• by Steven Rosenbaum , Featured Contributor, June 30, 2025

In an era where facts are questioned and institutions lose the public’s confidence by the day, a quiet digital revolution continues to unfold, one edit at a time.

It’s not flashy. There are no billion-dollar valuations or celebrity founders. Just millions of everyday people, quietly volunteering to defend something that used to feel simpler: the truth.

That idea—truth as something we build together, not something we passively receive—was at the heart of a keynote address given by Lisa Seitz-Gruwell, deputy to the CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, at this year’s NEXUS Global Summit in New York City.

“Access to information is important,” Gruwell told the room. “But the biggest challenge our world is facing today is not that we're not giving information fast enough. It's that we're not getting information right. And in a moment of crisis, speed without facts is a recipe for disaster.”

That crisis has a name: epistemic insecurity. It’s the condition we’re all living in—where people no longer know whom to trust or what to believe. It’s not just about misinformation or disinformation anymore. It’s deeper than that. It’s structural. It’s ambient. And as Gruwell noted, it’s an existential threat, on par with climate change.

In a world saturated with algorithmic sludge, AI-generated nonsense, political spin, and discredited institutions, where do people turn when they need something as basic—and as fragile—as a shared reality?

One answer, remarkably, is still Wikipedia.

The Last Bastion Still Holding

In 2018, The Atlantic published an essay by Alexis Madrigal titled “Wikipedia, the Last Bastion of Shared Reality.” At the time, the piece was something of a love letter to a strange, quietly reliable relic of the early web. “Wikipedia finds itself in a strange place these days,” Madrigal wrote. “It’s a shard of the utopian internet now embedded in the informational dystopia of present-day America.” Even then, before COVID, before ChatGPT, before the Elon-ification of platforms like Twitter, Wikipedia stood out as an anomaly: decentralized, nonprofit, community-policed, and remarkably stable.

Seven years later, the headline holds up—maybe even more than Madrigal could have imagined.

While social platforms have become increasingly performative, commercialized, and weaponized, Wikipedia has doubled down on its core values: verifiability, transparency, neutrality, and above all, public trust. It now serves more than 1.5 billion people every month, offering over 65 million articles in more than 300 languages. It’s cited by journalists, trusted by academics, and remains the first stop for nearly anyone who wants to know something—even if they don’t know where to begin.

And somehow, in 2025, Wikipedia has become more than a website. It’s become a kind of cultural immune system. A living archive. A firewall against epistemic rot.

What Is NEXUS Global?

The setting for Gruwell’s remarks—NEXUS Global—is worth understanding. Founded in 2011, NEXUS is a nonprofit network that brings together next-gen philanthropists, social entrepreneurs, activists, and impact investors from more than 70 countries. Its goal is to bridge communities of wealth and purpose, catalyzing projects that serve the public good across climate, equity, mental health, and tech.

The New York City summit, held annually at the United Nations and surrounding venues, has become a gathering point for rising leaders determined to rethink power and push for systemic change. In that context, Gruwell’s talk landed as both a rallying cry and a warning: The collapse of shared truth isn’t just a media problem, it’s a democratic one. And we ignore it at our peril.

Trust, Built by People

“Wikipedia isn’t perfect,” Gruwell admitted. “But we vest our power in people.” That sentence is doing a lot of work.

At a time when most major platforms have shifted power to centralized algorithms or opaque moderation teams, Wikipedia’s structure remains stubbornly analog. Its editors are human. Its debates are visible. Its rules—often dense and fussy—are there for anyone to read. You can trace the history of every edit. You can participate, challenge, refine.

That’s not just process. That’s governance.

And it’s why Wikipedia has become one of the few digital spaces still capable of holding together a fractured public. Its volunteers—millions of them worldwide—aren’t doing the work for clout. They aren’t monetizing engagement. They are doing what Gruwell calls “the hard, unglamorous labor of protecting knowledge.” Not creating viral content. Not selling ads. Just maintaining reality.

That collective vigilance is what makes Wikipedia so powerful—and, increasingly, what makes it a target.

“Those who push this anti-knowledge movement,” Gruwell said, “recognize our volunteer community correctly as the world’s foremost protector of the people’s knowledge, and therefore of the people’s power. They fear our incorruptibility, our democratization, and our reach.”

In a media ecosystem flooded with micro-targeting, clickbait, and synthetic content, Wikipedia is a rare example of a system that still rewards fact-checking, footnotes, and collaborative debate. It’s a model—however messy—that actually works.

A Blueprint, and a Battle

Of course, none of this is guaranteed to last. Wikipedia has its own pressures: disinformation campaigns, attempts at coordinated manipulation, and now, an onslaught of machine-generated content that threatens to dilute or distort its reliability. The fight for accuracy is getting harder.

But the alternative—abandoning shared knowledge to the marketplace of virality and outrage—isn’t sustainable. If Wikipedia disappears or buckles, we lose something irreplaceable: a public good accountable not to shareholders, but to readers.

So the real question is: What can we learn from this?

What if we treated Wikipedia not as a curiosity of the open web, but as a template—a model for what it looks like to build trust without profit motives. To structure collaboration without chaos. To create scale without centralization. What if Wikipedia is the best answer we have—not just an answer to epistemic insecurity, but for a more democratic digital future?

“We bring knowledge to over 1.5 billion people every month. And we have plans to expand that reach even further. But the volunteers can’t do it alone,” said Gruwell. “If we want a future where truth still matters, we have to build it—not with algorithms or ads, but with people.”

Truth is slow work in a fast-moving world. It’s not easy. But in this moment, it may be one of the most urgent issues we have to face.