What 20 million bans reveal about the strain on Wikipedia’s volunteers

https://theconversation.com/what-20-million-bans-reveal-about-the-strain-on-wikipedias-volunteers-274818

Publish Date: 2026-06-25 08:35:00

This year, Wikipedia is celebrating 25 years as the internet’s encyclopedia that anyone can edit. In its first decade, the quirky experiment for passionate nerds exploded in popularity. It became a ubiquitous information resource and a homework helper for schoolkids, much to the dismay of skeptical teachers.

In its second decade, amid the public’s growing dissatisfaction with the mangling of facts in popular discourse, it took on a new role as information infrastructure, helping categorize and validate information worldwide. Wired magazine deemed it “the last best place on the internet.” The hope was that the volunteer project could serve as the antidote for misinformation. Platforms from Facebook and Twitter to Alexa and YouTube began embedding Wikipedia material to ensure that users had context for what they read or saw.

That role has become more acute in recent years. Artificial intelligence developers have relied deeply on Wikipedia to train the large language models behind popular chatbots, which weight clean, reasonably reliable information sources more heavily than the rest of the web. Chatbots and AI-powered search engines have intensified Wikipedia’s significance, even as they siphon its readers by answering questions directly, with fewer people going to the source site itself.

But as Wikipedia’s importance – and size – has grown, the size of the volunteer corps that maintains it has not, and the number of volunteer administrators, a key moderation role, has shrunk.

I’m a researcher who studies social media platforms. I analyzed two decades of the site’s moderation records to understand the effect of these conditions. I found changes in behavior that appear to prioritize content quality while weakening the project’s ability to recruit and retain new volunteers.