Editor’s note: We welcome a guest blog post from Nathan Sonnenschein, User Services & Experience Librarian at Montana State University Billings.
During my first year as an undergraduate, my community college’s library handed out folders bearing a catchphrase: “Faster than Google. Better than Wikipedia. Your college library.” This gave me the impression that academic libraries saw Wikipedia as a usurper on their terrain—an upstart competitor of the digital age. This struck me as out-of-touch. I had to start my research somewhere, and Wikipedia was an easy, familiar way to learn the essentials about a topic before searching the library for books or articles. Furthermore, checking Wikipedia’s citations helped me find crucial sources I might have otherwise missed. I never would have cited Wikipedia directly in my papers, but then again, I would never have cited any encyclopedia.
In the decade since, I have been delighted to see many library professionals develop more nuanced approaches to Wikipedia. Past ACRLog posts reveal a few of these perspectives. Wikipedia is a handy partner for brainstorming, a clever means for disseminating new research, and a great case study for teaching info-lit students about systemic biases or the facets of the ACRL Framework. Many libraries over the years have even hosted edit-a-thons and other initiatives to promote active, critical engagement with the online information landscape.
Still, the belief that Wikipedia has no place in research or scholarship persists. Many of my students’ zealous high school teachers taught them to never use Wikipedia, ever. To be fair, Wikipedia is far from perfect. Its mechanisms can and do enable vandalism (though editors often revert vandalism within a few hours, or even a few minutes). Readers must watch out for uncited statements or promotional language. For new editors—Wikipedia’s term for its contributors—the site’s policies and style guidance can feel frustratingly arcane and difficult. Wikipedia’s editor base skews heavily white and male, which introduces the potential for unconscious bias, and can create an alienating environment for editors who are women and/or people of color. These are real issues, but they do not mean Wikipedia has no valid place in the information ecosystem. Any information source has its strengths and weaknesses, and we must approach all sources with a critical lens.
Optimistically, I hope the library field has reached a place where most of us understand how great Wikipedia is for certain uses. However, we need to go further. In our new world of generative AI and volatile American politics, our fields must approach Wikipedia as not just a tool, but as an ally. Let me explain.
A shared mission
Generally, the digital revolution in the library sector has been intertwined with the trends of corporate growth and consolidation. Academic libraries’ collection development funds funnel almost entirely to massive publishers and “information cartels.” These companies have a vested interest in keeping information behind paywalls, and in protecting their own rights. This pursuit of profit is actively at odds with our libraries’ economic realities—with flatlined or diminishing budgets, serving our communities’ information needs is increasingly challenging. (Quite frankly, it feels unethical to subsidize these corporations’ profit margins with the limited funds my library receives—especially when that funding comes from student fees.)
In contrast, Wikipedia is run by the Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit organization that seeks to “help everyone share in the sum of all knowledge.” (This is a big reason why Wikipedia has not suffered from the enshittification plaguing Google Search and other platforms.) The library field and the Wikimedia Foundation are both rooted in the belief that individuals benefit from information access. We are not competing, but working toward the same vision. As library professionals, we are not seeking to enrich our institutions by boosting profits. We are seeking sustainable mechanisms for keeping our communities connected to information.
The political climate
Just as libraries and Wikipedia have similar goals, we are facing similar challenges. On April 24, 2025, the Wikimedia Foundation received a letter from the U.S. Department of Justice claiming the organization may have violated nonprofit laws. Why? The letter levels several accusations: spreading propaganda, rewriting the details of events in American history, and failing to provide “neutral” educational content—content that allegedly benefits foreign powers. The inference is that Wikipedia must engage readers with a point of view that directly favors the United States, and should not even have “foreign nationals” on its board, despite Wikipedia’s international scope.
One passage in particular sticks out to me: “Masking propaganda that influences public opinion under the guise of providing informational material is antithetical to Wikimedia’s ‘educational’ mission.” If you swap “Wikimedia” for “libraries,” this statement rings similarly to the accusations unrelentingly leveled against libraries over the past few years. Whether it be the supposed spread of anti-American narratives, the “indoctrination” of children via books with queer themes, or the dissemination of scholarly materials on Critical Race Theory, libraries are challenged for providing information that does not align with the agenda of certain powerful political factions. While the DOJ’s accusations against Wikipedia differ in form from the censorship pressures faced by libraries, the underlying logic—targeting institutions for disseminating perspectives that do not align with a certain political agenda—is strikingly similar. The result? Even as federal library grants are revoked, the Wikimedia Foundation has its nonprofit status threatened.
The rise of AI
The information landscape is quickly shifting as generative AI tools, like ChatGPT and Google Gemini, are revolutionizing information discovery. For libraries, this just means adapting to yet another wave of technological innovation. However, because Wikipedia is relatively young, its resilience is being tested. There has already been some doom and gloom about Wikipedia’s continued existence in a world where AI can conveniently provide encyclopedic information. Yet, many AI platforms are heavily dependent on information sourced from Wikipedia (and from libraries’ digital collections, for that matter). This creates a new paradigm: an information landscape where AI-generated information proliferates, but traditional, human-generated sources—primary, secondary, and tertiary alike—take on a new dimension of reliability and authority. The latter cannot exist without the former.
In other words, with so much machine-generated content on the internet, Wikipedia’s content takes on new value. The Wikimedia Foundation recently reaffirmed its commitment to “putting humans first.” On the editing side, this means relegating AI to technical tasks while continuing to rely on real people for knowledge curation. For the everyday reader, Wikipedia remains committed to creating for the sake of human learning, not for AI ingestion. Meanwhile, libraries continue to exist for the purpose of serving people, prioritizing access, privacy, and reliability. To say that another way, Wikipedia and libraries put people first—not for the sake of profit, but for the betterment of society.
What does this mean?
If I were a first-year college student today, I hope that the librarians would not tell me to ignore freely available online research tools in favor of books or databases. Rather, I hope they would nudge me to navigate all information sources critically and thoughtfully—including Wikipedia.
Why? Wikipedia is not perfect, but it is one of the last vestiges of an earlier, idealized vision of the World Wide Web: a place where anyone can sail the wide-open seas of human knowledge. We cannot take it for granted. Even as the information paywalls in the scholarly world continue to grow higher, Wikipedia remains an incredible resource for discovering information written by humans, for humans. In an information ecosystem dominated by corporate interests, information paywalls, and tech oligarchs, libraries must stand with Wikipedia as catalysts for a more equitable future.