The next speaker in this session at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow is Giota Alevizou, whose interest is the role of online encyclopaedias in establishing epistemic authority. This role goes back to the early enlightenment period, in fact, when printed encyclopaedias first provided apparently authoritative knowledge, but also contributed to information overload.
But online encyclopaedias – chiefly, Wikipedia – are also under considerable threat now; this is in part because of its limited and shrinking contributor and editor base, a continuing lack of support from academia, and the threat of exploitation by AI. Every era finds a new way to extract value from encyclopaedias, while masking the conditions that make their production possible.
Encyclopaedias are media, of course, rather than merely neutral containers of knowledge: they are infrastructures that organise citation networks, structure visibility, and encode epistemic norms; interfaces; and tools for orienting us within a knowledge environment.
This can be understood through the lenses of genealogy and media archaeology; platform studies, genre theory, and political economy; and epistemology and the sociology of knowledge. It can be traced through several distinct periods of Internet and Web development; across these periods, aspects such as ownership, values, actors, and norms have evolved substantially.
Over this time, encyclopaedias have moved from their institutional, print legacies (exemplified by the Encyclopaedia Britannica) through multimedia form (as in Microsoft’s Encarta CD-ROM offering), paywalled platforms (e.g. Britannica.com) to a participatory commons era (whose major survivor is Wikipedia); but we are now entering a fourth era, overshadowed by generative AI, where authority is derived from plausibility and encyclopaedia data serve mainly to train LLMs.
Through this, collaborative online encyclopaedias have moved in public perception from upstart threat to authoritative source; gradually, Wikipedia was seen as an ethical alternative to commercial knowledge, and an engine of innovation based on collaborative knowledge creation, but its authority has always been conditioned by knowledge regimes.
The question now is whether such encyclopaedias will be absorbed by AI-driven answer engines and search overviews, and whether epistemic authority will shift towards such systems and away from the encyclopaedia itself. Current political attacks that threaten its independence, especially by fascist actors in the United States, add to these challenges. The broader question here becomes what AI is teaching us to know.
