Wikipedia at 25: Can their original ideals survive in the age of AI?

At the turn of the century, the Internet underwent a transformation known as “Web 2.0.” The World Wide Web of the 1990s was largely read-only: static pages, handcrafted homepages, portal pages with content from a few publishers.

Then came the dot-com crash of 2000-2001, when many heavily funded, not very useful Internet companies collapsed. As a result, surviving companies and new entrants followed a different logic, which author and publisher Tim O’Reilly later described as “harnessing collective intelligence”: platforms rather than sites, participation rather than passive consumption.

And on January 15, 2001, a website that seemed to embody this new era was born. The first entry on the homepage simply read: “This is the new WikiPedia!”

Wikipedia was not originally designed to be a non-profit organization…