Wikipedia is facing an existential crisis. Can gen Z save it? | Stephen Harrison

Established in 2001, Wikipedia is an “old man” by internet standards. But the role it plays in our collective knowledge of the world remains astonishing. Content from the free internet encyclopedia appears in everything from high-school term papers and pub trivia questions to search engine summaries and voice assistants. Tools like Google’s AI Overviews and ChatGPT rely heavily on Wikipedia, although they rarely credit the site in their responses.

And therein lies the problem: as Wikipedia’s visibility diminishes, reduced to mere training data for AI applications, it also loses prominence in the minds of readers and potential contributors. When someone notices a topic that is poorly described on Wikipedia, they might feel motivated to correct it. But this can-do spirit goes away when the error comes through an AI summary, where the source of the information isn’t clear.

In Katowice, Poland, at last month’s annual Wikimania conference – an event that feels a bit like an international summit of librarians crossed with Comic-Con – many of the speakers highlighted how Wikipedia faces an existential threat of fading into obscurity or disrepair. But there was also talk of a solution that may help secure Wikipedia’s future, or at least prevent its premature demise: recruiting more younger editors from generation Z and raising their awareness of how widely Wikipedia content is used across the internet.

Wikipedia operates on a model of unpaid and independent volunteers who create, update and maintain the content. Casual editors may make minor stylistic edits to a page, while others devote substantial time to creating full-fledged articles. A significant number of Wikipedia contributors are already gen Z; according to a 2022 survey , about 20% of Wikipedia editors are between the ages of 18 and 24. Although this is roughly reflective of the global population, there is a clear desire to increase this percentage.

As a tech writer, and in my research of Wikipedia for my novel The Editors, I have often heard the same handful of issues that dissuade the younger generation from joining the cause. First and foremost, the smartphone is gen Z’s preferred internet access device, but it’s not an easy tool for editing Wikipedia. Even the savviest digital natives find it frustrating to edit the encyclopedia with a small screen.

There are exceptions. Hannah Clover, a 22-year-old Canadian, was the youngest ever winner of “Wikimedian of the Year” at last month’s Wikimania. She also happens to be a rare breed: a highly prolific Wikipedian who has made more than 75% of her edits using mobile devices. A lot of those were edits she made on the go, while commuting on the bus or during shift breaks at her former job at McDonald’s. For Clover, adding to the global encyclopedia helped provide a sense of purpose. “Serving ice-cream to people isn’t really that much of a world-changing endeavour,” she told me. Clover has recommended improvements to the Wikipedia mobile app, including the ability to create new articles and a visual editor that doesn’t require any coding skills.

Another obstacle to attracting gen Z contributors is that today’s Wikipedia is simply more established. Steven Pruitt is a Wikipedia legend, with the largest number of edits made to English Wikipedia, at more than 5m. Now 40 years old, Pruitt said that when he first started editing 20 years ago, the project felt like uncharted territory: he had significant freedom to create new articles. Today, with so many pages already in existence, there are fewer opportunities to add new content. That means gen Z must approach Wikipedia not as an exciting wild west, but as an institution they can gradually improve.

Yet it’s harder for new editors to find their way in. Previous generations often began by making small edits, like fixing typos or spotting vandalism, but nowadays many of these tasks are handled by automated tools. Without clear entry points, new editors may dive into editing more contentious articles, where a single misstep could trigger harsh feedback. Experienced Wikipedians aren’t known for being nicey-nice: if an old-timer posts curt, pointed feedback on a new user’s talk page (where editors discuss improvements to articles), the public nature of the critique can be shameful enough to discourage the newcomer from continuing as a regular volunteer.

Related: The Guardian view on Wikipedia’s female volunteers: a hive heroism that changes history | Editorial

Like others in her cohort, Clover was born after Wikipedia was founded, so her mental image of an encyclopedia is shaped more by Wikipedia than by shelves of leather-bound Encyclopaedia Britannicas. This generational difference extends to the norms of communication. Clover and her peers often engage on chat platforms like Discord, while some older Wikipedians prefer to keep discussions confined to Wikipedia’s talk pages, where conversations are more focused and less social . Clover believes that offering more opportunities for social interaction is crucial for building a sense of community and shared purpose among young editors. As she put it: “When you’re young, you can feel like everything you’re doing is going into a massive void.”

While the different generations may eventually find common ground, the future relationship between human editors and AI remains uncertain. Will AI eventually replace human volunteers? Let’s hope not. Compiling an encyclopedia requires making judgments that are best understood by humans , who know the social context.

Related: ‘We’re writing history’: Spanish women tackle Wikipedia’s gender gap

Fortunately, gen Z doesn’t seem inclined to immediately surrender Wikipedia to AI. During an online debate last year about whether Wikipedia editors should incorporate chatbot-generated content, several young contributors urged caution, pointing out how large language models often produce errors and fail to cite sources accurately. And beyond AI’s shortcomings, there is a great human benefit to young people’s increased participation in the world’s most important knowledge platform. As a generation that is overall very cynical about media and institutions, contributing to Wikipedia allows them to channel their concerns into something constructive. Gen Z may still have plenty of criticisms of old institutions like Wikipedia, but at least they will have got involved.

• Stephen Harrison is a tech journalist and author of The Editors, a novel inspired by Wikipedia