Today (15.01.2026) marks the 25th Birthday of Wikipedia, but I’m not sure if there’s reason to celebrate;

Towards the end of last year, Elon Musk and his artificial intelligence company xAI launched Grokipedia, a large language model-driven Wikipedia clone with his personal right-wing bias baked in from the ground up.
At least in its beta version, the website relied heavily on partially cloned -or adapted, as Musk likes to frame it- Creative Commons content apparently pulled directly from the established encyclopedia. It was not only missing Wikipedia’s images but additionally basically everything Musk condemns as left-wing or woke, while adding falsehoods and unsourced claims (giving the own, unreliable AI-Chatbot Groke as a source) that feed his agenda instead.

Right before the start of Grokipedia in 2025, the Wikimedia Foundation published an article stating that it is “seeing declines in human pageviews on Wikipedia over the past few months, amounting to a decrease of roughly 8% as compared to the same months in 2024” [source: https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/10/17/new-user-trends-on-wikipedia/]. So one of the most important (public) collections of knowledge built with a collaborative effort over the last twenty-five years, basically the closest we got to the ancient Library of Alexandria, is apparently losing a considerable number of its users to chatbots, search engines, and summaries powered by AI -ironically, largely trained on material from Wikipedia.
And even more problematic: With the decline in users, the project loses (future) editors and contributors, maintenance staff, and financiers -resources the website desperately needs to fight off AI-generated hallucinations from contaminating its content.

While Grokipedia is a pretty blatant assault on Wikipedia -presumably carried out because Musk can’t buy and then control and censor the website like he did and does with Twitter- the project might die just like the Ancient Library of Alexandria did: Not after it was set on fire by a power-hungry individual, but because the general public stopped caring.

As someone who grew up with, still likes to build for, and all around deeply loves the open web, seeing Wikipedia in great danger is a very unfortunate perspective…

About the image

Also last year, the Wikimedia Foundation partnered with Armedangels to launch a collection of Wikipedia ‘merchandise’, with 12% of proceeds going to the Foundation.
My favourite piece might be the ‘Yes, I know* / *Source: Wikipedia’ cap, so I decided to place the cap in various historical images -like this one of Tim Berners-Lee, ‘the father of the World Wide Web’ depicted at CERN. [original image source]

Disclaimer

This is a personal art project; The Wikimedia Foundation and ARMEDANGELS were by no means involved in this. Please don’t sue me. 🙃