IEEE Spectrum#Wikipedia just turned 25. Built by volunteers who believed strangers could collaborate to create something remarkable. But the same openness that made it revolutionary might now be trapping it in the past.
Today's teens and twentysomethings grew up on TikTok and YouTube. Wikipedia still looks like the Encyclopedia Britannica it was designed to replace—dense walls of text that feel ancient to Gen Z readers.
Last June, Wikipedia tried adding #AI-generated summaries to help mobile readers. Editors shut it down in a day, calling it a "ghastly idea" that would cause "immediate and irreversible harm" to Wikipedia's credibility.
This isn't Wikipedia's first crisis. In 2013, the Foundation launched VisualEditor to make editing easier for newcomers. It crashed constantly. Editors revolted. An admin overrode the entire rollout.
A year later came Media Viewer, changing how images displayed. When the community voted to disable it, a Foundation exec reversed their decision and threatened to revoke admin privileges. They even created "superprotect" rights.
But 2025's #AIsummary crisis was different—immediate shutdown, no real discussion. Those earlier battles? They led to messy compromises. This one exposed a dangerous generation gap between editors and the readers Wikipedia serves.
Wikipedia has survived edit wars, vandalism, and countless predictions of its demise. But it cannot survive by refusing to change. The institutions we depend on must adapt to the people they're meant to serve.
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Julien@spectrum.ieee.org maybe Wikipedia has to change, but surrending to the AI craze would be its ruin