Wikipedia is in peril.

In a world where trust in truth is crumbling, the grande dame of collective online fact-gathering is under threat on every front. The MAGA right, with Elon Musk at the fore, is slinging accusations of political bias and antisemitism and has even questioned the site’s nonprofit status. Artificial intelligence is raiding the encyclopedia’s resources and draining attention. Repressive governments have hauled its volunteer editors into penal colonies.

In Wikipedia’s 25-year history, it has never had to fight this hard.

The organization that supports the site, the Wikimedia Foundation, is increasing its lobbying budget and advertising in Times Square. It is charging companies like Google and Meta that gobble up the encyclopedia’s 65 million articles, and throttling access for certain scrapers. And it is expanding its human rights team to better protect volunteers against rising harassment, surveillance and retaliation.

For an organization that holds neutrality as a cardinal rule, it is a lot of conflict, requiring Wikimedia to go on the offensive — diplomatically, of course.

So it found a diplomat: Bernadette Meehan, 50, became Wikimedia’s chief executive in January, after stints as the U.S. ambassador to Chile and at the Obama Foundation, at the State Department, at the National Security Council and on Wall Street.

In a career full of high-wire acts — helping to negotiate nuclear deals with Iran, facilitating talks with Cuba — being the custodian of one of the world’s 10 most visited websites could be Ms. Meehan’s trickiest task. The trilingual former public servant is the first with her background in the Wikimedia job, succeeding mostly women from fields like law, journalism and Planned Parenthood.

Ms. Meehan will not say Wikipedia is at war — not after she spent much of 2007 in Iraq, in an actual war zone where she witnessed “the supreme cruelty of human beings.”

But she accepts that the site is in a metaphorical battle for its very existence.

“Wikipedia underpins everything that we have on the internet,” she said in her first interview in the role. “It is beloved, it is credible; in increasingly polarized times, it is seen as a trustworthy source.”

It is also, she said, at an inflection point.

“How do we keep this project alive?” she asked.

A fight with the right

Mr. Musk has railed against Wikipedia as “Wokepedia” and “an extension of legacy media propaganda.” He has protested his entry and urged his followers to withhold donations over the foundation’s diversity initiatives.

The tech mogul is one in a chorus of conservatives calling the reference site a hotbed of liberal bias. Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, expressed “alarm” about both Wikipedia’s purported ideological lean and claims that editors were coordinating to spread antisemitic and pro-Hamas narratives. David Sacks, recently the Trump administration’s A.I. czar, weighed in. So did Tucker Carlson, a popular commentator, and even Larry Sanger, who founded Wikipedia with Jimmy Wales in 2001.

Wikipedia has long been a proxy battleground for warring ideas about truth: What constitutes balance? What makes a good source? But now, those online debates could result in real repercussions.

Last year, a Trump administration official made inquiries into the nonprofit’s tax-exempt status. A Republican-led congressional oversight committee initiated an investigation in August, demanding that Wikimedia identify certain editors and produce any evidence of influence from foreign operatives or academic institutions. The foundation said it responded to both inquests last year and had no updates.

To de-escalate the antagonism, Ms. Meehan and her team are addressing misconceptions about the site. Wikipedia is largely decentralized, with independent contributors distilling facts through open debate and agreement. Elected arbitration committees handle dispute resolution. The foundation, with a budget of $208.6 million and about 600 employees and contractors, provides servers and funding but steers clear of content decisions.

There is no shadowy mastermind, no leftist cabal, according to the foundation. Just the Wikipedians — nearly 250,000 unpaid strangers editing 324 times a minute under pseudonyms like “Dr. Blofeld” and “WooHooKitty.”

“The most important thing to understand about Wikipedia is it is truly a democracy,” said Bill Adair, who created the fact-checking site PolitiFact and is writing a book about the encyclopedia. “It’s messy, it’s loud, it often works.”

Ms. Meehan has been hauling her message to Capitol Hill, where she’s distributed personally meaningful printouts of Wikipedia entries. The foundation also uses lobbyists, nearly doubling its spending to $174,300 in the most recent fiscal year and retaining the Holland & Knight firm last spring for $150,000 a quarter.

“We are not seeking to be part of culture wars, of political discourse,” Ms. Meehan said. “These are people who want to put knowledge into the world, for people to do with it what they want.”

To those convinced of bias on Wikipedia, her recommendation is simple: Become an editor.

“More dialogue, frankly, is what’s needed in this moment,” she said. “So the door is open.”

Gorging on a data buffet

For many Wikipedians, the Trump administration may be the site’s most acute threat, but its most existential one is artificial intelligence. They have resisted the idea of integrating the technology, calling it “truly ghastly” (or, simply, “yuck”).

The more urgent worry, though, is that Wikipedia is being exploited to train its own competitors, as A.I. systems hoover up its content to inform chatbots like Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT. The bots then regurgitate the information, often imperfectly, polluting the information ecosystem that feeds into the encyclopedia.

Exhibit A: Grokipedia, a rival built by Mr. Musk and edited by xAI, his artificial intelligence company. It has no public edit history and lifts liberally from Wikipedia while also inventing errors (including several in its profile of Ms. Meehan).

A.I.-generated summaries atop search results also siphon away potential visitors, she said. Human page views of Wikipedia’s English edition slumped 8 percent late last year compared with a year earlier. The decline is concerning enough that Ms. Meehan — whose favorite entry describes “tsundoku,” the Japanese term for collecting books and letting them pile up unread — is pushing to reach younger people through TikTok and Roblox.

Wikimedia wants more give-and-take from the A.I. industry. It now charges clients like Amazon and Microsoft for faster bulk access to its data through a four-year-old commercial subsidiary called Enterprise. Last year, Enterprise earned $8.3 million, more than doubling the prior year’s revenue.

This spring, Wikimedia also began limiting automated freeloaders from scraping its site and overwhelming its back end — which accounts for nearly a third of its most intensive bandwidth demands. But the foundation can currently halt only about 30 percent of abusive data requests — about 1.5 billion daily.

“Our infrastructure is not free, and when scrapers come in and bulk-download, it really takes a toll,” Ms. Meehan said. “There is a literal dollar cost to that behavior.”

A global challenge

Wikipedia sprawls across 345 different editions. The English one is by far the most active, with nearly 115,000 contributors, while others, in languages like the western African Kusaal and the Taiwanese Seediq, have smaller reach.

In countries like China, Myanmar and North Korea, Wikipedia is blocked entirely. Turkey banned the site for nearly three years until 2020. Wikimedia negotiated with the Indonesian government this year over blackout threats.

Since 2020, at least 10 Wikipedia editors have been imprisoned for their work and countless others threatened. A pediatrician in Saudi Arabia was sentenced to 14 years in prison after editing pages about government surveillance and a women’s rights activist. Belarus has detained several editors, sending one to a penal colony for more than a year after he edited a post about murdered journalists. Curbs in free expression have been rising globally, affecting Wikipedia and its volunteers, a foundation spokesman wrote in an email.

Governments are also targeting Wikipedia content specifically. Of the 934 requests the foundation received last year to take down or alter content (it granted two), 117 came from governments, up from 10 a decade ago.

Most were from Russia, whose antagonism toward Wikipedia deepened after the country invaded Ukraine in 2022. Moscow has repeatedly accused the site of violating a sweeping censorship law that criminalized content deemed to “discredit” Russia’s military (Wikimedia refuses to pay the associated fines). A Russian clone of Wikipedia called Ruwiki was introduced in 2023; a Russian network of fake news portals managed to infiltrate some Wikipedia citations.

Wikimedia is expanding its human rights team, a division of the legal department that safeguards volunteers from digital and physical threats. The foundation recently deployed an anti-doxxing initiative offering contributors more anonymity; it has also connected Wikipedians to local evacuation and extraction services.

Defending volunteers and projects consumes 32 percent of the foundation’s budget. Wikimedia’s litigation costs have doubled since 2020, in part because there are more cases, which new privacy and speech regulations are making more complex.

“A core component of what we do is preserving freedom to information,” Ms. Meehan said. “That will never change, that commitment to advocating for those rights, and to helping to protect within our limited means editors who engage in that project and are persecuted for that very reason.”

A search for new recruits

Wikipedia’s future has often seemed precarious — its entry titled “Predictions of the end of Wikipedia” is nearly nine years old. But especially now, with so many dangers at its gate and fewer people joining its ranks, the site cannot afford to grow stale.

The foundation wants to entice a new generation of contributors that is not predominantly white, male and graying. Training sessions to demystify editing, for example, drew one 25-year-old Vietnamese American volunteer who has created hundreds of pages in two years about zeitgeisty topics like the “swag gap” and the “performative male.”

In five months, Ms. Meehan has met more than 1,100 such Wikipedians across four continents. Unlike most modern content creators, they “aren’t out there looking to be the next influencer or famous person,” she said. When they congregate, as on a recent rainy weekend in San Francisco, they want to discuss the finer points of A.I. detection and disappearing databases.

Wikipedians aren’t flashy, but they are tough. Two of them tackled a gunman at a conference last fall. Ms. Meehan fits in, always wearing a simple black Ironman watch, after the fancy Baume & Mercier timepiece she purchased when she first joined the foreign service was stolen 20 years ago in Colombia by armed assailants.

Seeing the depravity of war and the worst of humanity fundamentally changed her, she said, compelling her to “run toward the light” and seek out “the antithesis of the bad.” That’s Wikipedia, she said — an experiment that will keep fighting to push society toward conciliation over conflict.

“In the world right now, where politicization is on the rise, where there’s disagreement on facts, where people can’t even engage civilly in a conversation, it’s OK to disagree,” she said. “But let’s come together and have a conversation based on fact and see where that takes us.”

There’s a desk. There’s a band. There’s an opening monologue. There are interviews, musical guests and sketches and games.

The new show, “Outside Tonight,” shares a lot with traditional late-night television. But the overlap basically stops there.

For starters, full episodes of “Outside Tonight” are on YouTube, not a broadcast network or a subscription streaming service like Netflix. Next, it’s hosted and created by a 26-year-old digital native whose claim to fame comes from the internet, not from a connection to “Saturday Night Live” or “The Daily Show.”

There’s no media company bankrolling it, and the budget is a very small fraction of a typical late-night show, which can balloon to well over $100 million. It’s filmed outside, as the name suggests, and new episodes appear weekly. And yet Julian Shapiro-Barnum, the host and creator of the show, believes those contrasts will help save late night.

“Outside Tonight” is the latest attempt to ignite a spark in a genre that has fallen into an existential crisis and is in need of new ideas. Ratings and advertising revenue have plummeted, and so has the number of late-night series on broadcast, cable and streaming. CBS left the business after it canceled Stephen Colbert’s “Late Show,” citing financial losses that the network said had reached $40 million last year. Whenever Jimmy Kimmel decides to hang it up — he has been talking about it for years — ABC may get out of the business, too.

“Is it cocky to say that ‘Outside Tonight’ is saving late night?” Mr. Shapiro-Barnum asked in his opening monologue of the first episode of the show, which premiered in mid-June. “Definitely. Is it true? I don’t know. But I know for sure it is fun to say.”

Mr. Shapiro-Barnum then led the small outdoor audience in a chant: “‘Outside Tonight’ is saving late night!”

These are long odds. There is a graveyard dedicated to hosts who have tried to make a late-night show work on the internet. Streaming services like Netflix and Hulu have taken stab after stab at comedic talk shows over the years — tapping luminaries like John Mulaney, Sarah Silverman, Norm Macdonald, Chelsea Handler, Michelle Wolf and Joel McHale, among other hosts — to virtually no success. None seem interested in trying again.

Mr. Shapiro-Barnum, an energetic and wiry comedian, is the creator of “Recess Therapy,” a “Kids Say the Darndest Things”-like series that became a big digital hit in the early 2020s. He thinks the internet helped shatter the late-night format. YouTube, TikTok and Instagram deliver their own celebrity interviews (now on video podcasts), sketches (all over TikTok and Reels) and musical appearances (everywhere). He wants to reassemble those elements back into a cohesive long-form show, with a digital native’s point of view.

“More than loving capital L, capital N late night, I love the skeleton of late night,” Mr. Shapiro-Barnum said. “Like, all the pieces of what make late night late night are, like, core pieces of my, like, creative identity.”

The show’s pace can be lightning fast, and the opening monologue is broken into two or three separate parts over an episode, to better help the attention span of viewers with a device or two in their hands.

Each episode has a theme, and everything is filmed with the internet in mind. Episodes come out on Wednesdays — the nine-episode run will end in August — but more than a dozen short clips are produced from each episode and posted all over Instagram and YouTube.

Though he’s doing it all with a skeletal staff, Mr. Shapiro-Barnum has some powerful champions. The William Morris Endeavor agency is a big supporter, another example of a major Hollywood firm’s putting its weight behind a digital creator. YouTube is another. The tech company paid for Mr. Shapiro-Barnum’s premiere party at Cherry Lane Theater in Manhattan, and financed an oversize “Outside Tonight” billboard in Times Square. (It is also helping to pay for his campaign to get an Emmy nomination for another popular digital show he hosts, “Celebrity Substitute.”)

YouTube does not bankroll original series, but it is getting increasingly aggressive in trying to serve as a liaison between creators and sponsors who can finance their series. “YouTube gave me ample, ample opportunities to be in the room with brands,” Mr. Shapiro-Barnum said.

“Outside Tonight” has two sponsors: Amazon and Chase Freedom.

Still, the operation is no frills. For each episode, the show rotates to a different New York City location, including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. The third episode was filmed in a distant industrial corner of the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn, underneath a bridge that connects the borough to Queens. Some matters could not be planned for, including a near-constant chorus of trucks backing up and unloading at nearby depots, as well as a distinct stench that seemed to waft from either a river or a factory. “That smell is crazy,” one member of his staff observed.

Tom Hanks and other heavyweights are not on the show’s guest list, but comedians who have prominent online footprints, like Matteo Lane and Gianmarco Soresi, have been guests. So have cast members from “Adults,” the FX series about 20-somethings.

The first three episodes of the long-form YouTube version of “Outside Tonight” have reached small audiences thus far, a humbling reminder that nearly all experiments in the late-night space have gone sideways in recent years.

But Mr. Shapiro-Barnum said the short-form results were going better than he had anticipated, pointing to a clip that had garnered more than 2.8 million views on Instagram last month. Because there’s no network, he just needs to persuade sponsors that the show is worth bankrolling. And he needs only a handful of viral hits before viewers find the long-form show, he said.

“We have many, many, many tries, and we really only need one to really click and connect with a broader audience,” Mr. Shapiro-Barnum said. “Then, all of a sudden, they see this backlog and go, ‘Whoa.’”