Re: the question of openness in the AI context [was Re: Wikipedia at 25: A Wake-Up Call]

Thanks Luis, very insightful.

Our community indeed does not have a good track record of making
compromises, and I do not know how to go around this, but I just do not see
how we can survive without making them.

Best
Yaroslav

On Mon, May 4, 2026 at 4:25 AM Luis Villa via Wikimedia-l <
[email protected]> wrote:

> On Fri, May 1, 2026 at 1:45 PM Jan Ainali via Wikimedia-l <
> [email protected]> wrote:
>
>> ... there is one of our central values I want us to keep held front of
>> mind in this moment, and that is to focus on open source and not fall for
>> the lure of the proprietary just because it is AI. And here I would like us
>> to follow the principles of the Digital Public Goods Alliance (who made us
>> so proud when they awarded Wikipedia and Wikidata with their certification
>> of being Digital Public Goods) and go even further than the definition from
>> the Open Source Initiative definition for open source AI. Their extension
>> means that beyond the free license on the model and the code, also the
>> dataset used for training should be freely licensed.[1]
>>
>> This would not only be the ethically right thing to do, it would also
>> ensure we aren't dependent on Big Tech when doing our adaptation to the new
>> landscape.
>>
>
> Hey, Jan! Thanks for raising this. I think it's such an important topic
> that it is worth breaking out into a separate thread.
>
> I agree with your bottom line: we can't have truly open knowledge without
> a truly open ecosystem (not just software stack). That should be the goal
> we are always, always striving to get to.
>
> But there are some important wrinkles.
>
> *Our knowledge ecosystem has never been purely open*
> Our core web services have always been FOSS from the ground up.
>
> But our knowledge ecosystem is very much not open.
>
> Our tech ecosystem has always been co-dependent on web search generally,
> and Google Web Search specifically. Google is how most people find us, and
> how most of us find knowledge to put into the encyclopedia. This is not
> *good*—it is in fact very bad—but it is, and always has been, our reality.
> Mostly we ignore this inconvenient dependency, and mostly that is fine. But
> if we’re going to try to see the world as it is, we also have to be honest
> about that dependency.
>
> LLMs are not perfect, but *at worst* the reasons they’re bad are the same
> reasons Google Web Search (and essentially every other web search, and the
> publishing industry too) is bad: controlled by an unaccountable
> corporation, hard to audit, subject to all sorts of biases.
>
> Open-weight models still aren’t perfect, but: we can audit them for bias;
> we can modify them (within boundaries); we can rebuild them with open
> knowledge (Ai2 says hi); we can even run them locally. That’s true even
> when they aren’t DGPA-open (or in many cases even when they’re not
> OSI-open).
>
> And there are still *possibilities* of truly open (training data and
> weights) models, about which more in the next point.
>
> *Open has always involved compromise*
> New open ecosystems do not just magically spring into existence—they have
> always required hard work *and strategic compromise*. The GNU folks had
> to compromise for almost two decades, running on proprietary Unices. It
> took Mozilla most of a decade to beat IE, and they had to run proprietary
> plugins starting on day one to do it. As you’re well aware, open access
> publishing is still very much a work in progress two decades in.
>
> All of those things built on each other. If Stallman hadn’t compromised by
> building his open compiler on Solaris, Linus doesn’t build learn about GPL
> and free Linux. If Linus doesn’t build Linux, Netscape doesn’t open
> Mozilla. Mozilla used a compromise open license deliberately written to
> ensure Netscape could ship proprietary plugins. Etc. Etc. Etc.
>
> We’re only five years or so into the LLM era. It is not very open. I am
> not sure what compromises will be made. But we’re probably going to need to
> make compromises, in order to learn; to gain influence; to beat back our
> competitors. In the best case that’s going to mean tech like Olmo and
> partners like Ai2, but it is also going to mean some compromises—and some *hope
> *that our work will inspire the next generation of openness.
>
> *There’s supposed to be a third thing*
> I really want to have a third thing but uh I’m drawing a blank. So again:
>
> I have to stress, this is not a call to throw away our principles.
>
> We should absolutely be using every bit of influence and leverage (and
> money) we have to push every player in this ecosystem towards the most
> possible openness. But that’s also going to mean getting involved and
> building bridges, not sitting on the sidelines. And it’s going to mean
> building *practical *bridges, so that (like Wikipedia Library) we
> sometimes are doing deals with entities who don’t share our values. Those
> compromises will have to be done vigilantly and carefully. But the world is
> changing radically, and fast. So our compromises will have to be done
> boldly too.
>
> Sincerely—in open and in progress—
> Luis
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