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.”

The United States is turning 250 tomorrow. It’s a big birthday. But what exactly is America celebrating?

The revolutionary ideals enshrined in the 1776 Declaration of Independence inspired generations: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

But those ideals are now the subject of intense debate. What is the American experiment all about? What should American democracy be? These are big questions, especially during Donald Trump’s polarizing presidency. I talked to my colleague Peter Baker, our chief White House correspondent, about what this anniversary tells us about America and the moment it’s in.

America’s very messy birthday party

So Peter, can anyone actually agree on what’s being celebrated this weekend?

No, and that’s what’s so striking. It should be a moment of unity, right? I was 9 when we celebrated 200 years of independence. Everybody came together waving flags, remembering the Revolution and thinking about what it all meant. But it’s a much more polarized environment today. And we have a president who’s making this anniversary more about himself than about the country.

How so?

He’s basically taken over the organization of the festivities in Washington. Take the big Fourth of July concert. That’s been completely transformed. All these musicians backed out. They didn’t want to be part of some sort of Trump show. And so instead, the president is giving what he says will be “a really long speech.”

I’ve lived my whole life in the Washington area, and on the Fourth of July back in the day, you’d go to the National Mall, bring a picnic, stay through the concert by the National Symphony Orchestra, which would play patriotic music, and then you’d watch the fireworks.

But this year it’s essentially a political rally, and that will leave a lot of Americans feeling that they don’t want to be there. There’s going to be security. They can’t bring chairs or balls or Frisbees or coolers full of food and have a picnic on the mall the way they used to.

Picnics on the mall — what could be more American?

Exactly. You want to look back at what made America great? It was picnics on the mall!

You mentioned the musicians backing out of Trump’s concert. That’s not the only thing that has gone wrong. There’s also his multi-million-dollar project to spruce up the Reflecting Pool for the anniversary — only to get an algae infestation and peeling paint.

Yeah, the symbolism is terrible. It makes him look like he’s focused on the wrong things to a lot of Americans struggling to pay for rent or gas. And he can’t even do it right. For those who don’t like him, it’s become a metaphor for his presidency.

For any other president this would have been very damaging. But Trump has so many of these moments that it may not matter. Still, it’s a bad story and one that has frustrated him enormously.

What about the content of the celebrations? What exactly are Trump and his supporters celebrating?

They’re celebrating a view of America as they believe it once was, a better America as they see it. An America with fewer immigrants, a strong manufacturing sector, a more traditional definition of the family and so on.

It’s a view of America that doesn’t embrace some of the changes we’ve seen in the country. Those changes are discomfiting to a lot of people. And Trump has tapped into this sense of grievance that is out there among many Americans, that the country is getting away from them.

It also doesn’t acknowledge some of the times it’s fallen short of its ideals. But Trump doesn’t believe in telling stories that in any way diminish the mythology of America’s greatness.

How are his opponents celebrating this anniversary?

The people who don’t subscribe to Trump’s view of the world look at America as a place of change. We’re not the same country we were 250 years ago, nor, they argue, would most people want it to be. When we said in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal,” what we really meant was “all white men who owned a certain amount of property.” Those were the only ones who were allowed to vote then.

But the Constitution also vows to “form a more perfect union.” So there’s an acknowledgment that we’re not a perfect union, but we’re trying to get there. That ideal is what traditionally made America a beacon for the world. But now there’s a worry among people who aren’t fans of Trump that we no longer are.

Is there a chance that, all of this division notwithstanding, this weekend will actually be an occasion where people come together?

Certainly in individual communities. I’m in New England with my family right now and when you drive around, you see flags everywhere, you see a lot of excitement about the holiday that has nothing to do with politics. It’s in Washington where it just feels so divided, but I expect in communities across the country they will ignore the politics — or at least put it to the side for one day.

And Peter, how are you going to celebrate tomorrow?

We’re going to a barbecue with fried chicken, burgers and fireworks. We also have a family tradition of the kids reading from the Declaration of Independence and we will do that again this year. It’s such a beautiful document. The meaning of the words has evolved with our lived reality. But the ideal behind it is as inspiring as ever.

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The 15-year-olds in Kyiv had practiced the waltz hundreds of times. Now it was finally time to perform. The room, sticky in the June heat, was filled with parents, teachers and friends.

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BEFORE YOU GO …

I was 17 when I moved to the U.S. Coming from small-town Germany, there were many things that baffled me. So many flags! The size of the doughnuts! The noise of the ambulances!

Everything in America was bigger, louder and more confident than what I had grown up with. It was both intimidating and awe-inspiring. And there was something else I noticed: the endless small talk.

People constantly asked me how I was doing, sometimes multiple times in one conversation. They told me I looked great, that my bag looked great. They were endlessly smiley. And they definitely overshared.

At first I found it terribly superficial. And so inefficient. Why are we still talking? I just want to buy my coffee.

But I quickly became a convert: Small talk is not just a joyful way to make a human connection. It’s also very efficient when it comes to identifying common ground with people who are different. In America, a nation of immigrants, small talk plays an essential role. (In journalism, it does, too.)

Social psychologists talk about the peach vs. coconut model. Americans are peaches — soft and chatty on the outside, with a harder private core. Northern Europeans are coconuts: We have a hard outer shell (no gratuitous smiling), but a soft core (lifelong loyalty once you’ve earned our friendship).

My song of the week is something a little different — but I thought you’d appreciate it. I went to a Lewis Capaldi concert this week in Cardiff, Wales, where he gave a soulful rendition of … “Before You Go”!