ John Philip Sousa (one of America’s most famous composers) believed that when music began to be recorded people would no longer sing. Chess, as a game, is more popular than ever, even though the best chess player in the world is no longer human. That hasn’t stopped people from saying, ‘Oh, but we really enjoy playing chess!’ As for AI, since the technology is so new, and so accessible, I don’t know. You ask a computer a question and it can answer, it’s incredible. But we know it’s flawed. And then, there’s this wild assumption that it’s going to destroy all jobs, or that no one will have to work anymore because we’re going to be so rich. Perhaps the answer, as always, is somewhere in the middle. AI is clearly going to have a huge impact. It’s hard to predict right now what it will be.Broadly speaking, the Internet has made information a ‘commodity’. Do you think AI will turn intelligence into a product?■ I can say right away, when we look at large language models — and I use them a lot, I’m a programmer, but not a very good one because I enjoy building things — it’s incredibly helpful and a lot of fun. But it also creates and hallucinates things. What I’m most interested in right now is, are there ways to use this technology to support the community? Are there things that I can do quite well? Many Wikipedia discussions are really long. You can get AI to shorten it. But here’s a key point, I want to read the key. It is very useful. Another example is you load the Wikipedia article and all sources and ask if the sources contain anything that should be in Wikipedia, or if there is anything that is not supported by the source. I’ve done it and I think it’s potentially beneficial to the community. Then say I want to write about a Bollywood movie which is not world famous on Wikipedia and I want to get some basic information about it. But I can’t read Hindi. Maybe AI can help me a little.
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Wikis have driven a large number of Google search answers and are now emerging as a source layer for AI. Is LLM both a threat and an opportunity for the future of wikis?■ We’re really about that human element, human curated knowledge, judgement. That machine translation might be a grammatical translation, but if you think about the cultural context of the reader, what they need to understand, what they’re likely to know, and what you need to explain to them, it goes beyond just the text. My example is, who is the most famous cricketer? Virat Kohli can be in India today. But if you’re writing for a global audience, you need to add a little text to explain who he is and put it in context. Machine translation can’t do it. But a man can.You are really making the case for human moderation of information. Do you think that ultimately the biggest problem with AI-curated information will lie, a wall it can’t breach?■ So, Gary Marcus is an AI researcher who has become known as an AI skeptic, although I’d say he’s not really an AI skeptic, but thinks that big language models have already hit a kind of wall — that we’re not seeing improvements in a lot of important things like hallucinations. He thinks some more fundamental progress needs to be made. For a while, scaling seemed to make all the difference. But there are other experts of equal repute who disagree with them. Just looking at it, I think, maybe we’re going to have a little bit of a hiatus for a couple of years until there are more breakthroughs where it’s like ‘OK, we’ve got this amazing tool but maybe we’re not close to the next step’.Like Google Search in the past, AI companies have an uneasy relationship with the news media – for example, the New York Times sued OpenAI. If AI systems increasingly cite original sources, should they link back and share revenue or traffic?■ I think we’re going to have a big copyright fight It’s going to be across legislatures and courts, rethinking how copyright law is structured My concern is, we want to be careful about overreach. One of the classic principles of copyright law has always been that you cannot copyright information. Some scientific publishers may be very excited to be able to say, you can’t use the information unless you pay. And it’s a disaster. We don’t want to go there. This harms Wikipedia and our ability to say it happened on this date. Here’s the source, and it’s five different newspapers. Also, newspapers don’t want to go there. A bigger, deeper problem is that local journalism has been destroyed. And this happened long before AI. For society, this is a huge problem. I’m from Huntsville, Alabama, which isn’t a huge city, but it’s not small either – 250,000 people. When I was a kid, I was a paper boy. I rode my bike and threw the papers (at home). As a Wikipedian, the value of this is that if I want to write about the history of Huntsville or the 1978 mayoral election, I have much better material to work with. But if you want to write about the recent election? Very thin content. Because now there is only one afternoon paper published three times a week and from 100 miles away. And that means the first draft of history, which is journalism, is not being written. So, the second draft of history, which is Wikipedia, becomes much more difficult.
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How do we solve it?■ I wish I had an answer to this. In some cases, maybe AI can help, if there’s some way to make it possible for one or two journalists to do more work in an efficient way that would be good. There are many positives to the change in the information ecosystem, obviously, but there are also some negatives. So go ahead and test.Wikipedia has this debate between exclusionists and inclusionists. Which side are you on?■ It has helped strengthen Wikipedia that we have this active, intellectual dialogue. I always say I’m an eventualist, which is we’ll probably get it wrong a lot but we’ll get it right eventually. The health of the Wikipedia community is important to us. Is the community actively discussing, having fun, behaving well? Are we doing things in a thoughtful way? I’m very comfortable with arguments as long as they don’t just become angry shouting matches. Tell us about your India community and volunteer team. There is a perception or misconception, you tell us that pages in India are not that strict. ■ I find the Indian Wikipedia community very similar to anywhere in the world. Many nerds, not necessarily professionals in this field. The world community has this guy with the nickname Hurricane Hank, who is a meteorologist but not a professional meteorologist. Unfortunately there are more men than women in the community. That’s always something that we talk about. We want to improve it worldwide. This is my third visit to India in a month and a half. On one trip, I was in Kerala, and met the local Wikipedia group. Among them was a couple, both Wikipedia editors, who brought their children. As for the second part of your question, I haven’t heard that about the India pages. I think this will probably be the case for the smaller language versions of Wikipedia. Obviously, those pages are usually going to be smaller and less crowded and less rigorous because there are fewer people doing it.When people say, ‘Wikipedia is broken because it’s biased’, how do you respond? And what are your thoughts on an AI-first competitor like Grokipedia?■ See, Wikipedia is a source of knowledge, and sources are transparent things. One of the things Elon (Musk) said was that Wikipedia only reflects mainstream propaganda. And I would, that’s really weird. Wikipedia reflects what reliable sources say. We can’t take a weird side, and say, ‘Oh, we’re going to fight against all scientific knowledge’, can we? But we should reflect on a debate if it is a legitimate debate. Do we have biases? Well, of course, we are human. So, we have to be really careful about it. Being neutral is one of the core values of the community. There is no disagreement about it. But can we always get it right? maybe not An old saying that I love is that if you ask a fish about water, the fish will say, ‘What water?’ They live in it. They have no idea about it. And so often our biases are just there because we don’t know.How important is neutrality of tone for credibility? ■ Amartya Sen makes a comment in the introduction to his book ’10 Indians, 12 Opinions’. It’s actually all people – 10 people, 12 opinions. Neutrality of tone is also crucial for Wikipedia and newspapers. I live in London and read two papers, the Guardian and the Telegraph. The Guardian is sort of centre-left, the Telegraph centre-right. Both quality newspapers. I have an electric car, not a Tesla. I love electric cars and so I read a lot about them. If you cut the headlines from these two papers, I can probably filter the information 90% correctly, because the Guardian loves electric cars and the Telegraph hates them. But because of this tone, I trust both of them less because it seems like they are both running a campaign. This is a problem because it can undermine trust, not only with those who disagree, but even with those who vocally agree.You started WikiTribune to advocate for neutrality in public discourse. Why didn’t you continue?■ Tribune was an experiment to see if there was a way for journalists and community members to collaborate What journalists can do, like you come to chat with me in the middle of Delhi, or go and report something, or attend a press conference, or talk to a politician, it’s almost impossible to do as a volunteer. So, we explored some good collaborations. And then we will look at the daily traffic statistics. We had a story that was really a clickbait headline that I didn’t like. To make this a commercial success, we need more clickbait titles. I didn’t want to do that. That’s how I realized that the problem is not journalism but that model, the broader ecosystem. Newspapers always love a good, juicy headline. There is nothing wrong with that. But if algorithms are fed content to keep people around as long as possible, it encourages the same behavior and more. So that changed my focus and well, good test.
