James Baldwin, Wikipedia, and the Age of AI

 

Who Gets to Tell the Story?

James Baldwin, Wikipedia, and the Age of AI

As I Wonder Reflections

I recently returned to James Baldwin's A Talk to Teachers, and something about it feels very current.

Baldwin was speaking to teachers in 1963, during the Civil Rights Movement. He was asking teachers to think seriously about what they were teaching children—and, perhaps even more importantly, what kind of thinkers they were helping children become.

His concern was not simply whether children could memorize facts.

He wanted them to be able to look at the world they had inherited and ask:

Who made it this way?

Whose story am I being told?

What has been left out?

And perhaps the question underneath all of these questions:

Who gets to create knowledge?

That question takes me directly to Wikipedia.

And from Wikipedia, it takes me directly into the age of artificial intelligence.

Baldwin and the Problem of the Official Story

Baldwin understood something that I think every generation has to rediscover.

There is a difference between history and the story we are told about history.

A society can decide which people are important enough to appear in textbooks.

It can decide which events receive monuments.

It can decide whose papers are preserved in libraries.

It can decide which voices are considered authoritative.

And it can leave other people almost invisible.

For Black Americans, this has happened repeatedly.

People lived, worked, created, organized, protested, farmed, built businesses, raised families, wrote books, made music, created communities, and fought for freedom.

Yet many of their stories did not make it into the official record.

Sometimes the information was never recorded.

Sometimes it was recorded but never published.

Sometimes it was published but not widely distributed.

Sometimes it existed in family stories and community memory but never entered the institutions that determine what becomes "knowledge."

Baldwin understood the danger.

If children cannot find themselves in history, they can begin to believe that they were never there.

Wikipedia Changed Something

This is one reason I became interested in Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is not perfect.

But it represents something fascinating: ordinary people can participate in the creation of a global encyclopedia.

You don't necessarily have to be a university professor.

You don't have to work for a newspaper.

You don't have to own a publishing company.

You can learn how to research, find reliable sources, write an article, add a citation, correct an error, upload an image, or improve something someone else has written.

That changes the question from:

"Who writes history?"

to:

"Who is participating in the writing of the knowledge that the world can see?"

And that is a very Baldwin-like question.

But Who Is Actually Participating?

Here is where I begin to wonder.

If everyone can participate in Wikipedia, does everyone actually participate?

Not necessarily.

There are barriers.

People need access to technology.

They need time.

They need to understand the rules.

They need to know how to research.

They need to know what counts as a reliable source.

They need confidence.

And sometimes they need someone to say:

"You belong here. Your knowledge matters."

This is where I see a connection between Baldwin and the work of bringing more Black people into the Wikimedia movement.

It is not simply about getting more people to edit Wikipedia.

It is about expanding who participates in the preservation and creation of knowledge.

The Knowledge That Lives in People's Homes

One of the things that interests me is the knowledge sitting quietly on bookshelves.

I have often thought about my own home library this way.

A book on a shelf is not just a book.

It may contain information that could improve an existing Wikipedia article.

A scholar may have spent years documenting a subject.

An elder may have spent a lifetime experiencing it.

A community may have preserved knowledge through generations.

But unless someone connects that knowledge to the larger information system, it may remain invisible.

This is why I have become interested in what I think of as slow Wikipedia.

Not everything has to happen immediately.

Sometimes I want to take a book from my shelf, read it carefully, find something that is missing from Wikipedia, locate the appropriate article, and add a well-sourced piece of information.

It is a small act.

But multiplied thousands of times, these small acts change the encyclopedia.

Then Along Comes Artificial Intelligence

And now we have another participant in the knowledge ecosystem:

Artificial intelligence.

ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and other AI systems can produce an answer in seconds.

This is astonishing.

But it also makes Baldwin's questions even more important.

Where did the information come from?

Who created the original knowledge?

Whose books were digitized?

Whose Wikipedia articles were written?

Whose voices were recorded?

Whose archives were preserved?

Whose communities were documented?

And whose knowledge never made it into the systems from which AI learns?

AI can be extremely good at rearranging information.

But rearranging existing information is not the same thing as creating a complete record of human experience.

AI Can Repeat What We Have Already Recorded

This is something I keep thinking about.

Artificial intelligence can appear to know everything.

But AI does not mean that everything has actually been documented.

There can be an enormous difference between:

"The information doesn't exist"

and

"The information exists, but it hasn't entered the digital knowledge system."

There are family photographs.

Letters.

Church programs.

Local newspapers.

Oral histories.

Community newspapers.

Old business directories.

Personal libraries.

Meeting minutes.

Photographs in boxes.

Stories remembered by grandparents.

And people who know things that may never have been written down.

What happens to that knowledge?

If it never enters the record, future AI systems may not know it exists.

Wikipedia and AI Are Connected

This is one of the things that became increasingly clear to me while attending Wikimania in Paris in 2026.

We are entering a period in which artificial intelligence is becoming one of the major ways people encounter information.

A person may no longer begin by opening an encyclopedia.

They may ask an AI assistant.

The AI gives them an answer.

And they move on.

But where did that answer come from?

Wikipedia is one of the important sources of structured, publicly accessible human knowledge on the internet.

That means the work people do on Wikipedia has implications beyond Wikipedia itself.

A carefully researched article can become part of the information environment from which millions of people—and increasingly machines—learn.

That makes editing Wikipedia feel different to me.

It isn't simply correcting an encyclopedia.

It is participating in the knowledge infrastructure of the future.

The Danger of a Digital Memory That Is Incomplete

This also creates a new danger.

Imagine that artificial intelligence becomes the primary doorway through which people learn about the world.

Now imagine that the historical record behind that AI is incomplete.

What happens?

The omissions can become invisible.

A person asks about a Black community that once existed in California.

The AI searches its available knowledge.

Perhaps it finds very little.

The person may conclude:

"There must not have been much there."

But that conclusion could be completely wrong.

Maybe the community existed for generations.

Maybe the evidence is sitting in an archive.

Maybe there are photographs in someone's basement.

Maybe an elderly person still remembers the people who lived there.

Maybe the information exists in a book that has never been digitized.

The absence of information can easily be mistaken for the absence of history.

That is a problem.

This Brings Me Back to Baldwin

Baldwin was deeply concerned with what happens when people are given a distorted understanding of themselves.

He understood that history isn't merely about the past.

History shapes identity.

If you are told that your people contributed very little, you may begin to see yourself differently.

If you discover that your ancestors built communities, created institutions, resisted oppression, cultivated land, invented things, wrote books, made music, organized movements, and preserved knowledge, your understanding of yourself can change.

This is why preserving history matters.

And this is why I think Baldwin's A Talk to Teachers has something to say to Wikipedia editors, librarians, archivists, parents, students, and even AI developers.

Who Gets to Be an Author of Knowledge?

For a long time, knowledge was controlled by institutions.

Universities.

Publishers.

Governments.

Museums.

Newspapers.

Libraries.

Archives.

These institutions remain important.

But the internet opened another door.

Wikipedia opened another.

Now AI is opening another.

And I find myself wondering:

Are we moving toward a more democratic knowledge system—or are we simply creating new gatekeepers?

That question matters.

Because AI may make information easier to access while simultaneously making it harder for people to see where that information originated.

A polished AI answer can make uncertainty disappear.

It can make missing information invisible.

It can make an incomplete historical record look complete.

That is why human participation still matters.

The Human-AI Learning Loop

I don't think the answer is to reject AI.

I use AI myself.

I ask questions.

I explore ideas.

I use it to help me organize my thinking and discover connections.

But I don't want AI to replace the human work of research.

I think there is another possibility.

Human beings research.

AI helps us explore.

Human beings verify.

Human beings add sources.

Communities contribute their knowledge.

Wikipedia preserves it.

AI helps people discover it.

And then people discover something new and add more knowledge.

That becomes a kind of human-AI learning loop.

The machine helps us move through information faster.

But humans still have to decide what is meaningful, what is accurate, what is missing, and what deserves to be preserved.

Maybe This Is What Baldwin Was Asking Us to Do

When I think about Baldwin's talk now, I hear something beyond a speech to teachers.

I hear an invitation to become participants in our own intellectual lives.

Don't simply accept the story.

Investigate it.

Don't assume that because something isn't written down, it didn't happen.

Look for the evidence.

Don't assume that because an AI gives you an answer, the answer is complete.

Ask where it came from.

And don't assume that knowledge belongs only to experts.

Sometimes knowledge is sitting in someone's home.

Sometimes it is in an elder's memory.

Sometimes it is in a photograph.

Sometimes it is in a community that has been overlooked.

Sometimes it is in a book that has been sitting on a shelf for fifty years.

From Information Age to Education Age

This brings me to a phrase I have been thinking about for a long time:

We are moving from the Information Age into an Education Age.

We already have an extraordinary amount of information.

The challenge now is learning what to do with it.

Can we distinguish information from knowledge?

Can we recognize a trustworthy source?

Can we notice what is missing?

Can we connect oral history with written history?

Can we teach young people to question AI?

Can we teach them to contribute rather than simply consume?

Can we help communities preserve their own histories?

And can we make sure that the people whose histories have been overlooked become participants in creating the record?

A Way to Be Part of Something Meaningful

Maybe this is why I keep returning to Wikipedia.

It gives ordinary people a way to participate.

You don't have to change the whole world in one afternoon.

You can begin with one article.

One citation.

One photograph.

One book.

One correction.

One story.

One community.

One forgotten person.

One piece of evidence.

And perhaps that is another lesson I take from Baldwin.

We don't have to accept the world exactly as it was handed to us.

We can examine it.

We can question it.

We can add to it.

We can correct it.

And we can preserve what might otherwise disappear.

Who Owns Human Knowledge?

That may be one of the great questions of the AI age.

Who owns human knowledge?

Perhaps the better question is:

Who participates in preserving it?

Because knowledge existed long before artificial intelligence.

Human beings observed the stars.

Farmers learned the seasons.

Grandmothers preserved recipes.

Communities remembered migrations.

Elders carried stories.

Scientists recorded experiments.

Artists documented their worlds.

Writers interpreted their times.

And ordinary people lived histories that were sometimes never written down.

AI did not create human knowledge.

It arrived in the middle of a very long human conversation.

The question before us is whether we will allow that conversation to become narrower—or whether we will invite more people into it.

James Baldwin wanted teachers to help young people become thinkers rather than simply receivers of information.

Perhaps today we need to extend that idea.

We need people who are not only consumers of AI answers, but creators, investigators, editors, archivists, storytellers, and preservers of human knowledge.

That is where Wikipedia becomes more than an encyclopedia for me.

It becomes a place where ordinary people can say:

I was here.

My community was here.

This happened.

This person mattered.

Here is the source.

Here is the evidence.

Please don't let this disappear.

And perhaps that is one of the most important things we can teach in the age of artificial intelligence:

Don't just ask the machine what it knows.

Ask what humanity has forgotten—and then go looking for it.