Wikipedia Built the Internet’s Brain. Now Its Leaders Want Credit.

Wikipedia, the world’s largest encyclopedia, is painstakingly human. Contributions to its pages are labored over and debated by hundreds of thousands of active volunteer editors—some so dedicated they compete to update celebrity deaths first. But in recent years the site has also emerged as a backbone of A.I., with its data increasingly relied upon by the technology’s large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

In the early days of LLMs, tech companies told Wikipedia they only needed...