Wikipedia vs Grokipedia

HOW QUARTER-CENTURY-OLD 'FREE' ONLINE KNOWLEDGE BASE IS BEING CHALLENGED IN Al ERA

- ATANU BISWAS

IN THE 35TH poem of his Nobel Prizewinning Gitanjali, Tagore expressed his desire for a world “where knowledge is free”. Given that “free” and “freedom” go hand in hand, let’s examine how Wikipedia’s quarter-of-a-century-old “free” online knowledge base is being challenged in today’s Al era.

The initial driving force of Wikipedia, certainly, was a personal crisis. After being born on December 26, 2000, Kira, the daughter of American Internet entrepreneur Jimmy Wales, suffered from a life-threatening condition known as meconium aspiration syndrome. The hospital in San Diego offered an experimental treatment. A desperate Wales was searching the internet for info on that. However, he only received information from unverifiable sources. Scholarly publications did exist, of course, but they were typically incomprehensible to the common people. So Wales and his spouse relied heavily on the doctors, and fortunately, their daughter survived.

However, the helplessness of lacking trustworthy information during those awful times motivated Wales to establish an online storehouse of information that would be free, accurate, complete, ubiquitous, and, crucially, accessible to billions of people. The idea for such a free encyclopaedia was already in his mind. However, it now got a special shape and drive. In January 2001, Wales co-founded Wikipedia. It doesn’t require an “Open sesame” command, unlike Alibaba’s treasure trove, we know. And it has grown over the past 25 years into a credible, massive repository that offers everyone free access to the entirety of human knowledge, with roughly seven million topics already covered.