The Decibel - Why Wikipedia might be the last good place on the internet

Episode Date: August 19, 2025

Since Wikipedia was founded nearly 25 years ago as a free, online encyclopedia, it has consistently ranked as one of the top 10 most visited websites globally. In an era when so much of the internet is full of misinformation, polarization, and social media platforms designed to keep you doomscrolling for hours, you could argue that Wikipedia – free of ads, and maintained by volunteer editors – is one of the last good places online.Samantha Edwards is the Globe’s online culture reporter. She’s on the show to talk about what motivates these editors to volunteer, how AI is threatening the site’s future, and why going down a Wikipedia rabbit hole might actually be good for you.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

I think in a typical day, I would spend about one to two hours editing Wikipedia. That's Andy Filipovich. On Wikipedia, I'm known as Z-1720. He's a high school teacher by day, but by night, he writes and edits Wikipedia articles. On weekends, when I'm not doing anything else, I could wake up, go on Wikipedia, start editing the site. giving information on an article I am working on, reviewing other articles that other people are working on, take a bit of a break and go right back to it, and be up until 11 o'clock or later at night, just editing the site.

Andy is one of thousands of dedicated volunteers who contribute to the site. He writes and edits article pages, removes misinformation, and adds citations where they're missing. Wikipedia was founded as a free online encyclopedia, nearly 20, years ago. And in a time when so much of the internet is full of misinformation, polarization, and platforms that keep you doom-scrolling for hours, you could argue that Wikipedia, free of ads and run by a non-profit, is one of the last good places online. Today on the decibel, we wanted to unpack how Wikipedia has managed to keep its charm.

Samantha Edwards, the Globe's online culture reporter, is here to pull back the curtain on what drives these editors to keep the site honest, how AI is threatening its future, and why going down a Wikipedia rabbit hole might just expand your mind. I'm Shannon Proudfoot, guest hosting the Decibel from the Globe and Mail. Hi, Sam. Thanks for joining us. Thanks so much for having me. So what got you interested in writing about this in the first place?

I'm like a lot of people, and I just love Wikipedia. when I can't sleep at night. I love scrolling on Wikipedia. I love going down different rabbit holes. And I love just learning random facts about things. So I wanted to write about it because I just had a real love for Wikipedia. And I'm also fascinated by this kind of online altruism in which people devote their time and volunteer to make the internet a better place. And so I want to hear from Wikipedia editors who volunteer and write and edit these articles

because I want to talk to people about what motivates them to kind of take that next step and actually write and edit. I get that. Now, you're talking about the altruism online. Maybe at the other end of the scale, we often hear about big tech companies like meta and Google, often not in altruistic ways. But we don't hear a lot about Wikipedia in the same way. How is it run? And what to you sets it apart from these tech giants that are sort of running the internet now?

Well, Wikipedia is run by a nonprofit organization. And so that's a huge thing that sets it apart. Yeah. There's also no ads, which is a rarity online. There's no subscriptions. And it's all run by volunteers. There are some people who are paid who work for the nonprofit. But the majority of people who actually write and edit it, they're all. volunteers. And anybody can become a volunteer. Anybody can become an editor. And I love how that gives the power to write and edit a website that has billions of views every month and is one of the most popular, most read websites online. So interesting. It's such an aberration on today's internet, not selling anything or trying to grab eyeballs. So can you walk us through how a Wikipedia

article comes to be with these volunteer editors involved? So if someone wants to write a Wikipedia article, maybe it's something or someone that is notable that there's not a page for. And Wikipedia has specific ways in which they define if something's notable. It has to be worthy of notice, as they say, or something significant or interesting. It doesn't have to be someone like famous or popular or something famous or popular. And so if somebody sees something, there's no article for it, like say, all dressed check. then they can just create it and find different sources to substantiate what they're writing in the article. So they could say this is when the biography of the chips and just kind of flesh it out.

And then once they're done, the article can get reviewed or it can just be published. I see. And when something has to be of note, how do they determine if something meets that bar? Is there a committee or a litmus test of some kind? There is some criteria for an actor, say, they have to be, have been in multiple films or TV shows or they've had to have made a prolific contribution to the field of entertainment, say. And so there's an interesting page of a Wikipedia page about notable people whose pages were initially deleted and Megan Markle's page was originally deleted in 2006 and the description of why this page. should be deleted, was because, quote, she was a non-notable model who appears on a game show with a non-speaking rule. Ouch.

That's the internet being a mean girl, but I guess now she qualifies. Now she has a very robust page. Got it. But at the time when she was just on dealer no deal, she wasn't notable enough. And the thing with Wikipedia is you can kind of see the back and forth that different editors have. Every page, there's a talk second. And if you click on that, you can see the different editors debating edits and revisions, and that's where you can see some of these notes. Like, this is why Megan Markle's page should be deleted.

I see. So it's all transparent. Those discussions are out in the open to be seen when you can see them making rulings on things like this. Exactly. It is, it's all out there, which I think also makes it very different than other websites. Absolutely. Yeah. you can see the conversations that these editors are having. And I know some people love just to read

these discussions and the very petty debates that editors can get into. That sounds like fun. And so can you tell us a bit more about the role of the Wikipedia editor in that process? They're the people making these decisions or they're cleaning things up as they go along. How does their job work? They do all of that. So they're the ones who write the articles. They can edit. pre-existing articles. They're looking for vandalism or misinformation. They're approving other edits or rejecting edits. Basically everything you see in Wikipedia is done by these volunteer editors. Wow. Do they get in arguments about things? Yeah, they definitely do get into arguments. Sometimes they're larger arguments about whether or not a source is biased or whether

it's appropriate as a citation. Other times it can be very petty and about semantics. There's a famous example, and the Wikipedia page for this is Wikipedia Star Trek Into Darkness debate, and the whole controversy was around whether the word into was in the title or not. Oh, wow. There were more than 40,000 words written on this article's talk page discussing whether or not, they should capitalize the I.

Amazing. In the end, they did capitalize the eye in two. See, I would subscribe to watch those fights play out. So how do people get into this line of work or volunteer work in the first place? What draws them? I think it's a lot of the Wikipedia editors that I spoke to for this story. They started volunteering in writing and editing because they love Wikipedia. They were already spending a lot of time.

just reading the articles, and they just decided, hey, I think I want to contribute. Sometimes they would see a small error that would be like, oh, I can fix that. Like if a lyric was wrong in a song, that would kind of prompt them. Okay. Other people, it was just that they wanted to do it. They just had that kind of urge to be a part of this larger community as well. Andy explained to us how he got into it in the first place. During the COVID-19 pandemic, I was sitting at home, kind of bored, and I was editing Wikipedia, and there was a view random article button on the side.

So I just clicked it. And after a couple clicks, I got to a event that happened in Atobico were, There was some sort of gas pipe explosion, and there wasn't a lot of information about it. So I was like, man, like, it'd be really cool to know more about this. So I did a Google search and decided, you know what, like this is the stuff that I'm reading about. I'd love to add it onto Wikipedia. So I just read through them, found the most important information, and added it onto the site. And then adding it to one article led to adding information to another article.

And then suddenly I'm going down a rabbit hole of editing a whole. bunch of different articles and making them better. So what do they get out of it? What is the fulfillment or excitement or fun of it for them? What did they tell you? They told me that it's really fun and satisfying to contribute to such a popular website that's read by billions of people all over the world. So there's that kind of satisfaction.

Also, there's just a lot of community that is built between. these editors. I spoke to one Wikipedia editor, Hannah Clover, and she says that she's made so many friends through Wikipedia. And there's meetups in person where Wikipedia editors, like, get together. And I think that sense of community and being a part of something so big is really meaningful for editors. I could see that. I imagine there's a lot of like-minded people you find. And Andy told us, too, a bit about his experience what it's given to him. I think that there's a really cool sense that an article that I have written could potentially be read by thousands or tens of thousands of people around the world

and also introduce topics that I care about to people that would never have known about that. I wrote an article about a dance production that was choreographed by Crystal Pite, in the UK. Crystal Pite is a Canadian choreographer. And this article called Flight Pattern barely got any views before I started editing it. When I was able to flesh out the article, get it up to feature status and featured on the front page of Wikipedia, tens of thousands of people then read about it and discovered about this dance work. Stuff that I put on Wikipedia could be on there for decades, perhaps longer. There are some articles that I read that were excellently written in 2008 and are still on the site basically in that same form. And those editors have moved on.

Some of those editors are deceased. But their work lives on even after they've left the site. We'll be right back. Okay, Sam, so we've talked. talked about the very human element of how Wikipedia runs, but let's be a little bit more philosophical here. To you as the internet culture reporter, where does Wikipedia sit in the internet as we have it today? Like, what does this place mean in the landscape we all live in online these days? I think that so much of the way that we consume media is social media in a way, it's like putting content out there for attention or for our own kind of like self-gratification.

Sure. And I think that Wikipedia is very different because you don't really know who's editing these pages. Like, of course, you can click through and see the usernames, but they don't have like photos attached to them. You can't then like follow them on TikTok or Instagram. Ah, great point. It's just a website that's really about. spreading knowledge. And that feels so pure and kind of what the internet was like so long ago. It was just about learning and finding cool stuff and going into rabbit holes. And it feels like so

much of how we spend our lives online now, it's not necessarily about like learning in this kind of space or this kind of environment. It's about like watching other people or filming yourself so other people can watch you do stuff? I mean, at the risk of idealizing it, the way you're explaining it, Wikipedia sounds like an antidote to so much of what's online. Like, I don't know about you. I just feel like the internet is just trying to grab my eyeballs and hold them these days or sell me stuff or trick me into watching endless hours. But as you say, Wikipedia is not really about attention. It's just about enlightening people. There's transparency. You can see how they're making those decisions.

It's kind of ironic, though, because Wikipedia, we're talking about how there's sort of a purity to it and a transparency, but in its early days, it was kind of held up as an example of how you shouldn't trust the Internet, right? That's a bit ironic. I know. When I was working on this story, I was thinking about how some of my first interactions with Wikipedia were from teachers saying, like, you can never use Wikipedia as a source when you're doing, writing that high school essay or whatever. And now people generally, I think, see Wikipedia as being a good resource. And the reason is because everything is cited. And so if you scroll to the very bottom of the article, you'll see all the citations. Or if you click the footnote, you'll see that this is the news article.

It's referencing. Or this is the biography that's referencing this point. So you can go and double check all those things. I just also think that there's so much more information online as well. Yeah. And now with AI slop, there's just a lot of misinformation as well. And so Wikipedia as this place where people are constantly checking to make sure that it's not being vandalized, misinformation isn't going, getting slipped in just seems like such a rarity. Absolutely.

Speaking of AI, it's disrupting pretty much everything. we do these days. What kind of impact is it having on Wikipedia? It's interesting because so many of these chatbots like OpenAI's chat GPT or Google's Gemini, a lot of these large language models were trained on Wikipedia data. I mean, they were trained on basically like everything online. Sure. But a lot of it was Wikipedia as well. And there's a fear amongst some editors, and scholars who study Wikipedia that people aren't going to be clicking through on Wikipedia in the future because instead they're just using chat GPT as like their search engine.

And chat GPT is just going to give them the answer and they're not going to then go and click through to Wikipedia where they can see the whole article and potentially they'll think, oh, I want to edit this website. I want to contribute to this article. And there's a fear that if people aren't actually going to the Wikipedia website, there's going to be fewer editors. And so many of the articles that are up right now are going to become stale. And the people still could be living, these biographical pages, but no one's going to be updating them. And I think that's a fear that a lot of editors have.

And it's just kind of a fear of the internet as well. Like are people going to be clicking through to other websites or are they just going to stay vacuumed into their chat bot window? Right. Something kind of sad about AI training itself on Wikipedia, gobbling up all its information and then maybe gobbling up its audience too. But if people are interested in trying to keep this website alive and vital, did you hear any advice for people who want to get started editing or contributing? I think that a lot of the editors just say, just create an account and start editing. It's very easy. It can be small things.

Like if you spot a typo, you can fix that. You don't have to write your own article. You can start by doing small things. Like, yeah, fixing typos. Or if you go through to the citations and you see something that could be, a citation could be replaced with a better one, you can do that. So there's like little smaller. steps that you can do before you, you know, start writing your own pages. Because some of the Wikipedia editors are really hardcore about it. And they'll read multiple books or biographies

about people in order to write these pages. They go into the newspaper archives. They go investigate things in person to write their articles. That's impressive. That's hefty journalism, basically what they're doing. Yeah, it was, it really is. So Sam, before we let you go, we wanted to go on a journey down one of these Wikipedia rabbit holes. So we asked Andy to take us on a tour of one of his favorites. A recent article I love is about Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the USSR, was in a Pizza Hut commercial in the late 90s. And I was, like, oh my gosh, like, why did this happen?

Why did this former leader of one of the superpowers of the world decide to record this Pizza Hut commercial in the middle of Russia, showcased around the world, except in Russia. It was not actually aired there. And the exact amount that he was paid was never revealed, but there have been articles about what they think he might have been paid, its reception, how well it did with the public. Apparently, an ambassador from the United States was able to link Pizza Hut with Gorbachev's people, and they had negotiations. Gorbachev didn't want to be seen as eating a pizza on camera, so he had his granddaughter be the person who actually ate the pizza. He wanted to improve the final script before it was filmed and aired, just finding as much information as you can about this random obscure.

1990s event is kind of what Wikipedia is all about. Okay, Sam, Andy has set a high bar here, but can you show us out by telling us about one of your favorite Wikipedia rabbit holes? Yes, Wikipedia has lots of lists on the website, and I love looking at these lists. One of my favorites is lists of unusual deaths in the 19th century, and so these are very unique or extremely rare circumstances in which someone died. So, for example, in 1804, the 322-year-old Thomas Millwood was shot after somebody, an officer, mistook him for a ghost because he was wearing a white uniform. Oh, poor Thomas.

I know. This case was later called the Hammersmith Ghost murder case because it happened in Hammersmith, which is an area of London. And it actually set a legal precedent in the UK regarding self-defense. And it found that someone could be held liable for their actions, even if they were the consequence of a mistaken belief. So you could no longer shoot somebody because you thought they were a ghost. That seems reasonable. Thank you to Wikipedia for teaching us all. And Sam, thank you for joining us today.

Thank you for having me. That was Samantha Edwards, the Globe's online culture reporter. That's it for today. I'm Shannon Proudfoot. Our producers are Madeline White, Michal Stein, and Ali Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thank you for listening.