Artificial intelligence and the future of Wikipedia

 Jimmy Wales, interviewed in the Guardian:

‘People thought I was a communist doing this as a non-profit’: is Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales the last decent tech baron?  by David Shariatmadari 

"Musk’s hostility aside, does Wales see artificial intelligence in general as a threat? If people are increasingly relying on AI summaries, might Wikipedia’s dominance turn out to have been a blip? “I don’t think so,” he says, “but, I mean, that’s obviously on a lot of people’s minds these days.” It would be ironic, given that the site’s free licensing model means it can be used by anyone for anything – including as training data for large language models. “There are definitely threats to the web, but they’re not necessarily coming from AI,” he says. “I think the bigger threat is the rise of authoritarianism, governments, regulations, which make it harder to have a truly open global web where people are free to share ideas.” It’s true that Wikipedia is blocked in China, and faces sporadic censorship in Russia and elsewhere. Wales’s stance on this is not to give an inch – he has said: “We have a very firm policy, never breached, to never cooperate with government censorship in any region of the world.”