In 2008, Google created an ad-powered wiki encyclopedia called Knol, seen as a "Wikipedia killer" amid its highly-publicized launch. And the Wikimedia Foundation gave an unbothered response that I quite like: "the more good free content, the better for the world." Anyway Knol instantly flopped

called it again

The practice of building a new encyclopedia by directly pulling entire articles from extant competitors is by no means novel (Wikipedia originally did the same with the 11th edition of Britannica). #Grokipedia may, however, be the first encyclopedia in centuries to include zero cross-referencing.

Elon Musk’s Grokipedia contains copied Wikipedia pages

wasn’t my most out-there take, but still… called it

Excellent @willoremus.com piece about the launch of Grokipedia, Elon’s historical relationship with Wikipedia, and whether AI language models (as opposed to humans) are good enough to write a trustworthy encyclopedia. On that point, I agree with @jimmywales.bsky.social Gift link: wapo.st/47PKzTd

Felt this was important to write for @slate.com to capture the experience of Wikipedia editors who were there in the room as the armed man took the stage at last weekend's Wikipedia conference. Pharos and Fuzheado showed courage & quick thinking by taking down the gunman and averting tragedy.

“We’ll be here in 100 years and he won’t.” Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, recently discussed Elon Musk’s attacks on the platform, building trust online and more. Watch, read or listen to “The Interview.” nyti.ms/48ybyEJ

“We have so many haters on Wikipedia,” Molly Stark Dean, a Wikipedian and conference organizer who was sitting in the front row, told Slate. “I was like, Which corner of the internet is this guy from?” slate.com/technology/2...

didn't post about this when it happened friday but..... heroes!

Feeling very proud of my Wikipedian-in-Residence colleagues who tackled an armed suicidal man. Andrew Lih, Wikimedia Laureate 2022, prised a loaded gun from his hand. Richard and Andrew are bookish computer guys who work in libraries. That takes some guts.

Wikipedia Volunteers Avert Tragedy by Taking Down Gunman at Conference By Andy Newman At Civic Hall in Union Square, a man with a gun walked onto the stage at a Wikipedia conference. Richard Knipel, CUNY's Wikimedian-in-Residence, jumped the gunman and, with others' help, saved the day. Gift link

At #wikiconferencena a man pulled a gun on stage wearing a "non-offending pedophile" sign, aggrieved, seemingly, that wikipedia doesn't allow him to write about that subject. Disarmed by hero Wikipedians Pharos and Fuzheado and arrested.

wikipedia's data shows that AI is siphoning traffic away from the site, which is a danger to its sustainability. ironically Wikipedia is more important than ever to users who want reliable information instead of slop, and to AI companies that need it for training data www.404media.co/wikipedia-sa...

“The landscape thinks itself in me, and I am in its consciousness.” —Paul Cézanne

“Human beings in the late-modern society of work and information are not the only ones capable of multitasking. Rather, such an aptitude amounts to regression. Multitasking is commonplace among wild animals. It is an attentive technique indispensable for survival in the wilderness.” 1/2

OSS-themed Tron > tech mogul Tron “If the first Tron is defined by the singular figure of the Silicon Valley upstart and the second by the communitarian ethos of the open-source movement, the new Tron: Ares belongs entirely to tech’s CEO era. Its characters aren’t coders but captains of industry”

Pope Leo keeps scoring points with me... “Communication must be freed from the misguided thinking that corrupts it, from unfair competition and the degrading practice of so-called clickbait." The Pope vs. clickbait! Awesome. And kudos to The Guardian for their headline humor.

Damn. This is amazing. £325 per week, paid monthly, for 3 years - and the result was a profit for the Irish economy: www.citizensinformation.ie/en/employmen...

“I’m a lycanthropic spell checker.” That’s how Wikipedia editor WereSpielChequers explains his username. In my latest newsletter, we talked about easily confused words, dead links, and the election process for the Wikimedia Foundation’s board of trustees.

I've written before about Wikiracing, but it's not the only wiki-based game. The WikiGameJam is a WikiHaus hackathon happening this weekend (Oct 3-5) at Hex House in Brooklyn: wikigamejam.org They'll be playing WikiAsteroids, WikiTrivia, and hopefully designing the next gen of wiki-powered games.

The biggest Wikipedia news this week? Amazon sold out of “The Editors.” Don’t worry, it’ll be back in stock soon and in the meantime, you can grab a copy other places.

Wikipedia editors have put together a guide on signs of AI writing: -Tone: vague attribution of opinion ("has been described as") -Style: the now infamous em dashes; excessive use of boldface -Communication intended for the user: "I hope this helps," "You're absolutely right," sycophantic chatter

no one tells you that a huge part of being a Wikipedia beat journalist in 2025 is people emailing “the Wiki page for Tylenol is really weird right now,” detailing the debate over disambiguation links, then acting surprised you haven’t landed the Wikitylenol story on the front page of The NY Times

Altman’s enthusiasm for spiral notebooks is so endearing that it almost obscures the irony. His job is to promote the company’s AI tools to billions of potential customers, promising the transformative benefits AI. But when he does his own deep thinking, his style is decidedly analog.

Q: Why print photos (or anything else)? A: A print is self-worth. It’s a statement that you’re putting on an image that you’ve created to make it manifest... It isn’t a thing you’re creating for likes and comments... It’s just exactly what it is. --Chris Gampat, The Phoblographer

"If we can't agree on basic facts, we can't self-govern. And that is what authoritarians count on." @rachelegoodman.bsky.social

The scariest part isn't the fake book titles generated by AI. It is the hostility patrons show librarians when they cannot find them. People now trust their sycophantic LLMs more real people. www.404media.co/librarians-a...

Thomas Mallon with an unexpected benefit of keeping a diary.

“The strategy is clear: erode trust in Wikipedia and other independent knowledge institutions. Because once those collapse, the party in power can declare the Truth, no citation needed.” My latest for Slate:

Excellent @stephenharrison.com piece about Wikipedia, breaking news, and the right wing outrage machine that's kicked into high gear around articles about Charlie Kirk and the killing of Iryna Zarutska. slate.com/technology/2...

Thank you, Chris, for sharing my piece. P.S. You've built such a cool community of readers, interested in both data-driven analyses and music history. Well done. www.cantgetmuchhigher.com/p/the-surpri...

Because cynicism is the easier path, people assume Wikipedia editors title articles based on feelings. But titles follow policy. Different rules apply depending on facts, like whether there’s been a conviction. H/t to @molly.wiki for laying out the reasoning and pushing back on the bad-faith takes

Music writer Chris Dalla Riva has a theory that late ’80s pop songs left a weaker cultural footprint than early ’80s hits. His proof? The size & page views of their Wikipedia articles. I wrote about his investigation, KPop Demon Hunters, and the Wiki editors who write pages for #1 hit songs.

Knowledge acquisition used to be an automatic consequence of doing or researching anything, argues @jackraines.bsky.social, but thanks to AI, the end result is now decoupled from learning about what you've built. What should you do? Write it down. Document the whole process for future record.

This article from @biblioracle.bsky.social explains why AI summaries can't match the power of reading the original. Each of us is a "unique intelligence," and when that collides with the unique intelligence expressed in an author's full work, the collision of unique intelligences throws off sparks.

Last week, the leaders of Meta, Alphabet, OpenAI, and Apple took turns praising Trump at a White House dinner. Not in the room: the leaders of Wikipedia, the volunteer editors who curate and maintain the internet's knowledge.

"Wikipedia has become the next target, and a more stubborn one... its contributors are difficult for any particular state to persecute... there's no government funding to cut off or advertisers to boycott. And it's so popular and useful that even highly repressive governments hesitate to block it."

quick notes from @biblioracle.bsky.social’s book: -automation ≠ artificial intelligence -writing is thinking -writing is feeling -framework for thinking about AI: resist, renew, explore -remember that we are embodied creatures, not machines

Appreciate Vera's honesty here - Of the 86K media files she has added to Wikimedia projects, most came from bulk uploads of sets that are in the public domain/freely available. But 7,500+ of the files are Vera's own work. She goes out with her press pass, documenting the world for Wikipedia.

The GOP is officially probing the Wikimedia Foundation. Yes, "nation-state actors" have targeted Wikipedia before (there are wiki pages about the attempts). But for Comer/Mace, this claim of foreign influence is just a pretext to clamp down on the open internet. To purge it of "un-American" ideas.

[thread] The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform sent a request for assistance to the @wikimediafoundation.org today (request, importantly, and not a subpoena). oversight.house.gov/wp-content/u... [1/?]

I miss the old em dash discourse. 2011: They disrupt the flow and should be used sparingly—like javelins hurled across the page. Modern prose has too many interruptions. 2025: They prove you cheated with AI. Leave in typos so we know you're human. Good writing is inherently suspicious.

“Every writing event I have ever been to in my entire life, both talent-tested application retreats and pay-to-play retreats and conferences, are all 98 percent white ladies,” she says.

An older woman in a D.C. book club annotated my Wikipedia-inspired novel like it was a spy dossier. "Political websites - biased propaganda" "Recruitment! Bribery! Double agent!" "How can we TRUST anything?"

Experts worry that replacing government employees with AI agents could radically increase the power of political leaders at the expense of democracy. “Human workers can question, challenge, or reinterpret the instructions they are given but AI agents may be trained to be blindly obedient.”

Audie Cornish (CNN host): Why would the generation that was raised on TikToks and hashtag activism turn to paper? Kennedy McDaniel (zine maker): Do I want my reach to be broad? Or do I want it go deep?

Beware of circumscribed inferences

Update: Amazon has banned comments on this video.