Richard Cooke
author, The Last Best Place on the Internet: A Human History of Wikipedia
Titles as the sources gave them. In 1 entry, with 4 checked quotations.
What they said
Newest first. Each quotation was found word for word in the source.
“By March 2026, AI content was found to violate its core principles so often that writing with large language models was banned outright, and their role restricted to translation and minor proofreading.”
“Since 2022, the encyclopedia had lost almost a quarter of its readership, more than 1.1 billion visits per month, a missing audience who, presumably, were seeking out AI summaries instead.”
“When the Wikimedia Foundation says that the care and commitment of Wikipedians to “reliable encyclopedic knowledge is something AI cannot replace,” that is not the same as saying that it will not be replaced.”
“Anyone who uses AI agents knows that they give plausible, almost intuitive answers, which can pass a superficial review of their sourcing. They are also often wrong. If Wikipedia itself becomes corrupted by artificial intelligence, by what means will we prove when they are wrong?”
In the Base
Every entry they appear in.
Wikipedians Believed AI Would Come and Go. They Were Wrong
Wired excerpts Richard Cooke's book on Wikipedia's history. Cooke reports a ban on writing with large language models by March 2026 and a loss of almost a quarter of readers since 2022, and argues AI is one force in a longer decline of the encyclopedic age. It suggests Wikipedia's lasting value may be its process, not its contents.