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How old was Marlon Brando in “The Godfather?”
That was the fairly straightforward question my husband typed into Google while the movie played in the background over our Thanksgiving break. The answer from Google’s AI overview: “Marlon Brando was not yet old enough to act in The Godfather when he died in 2004 at the age of 80.”
It was one of the funnier, somewhat surprising screw-ups we’d seen from Gemini, which like all publicly available artificial intelligence tools is prone to what the tech industry calls “hallucinations.” He screenshot the answer so that we could have a laugh about it, and then scrolled down to find the first non-sponsored, non-AI search result: an entry from one of the most reliable places on the internet, Wikipedia.
If I’d written that last sentence at the start of my career, no editor would have allowed it into print. You can’t trust something that anyone can edit, the thinking went, and so it became a bad word in journalism and academia. Don’t cite it; don’t even look at it. Or if you do, for God’s sake, don’t let anyone see you.
But over the past two decades, the free-to-use online encyclopedia has carried on with its mission, expanding its global community of volunteer editors, known as Wikipedians, and ultimately resisting the kinds of platform decay that have claimed other 2000s-era internet phenoms like Facebook, Twitter and, to some extent, Google. (In a statement to Nightcap, Google said it maintains a “high quality bar with all Search features” and that its extensive testing found “people find their results more helpful with AI Overviews.” Meta and X didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.)
What’s emerged is a port in a storm of misinformation, and a potential roadmap for startups as Big Tech continues to abdicate any responsibility for the garbage littering its platforms in the form of AI-generated slop and human-generated propaganda. (By the way, Brando was 47 at the time he filmed “The Godfather” and turned 48 shortly after its release in 1972, according to Wikipedia and multiple obituaries.)
Wikipedia is the seventh most popular website on the planet, according to analytics firm Similarweb — after Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, X and WhatsApp. It is the only one on that list not owned by Alphabet, Meta or Elon Musk (who has recently taken aim at what he called “Wokepedia,” for what he and the MAGA right views as liberal bias).
The nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation hosts Wikipedia, generating the bulk of its financing through small donations and grants. That’s part of the secret to its success, according to Molly White, a researcher and prolific Wikipedia editor.
With Wikipedia, “there isn’t some huge corporation enriching themselves off the backs of the free editing” White told me. “Whereas over on Twitter, your free labor is going toward a corporation that is directly enriching Elon Musk.”
Musk promptly fired Twitter’s trust and safety team when he bought Twitter, now called X, in 2022. The site now relies on users to fact-check one another through a “community notes” system that has done little to counter false information, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate. X users who’ve stepped up to try to debunk lies and flag propaganda recently told the Washington Post that their efforts often feel like a game of whack-a-mole.
That’s the same system that Mark Zuckerberg revealed last week for Meta, which is preparing to fire its third-party professional fact-checkers who are already straining against a flood of conspiracy theories.
By Zuckerberg’s own admission, that move is a “trade-off” that will mean allowing more “bad stuff” on the platforms.
Wikipedia’s crowdsourcing model isn’t perfect — the site has an entry on its own reliability in which it acknowledges instances of vandalism, and it keeps a list of hoaxes that have taken off there. Still, as a general rule, you’re not going to find Marlon Brando’s Wikipedia entry not suggest that he wasn’t in “The Godfather.”
When someone tries to insert bad intel into a Wikipedia page, that edit gets flagged to hundreds or thousands of Wikipedians around the world who keep tabs on various pages. (More than 280,000 editors contribute to Wikimedia projects every month, according to the organization.)
I asked White why the community notes model, which on paper seems in line with the Wikipedia ethos, doesn’t seem to be working so well on X.
“I think that people who are writing community notes are very much in a reactive frame of mind, where it’s not about providing high-quality information — it’s about preventing some of the most egregious misinformation from proliferating.”
With Wikipedia, she added, there’s a baseline level of behavior that the community of editors reinforces. “People who are trolling or expressing their own political beliefs are not tolerated on the site.”
(No wonder Musk dislikes it.)
Bottom line: The internet’s most popular sites are in a state of transition. X and Meta are doing away with guardrails. Google is forcing unreliable AI to the top of its search results. Meanwhile, TikTok is facing a ban in the US and lawmakers are forcing Pornhub to block its content in roughly a third of US states.
Wikipedia’s stodgy nonprofit model suddenly looks a lot more appealing. Its community-focused approach to moderation is also taking off with platforms like Bluesky, which has reportedly surged past 21 million users amid an exodus from X.
“This idea of a social network with the benevolent dictator… isn’t a particularly sustainable thing,” White said. “It works until that benevolent dictator either sells the platform or has a political 180 of his own.”
