Lead Balloon Ep. 61 - Will Wikipedia survive Artificial Intelligence? And Can A.I. Survive Without Wikipedia?

Is ChatGPT killing its own Golden Goose?

Wikipedia readers consume nearly one billion articles per day from the online encyclopedia.

In its 25 years of operation, this compendium of human knowledge has become an integral tool for understanding the world in which we live.

But artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT could threaten Wikipedia's viability over the next 25 years.

The fool considers his golden goose.

And in fact, by diverting fundraising traffic, undermining traditional journalism, and thinning the ranks of Wikipedia editors, large language models (LLMs) could even imperil their own usefulness.

So in this episode, we're talking to a Wikipedia expert about the implications—both for strategic communicators and for society in general.

Bill Beutler is the founder of Beutler Ink, a PR firm that specializes in optimizing brands' presence on Wikipedia.

And together we'll discuss what can be done to preserve Wikipedia as a resource, how communicators should adapt their strategies, and what the future might hold.

Transcript

Dusty Weis

Every second, 10,000 people visit a page on Wikipedia.

That's 600,000 articles a minute, 36 million new things that someone, somewhere is learning every hour.

Nearly 1 billion visits to the world's foremost compendium of human knowledge every single day.

That makes Wikipedia an integral part to the way that people understand the world, which makes it integrally important to how we do our jobs as strategic communicators.

But like so many of our institutions in 2025, Wikipedia faces an existential crisis posed by artificial intelligence. Whether it's Wikipedia’s funding model, its massive team of volunteer editors, or the journalistic articles from which it sources a lot of its material, this collaborative tool for the betterment of all humanity is hemmed in on all sides by AI tools like ChatGPT.

And nobody's talking about it… except Bill Beutler.

Bill Beutler

If people are getting Wikipedia's information from the LLMs instead, then they might not go back to Wikipedia. There might be fewer editors, there might be fewer donations

.

The data mining aspect of it has started to strain the Wikipedia servers.

Dusty Weis

So in this episode, we'll take a look at the threats to Wikipedia, learn a little bit more about how this core piece of our information infrastructure works, and examine how AI both threatens and depends upon Wikipedia's continued existence.

I'm Dusty Weis. From Podcamp Media, this is Lead Balloon, a podcast about irresistible tales from the worlds of PR, marketing and branding told by the well-meaning communications professionals who live them.

Thank you for tuning in. Our guest today is Wikipedia consultant Bill Beutler.

15 years ago, when the rest of us were still trying to figure out the proper format for indicating a Retweet on Twitter, Bill saw an underserved niche in the market and founded Beutler Ink, a PR firm specializing in helping its clients get their messaging onto Wikipedia without running afoul of its policies and guidelines.

The agency has now grown to more than 15 people across North America, serving clients from startups to Fortune 500 companies.

Prior to becoming a leading authority on leveraging the internet’s most useful resource for strategic ends, Bill was a Senior Writer at the Hotline, a DC political news aggregator before that was a cool thing to be.

So Bill Beutler, thank you for joining us on Lead Balloon.

Bill Beutler

Dusty, thank you for having me here. It's a pleasure, I’m really looking forward to our conversation today.

Dusty Weis

I think we are going to be delving into something that is really niche and really nerdy, which means it's going to be among one of my favorite topics, because that's my bread and butter here, Bill. But in my research for this episode, I visited the Wikipedia page about Wikipedia for the first time ever. And according to that Wikipedia page, Wikipedia will turn 25 years old next year.

Now I'm old enough to remember, Bill, in my high school English class, my teacher chiding me that I couldn't cite Wikipedia as a source for my term paper because “it's just a couple of guys on the internet.”

Nonetheless, by the mid-2000s, this crowdsourced compendium of human knowledge had basically become the internet's primary authority on what was real and what was not.

So for all of its clout, I would venture that a majority of Wikipedia users today don't actually understand where that information comes from and how it gets there. So to start us off and level set a little bit. Can you give us a brief overview of how Wikipedia and its editors work?

Bill Beutler

Sure thing. It is a big topic because it's a big website, big community. It was never just a couple of guys editing. It was, you know, maybe a couple a dozen early on. And it grew to be a few hundred.

And so Wikipedia started in 2001. In 2004 is where it really took off. Like, essentially, you could say that editing Wikipedia went viral and the early contributors were like software people and academic people a little bit.

And then it got more popular in 2004. It kind of hit this critical mass. Everybody recognized that it was useful. Maybe it wasn't entirely trustworthy and frankly, even to this day, it is not entirely trustworthy. But all of a sudden, it was this new thing, real interesting. Between 2004 and 2007, the editorship, it really went up like a rocket ship.

It came back down, settled a bit. Today there are billions of page views on Wikipedia every day. There are hundreds of thousands of edits made every month. There's tens of thousands of editors still active on a monthly basis, and there's like a hardcore set of like 4000 editors who are making more than 100 edits per month.

Dusty Weis

Now, these people that are doing this work on Wikipedia, they almost… a lot of them, they treat this like it's a second job. They're not getting compensated for this. They're not getting paid for it. This is something that they do out of the goodness of their heart?

Because they enjoy doing it? Why are people spending so much time editing this website for free?

Bill Beutler

It's helpful to think of it as a hobby. For most of those people, it is just what their hobby is. The analogy that I've been using lately is that it's not for many of them, where they're not necessarily all researching and writing new content. A lot of it is more changing categories, and it's a lot of janitorial work to be done. Curatorial work.

The analogy that I've been using lately is like, it's like knitting. It's kind of this repetitive, soothing thing to keep doing. You're knitting together information. That's what a lot of them do. You do have editors who are primarily content creators, who research, who write, who add stuff. They usually kind of add something on their area of knowledge.

And then, you know what? If they have added everything they have, they might just move on. And so some Wikipedia editors are not forever.

But the people who kind of treat it like knitting, and they have conversations with other editors about what's the right way to do things. I mean, some of them have been editing for almost 25 years now.

Dusty Weis

I'll be darned. And so in addition to all these people that are volunteering their time, and I would imagine that they see it as a public service and Lord knows that it is, in this era of misinformation that we're in.

But on top of all that, there is actually a nonprofit structure that, you know, they have to pay the bills. They got to keep the lights on. They have to pay to put all of this information on servers and make it available.

How is that part of the business operated and funded?

Bill Beutler

So, you know, it's helpful to realize that there are kind of two Wikipedias, in a sense. There is that volunteer community that I mentioned as you note, they are not paid. But then there is also the nonprofit foundation that back stops them. And that's called the Wikimedia Foundation.

Whenever you see those fundraising banners at the top of the page every November, December, that's coming from the Wikimedia Foundation, they are raising money to keep the lights on. About half of all that money that they get, which is a lot of money. A lot of money, I think, was 185 million that they raised last year. Half of it goes to infrastructure. You know, the servers, some software development.

About another quarter of it goes to supporting the volunteers. But that does not mean paying them. The nonprofit is not allowed, per its own charter, to have any real say so on content except for extreme circumstances where they're going to get sued. They stay out of that.

And the rest of the money is used as this kind of overhead to finance salaries there.

It is a lot of money. They spend about 200 million every year. And yet, frankly, those fundraising banners are a little bit controversial among the community, not just that they don't see that money.

They don't expect to, but because of the fundraising banners, you know, can kind of feel a little bit like they are trying to make you think that Wikipedia is about to go out of business tomorrow if you don't give five bucks. It will not.

Dusty Weis

It could operate on less.

Bill Beutler

Oh yeah. It's gotten so popular. It does have such goodwill that people are like, hey man, I use this thing all the time. No problem to throw in five bucks every November. And so it adds up over time.

Dusty Weis

I'll say this as a longtime NPR listener as well, it's definitely less obtrusive than a pledge drive.

Bill Beutler

Well, Wikipedia's former CEO is now the CEO at NPR, so she's seen some stuff.

Dusty Weis

I would certainly hope that she's going to bring some of that Wikipedia razzle dazzle to NPR, which is in sore need of funding, and I would argue, a new method of pursuing that funding beyond just pledge drives, because there's nothing dumber, in my very humble opinion, than annoying people and making your content demonstrably worse as a means of demonstrating its value to them.

But that’s a whole other rant that I like to go off on.

Bill Beutler

At least NPR will send you a tote bag.

Dusty Weis

At least you get a tote bag out of it. When you look at the entire body of knowledge that's contained on Wikipedia and maintained, as you put it by this staff of volunteer editors, just how much is out there? How do we quantify the value to humanity of Wikipedia?

Bill Beutler

I can definitely speak very simply to how much is there. The value to humanity, that's a bigger conversation, but we can get into it. As far as the content goes, so the English Wikipedia, which is the biggest project… there are actually 340 different Wikipedias that are in different languages. English was the first. It's by far the biggest. It's a global language.

But 340… across them there's 65 million encyclopedia articles. On English, the one that you and I and most people read, actually just crossed a major milestone a few weeks ago, and that was its 7,000,000th article, and it took about the better part of ten years to get there, I think. It hit 6 million sometime in the prior decade, and it's taking longer and longer to create them because so much of it's already been built.

You know, there's lots more to go, for sure. But Wikipedia has reached a certain age of maturity. There's not as much, kind of, green field, blue ocean to explore there.

Dusty Weis

You only have to write about the Napoleonic Wars once and then you've basically got it covered. We're not learning a whole lot new about it.

Bill Beutler

And presuming that scholarship on the Napoleonic Wars is fairly stable, once you've written it, there's not as much to argue about, there are certain topics that people will just argue about forever. The troubles in Ireland, people are still arguing about that decades later, totally.

Dusty Weis

It suffices to say just based on the depth of knowledge that you very clearly have, and the passion for Wikipedia that you have, that you have some background in this community of editors. Am I right or wrong there?

Bill Beutler

Right, absolutely. I am not just a consultant, not just the president of the Hair Club for Men, I'm also a client. Boy, that's a joke that I don't even know if you're old enough to get.

Dusty Weis

No, no, I’m right there with you but only just barely, man. It's you and me as elder millennials and not many others who are going to get that one.

Bill Beutler

Anyway, I started editing Wikipedia back in 2006. At the time, I was a, as you know, I was a political journalist in DC, working for a proto-aggregator. And I covered a lot of, like, what the emerging political blogosphere was writing about politics. And they kept linking to this one site over and over again, Wikipedia. And it was bloggers of the left and bloggers of the right were both linking to it.

They didn't agree on much, but they did seem to agree on Wikipedia being useful. And I was like, well, this is fascinating. And I was a reader for a long time. And then finally in 2006, I made my first edit.

Coincidentally enough, it was because my boss asked me to make a change for a friend of his, and it worked out like I did my research and I left a talk page comment when I did it, and then it worked out. It worked out for me.

And then I spent a long time just going through editing articles about movies while I was watching the movie, or when I first started creating articles, it was about a prominent TV pitchman in my hometown of Portland, Oregon when I was growing up, Tom Peterson.

That was the first article that I ever wrote. It's still there, way more detail than I would have written today but, you know, you learn. Been a member of the Wikipedia community since that time. I write a blog in my own time about how Wikipedia works. Yeah, it's fair to say it's certainly, I do derive my living from it.

But it is not just a job for me.

Dusty Weis

Well, I want to hear then about how you made the transition from just being an enthusiastic member of the community to founding a business that still, to this day, plays in that space. Because I do love a good light bulb moment story from another entrepreneur.

Bill Beutler

Yeah. So the moment that my boss asked me to make the change probably was that initial thread that I pulled and pulled.

Dusty Weis

You realized, hey, there's a demand for services here that isn't being met by the current market.

Bill Beutler

Right. It didn't happen immediately. There was still a period of time where I was just kind of learning how Wikipedia works. I'm getting my feet wet, I suppose. And yet, just as you said, the clients of my then-employer, which was a public affairs, social media marketing firm in the DC area. Their clients included Burger King and Disney.

And so a lot of the early projects I did was like creating Wikipedia articles about direct to video Disney, like Buena Vista Productions, like, I don't know, like Mulan 3.

Dusty Weis

The Little Mermaid 3.

Bill Beutler

Yeah, precisely. Precisely. High School Musical, that was big at the time.

So, yeah, I recognized that, like the clients of my employer were the subject of the articles, but Wikipedia's rules, even at that time, strongly discourage companies from going in and editing articles themselves, because Wikipedia editors correctly suspected that the companies will, you know, turn them into a puff piece, into an advertising flier.

Left to their own devices, that will happen.

And so they kind of put up this barrier that says, “Don't do it. Like we'll undo your edits. We'll put a nasty warning on your account page if you do it.” But I knew that couldn't be the end of the story, because Wikipedia articles do get things wrong. And the volunteer community at Wikipedia doesn't care as much about company articles, existing organizations, or business people than it cares about things like the highway system.

Like people geek out about the roadways, about trains, about weather systems, hurricane articles, so well developed. If the company is a video game company, like okay, the Red Dead you know, series, those articles are so immaculate.

Dusty Weis

Thorough.

Bill Beutler

But not so much for B2B software companies of midsize that meet Wikipedia’s inclusion requirements. But the editor base doesn't really care about it that much. So we really like, you know, realized there's an opportunity to provide a service where we'll bridge that gap. The two sides don't really understand each other, but I had a foot in both worlds.

And so that was really where things started to come together. And after a couple of years of offering that as a service, as like a value add at my employer, I was like, I think there's a lot more to this than what they want to do with it. So I said, thank you very much. It's been great. I'm gonna go do my own thing now.

And boy, 15 years later, as you say, we are a company of 15 to 20 people at different times and it's a blast. I feel so fortunate to be doing this thing that almost nobody does, really.

Dusty Weis

It's a really cool origin story, and I love it because you found that really, really thin slice of the Venn diagram where you've got a whole bunch of people interested in a thing and a whole bunch of people who know how to do the thing and the overlap. It's really slim. But you found a niche there, and 15 years later you're still at it. It's really cool to hear.

Certainly, Wikipedia has faced its ups and downs over its quarter century of operation here, but I would argue after speaking with you, and certainly I think you would too, that there has never been a more existential threat to Wikipedia then it's going to be facing very soon with the advent of artificial intelligence and large language models, or LLMs like ChatGPT.

So what's the threat? What should Wikipedia and its community of users, its community of editors? What should they be paying attention to right now vis-a-vis LLMs and ChatGPT?

Bill Beutler

Sure. So I don't want to portray it as an unmitigated bad thing for Wikipedia, because there are ways in which it can help. But you are not wrong that it does start to raise questions both about how people use Wikipedia, how Wikipedia is generated, is created. AI is upending assumptions in many fields, Wikipedia would not be immune.

So probably the first thing that most people think about would be the fact that AI pulls information from Wikipedia in forming its answers.

It's both in the training data. And then especially ChatGPT loves to use it as a citation. So at least they are giving the citation but people don't always follow it.

Frankly, this was always the case with Google as well. Google's been borrowing information from Wikipedia for decades, and editors were concerned a decade ago that, did they need to create their own search engine? Because what if Google one day turned off the traffic spigot? And that never happened.

I know we talked about the traffic implications on Wikipedia. And so this gave me a chance to go do some research to look into that, because what I remember hearing before is still correct today. Wikipedia's traffic is basically flat, and it has been for the better part of a decade. It is not at this time losing traffic.

I actually last week tuned in to a webinar given by the Wikimedia research team at the Foundation. And so they also we're talking about… so Reddit is another big input on what the LMS say. It turns to it for answers because a lot of genuine opinions that it's pulling out of there, Reddit also has maintained its traffic so far.

So that is good news in the short term. But it's not to say that it will be the case forever. Certainly, if people are getting Wikipedia's information from the LLMs instead, then they might not go back to Wikipedia. There might be fewer editors, there might be fewer donations, which I think is, as I said, a little bit less of an issue than the editors there, but they’re connected.

There are more than that, the data mining aspect of it has started to strain the Wikipedia servers. So the foundation recently put out a different version of Wikipedia that is specifically for the LLMs. It's kind of curated. It's like here, please stay off of our humble servers and go to this other server and use that one.

The other bigger issue that I am really concerned about is less about Wikipedia than it is about the media ecosystem. “Citation needed” is probably one of the most famous phrases associated with Wikipedia. Wikipedia does depend on mostly professional news publications for updating articles about current subjects, but there's been a huge drop in the news media over time in multiple phases.

And if Wikipedia runs out of sources to verify information, that could slow down Wikipedia’s growth even more.

Dusty Weis

Yeah, yeah. No, certainly I as one former journalist to another here, it's something that, I follow with a growing sense of dread and alarm watching the numbers even just recently, Muck Rack and another partner organization put out a study where they went county by county across the United States and looked at… they called it “full time equivalent journalism,” and found that in the United States now there are only eight journalists per 100,000 residents in the U.S.

And that's compared to like 40 about 25 years ago. So literally, the number of journalists working in the United States, or at least the proportion of journalists working in the United States, has declined by 80% over the last 25 years.

Certainly, that has implications for us as a society. But certainly if Wikipedia has that many fewer articles, that many professionally sourced sources to tap, it's going to have an impact on the quality of the work that Wikipedia and its editors are able to do, yeah?

Bill Beutler

Oh, most certainly. This is a matter of professional concern to me because most of the inbound inquiries we get, at least two thirds of it are people asking to create an article about their company or about themselves. And what they really need, the coin of the realm are those citations and, you know, really like it's not like the media has gone away.

There's more of it than ever. There's TikTok, there's Reddit, there's social media is, you know, there's no shortage of that. What there is less and less of, though, as you note, is professional news reporting where the rigor with analysis. And that's what Wikipedia editors are looking for. And Wikipedia, founded in 2001, is still operating on like a 2000 late 90s era model of the news.

And so one of my favorite examples of an area that Wikipedia does not cover very well right now is music. You used to have… I know that Rolling Stone and spin are still around, but they are not what they once were.

Dusty Weis

Shells of themselves.

Bill Beutler

Yeah, even Pitchfork got scaled back by Condé Nast fairly recently. There are many bands that I will hear come up on the Sirius XMU radio station while I'm driving and I'm like, oh, this Castlebeat, I really like this. It sounds cool. Let me go, surely they have a Wikipedia article. No they don't, because all the press they've got basically are these interviews on blogs.

And Wikipedia does not accept Q and A's for this purpose because they're not vetted the same way that an edited journalistic article would be. And so I haven't checked for a little bit, maybe Castlebeat has an article now. His stuff is good, you should check it out.

But, Wikipedia is not able to cover as many subjects as it could have, were the news media still around. That’s fewer would-be clients I can say yes to, and that's less reliable information for people who just want to learn about any current subject.

Dusty Weis

But as much as losing primary sources is a concern for Wikipedia’s model… there’s another threat that could hamstring the platform even worse.

And that… is coming up in a moment, here on Lead Balloon

Dusty Weis

This is Lead Balloon, and I’m Dusty Weis

If the rise of A.I. and Large Language Models is cannibalizing the primary media sources at the heart of Wikipedia’s quality assurance processes, it stands to reason that it would take MORE Wikipedia editors to make up the difference, right?

However, folks like Bill Beutler are raising red flags… that if fewer people are clicking to Wikipedia and instead getting their information from ChatGPT, then fewer people are going to learn about the guts of Wikipedia… Ergo, you're going to have FEWER people volunteering to be editors.

Bill Beutler

I do think it's a valid concern, it's one that Wikipedia editors talk about among themselves frequently. There's in person conferences where folks like myself get together and talk about wiki things, and I would say that is a big topic of conversation for sure.

Dusty Weis

When you go to one of those conferences, what are the demographics? Are most of the people around your age? Are there any young folks who are getting excited to contribute as Wikipedia editors?

Bill Beutler

There are, but not as many. I would say that I'm 45, I would say the average editor is probably my age or older. And then there's a handful of people who are kind of like stars in the community because they are younger.

There's this woman named Hannah Clover who's a Gen Zer out of Canada, who was named the Wikimedian of the year last year at the Wikimania conference in Poland, where I was at, and she just got into editing Wikipedia, and she's very active contributor, very thoughtful person.

And they would like to spotlight her because we want more like her. I would say that, you know, right now things are steady, things are stable, but everybody's kind of thinking long term, legacy wise. We're at 25 years now. Wikipedia will surely be around for another 25 at least. But what is it going to look like?

So people do talk about that. They don't talk as much really at this time about the sources question. That's one where I think that there should be more and maybe I should submit this as a talk. There should be more discussion about what Wikipedia can do and honestly there may not be a lot that Wikipedia can do about the news media.

That's a systemic problem.

Dusty Weis

That's a tough nut to crack, right? There are a lot of other big minds of presented solutions as well, but so far nobody's got that one licked. But as someone who's deeply immersed in this space and you said that people are talking about it at the conferences, has anyone presented a solution? Do you have any, please?

Bill Beutler

So one thing that they're not going to do is lower their standards. I think if anything, Wikipedia's standards have become higher over the years. As you note, like in the mid 2000s, it was kind of disreputable, vaguely disreputable. You know, don't cite Wikipedia, don't trust it. I like to point out that this is where generative AI is today.

You can't trust what it says, but damn, it's too useful not to, you know, at least look at.

So Wikipedia, once it got to that critical mass, it kind of started to realize that it needed to put the best face forward. So it relies on the most reliable of sources and it is a little small-c conservative in some ways, that way.

The solution that I have in mind is not one that is going to be a large-scale solution, but I actually think there should be some effort to create a news publication whose job it is to report specifically for Wikipedia. To be like a FactCheck.org for Wikipedia, I would not be the person to run this because of my running a consultancy, there would be a big conflict of interest with that I think.

But if someone hearing this is intrigued and sounds like you’d like to learn more about that, by all means reach out to me because I have big thoughts about how that would be done and how it might be funded.

Dusty Weis

I was going to say. Or if a funder hears and wants to reach out and have that conversation.

Bill Beutler

If you are a deep pocketed fan of Wikipedia, who worries about the sources available to verify information for the page and for the project to continue to grow. I do think, and then look I think the Wikimedia Foundation is in a good position to do something like this, but they're really cautious about not getting involved in content and I think that that could change in the future.

That's certainly a conversation I would like to drive.

So that’s one, would be creating those publications… not to jump ahead too much on AI, but like, I think that probably OpenAI has a strong vested interest in propping up...

Dusty Weis

Well that's what I was going to say. If we need somebody to fund this, the people who are undermining it to begin with should possibly look into contributing.

I have to say, Bill, if there's one thing that continually infuriates me about the so-called A.I. revolution that's happening right now, it's its leaders' seeming indifference to the destructive disruption that they say that they're seeking to foster.

Not to get too far off topic here, but just a couple of months ago, the CEO at Anthropic, Dario Amodei, I think is his name, predicted something like 20% unemployment in five years and the elimination of half of all entry level white collar jobs.

And then he said, “Well, that'll be weird. I guess we're going to keep doing what we're doing” in this way that is almost like…

It's just infuriating that they seem to pursue these solutions in spite of or even because of the consequences that they seem to be seeking to foster here.

Now, I'm skeptical that AI really has the power to cause that much disruption, because I put my marketer's hat on and I say, wow, he did a really good job of getting into the headline of every single major news outlet that's out there when he said that sort of crazy thing.

I think it's going to be kind of more like the Amazon Alexa and the rise of voice assistants that we went through 10 years ago now, when they said that this was going to change the way that people do online shopping and that children my children's age would not know how to use a computer or a tablet, because they would just do everything on voice assistants.

That hasn't materialized yet. And so I don't see the disruption taking place at that sort of scale. But at the same time, if you think that there's going to be that much disruption, wouldn't you please just like also present a solution to 20% unemployment because that has major societal ramifications.

All of that is a really long winded way to say that if Wikipedia is the single biggest source of data for training LLMs, if it's compromised, doesn't that mean the LLMs themselves will also be compromised?

And don't they have a vested interest in promoting its continued vibrance?

Bill Beutler

There is definitely a killing the golden goose aspect to it. That could be an issue. I have talked to other professionals in this space, especially people in SEO, which is also, you know, closely related to this. And I think the view is like, yeah, maybe over the long term, but we're talking about like, big long-term shift.

Granted, the problem with making predictions about AI is it that leaps up and surprises you. Obviously, ChatGPT was a huge surprise when it came along, and people were kind of willing to believe almost anything, including if the CEO of Anthropic or Sam Altman at OpenAI had said very similar things about, “Well, this could be the end of money, you know?” Shrug. (laughs)

And I have my doubts about all that, but nor does it need to be that disruptive to be quite disruptive to the economy and to how society is organized.

So they're aware of it. And, look, they're going to cannibalize their own industry, right? Software programmers are among the most vulnerable. So I am so fascinated by how information jobs used to be where oh, you're safe in information jobs.

Now the information jobs are very much at risk. And I would say relationship jobs are the ones that are, have a little bit more of a moat around it because like, AI does not do a good job of really speaking to human needs and feelings and doesn't really know what those are. It's just making predictions about it.

Dusty Weis

I would argue that Dario Amodei does not do a good job of speaking to other humans. (laughs)

Bill Beutler

I mean, he's probably kind of an accidental CEO. A lot of them are just that, you know, computer science nerds who lucked into one of the biggest developments in human communication history. So they're learning on the fly. And by the way, like “move fast and break things" was a phrase 20 years ago that was Zuckerberg's line.

Dusty Weis

And look where it got us, right?

Bill Beutler

Yeah. I mean, that's a fair point. I'm not saying it was a constructive perspective, just that it's not a new one.

Dusty Weis

Strategic communicators in this era, Bill, we still have a job to do. Certainly at Beutler Ink, you're doing more than just keeping an eye on this. How are you counseling your clients to shift their strategic communication strategies in light of what you're seeing and what your concerns are?

Bill Beutler

A good question. For the longest time, our work was based on: people care about Wikipedia because it showed up at the top of Google search results, and they do still care about that. But increasingly, and I really mean in the last three months, I have seen the shift in inbound inquiries that we're getting. They're asking for help because one, because increasingly, ChatGPT is recommending us to people who are searching for Wikipedia help.

And they're also asking because they know that Wikipedia as an input to what the AI answers say. We're at the start of this new/evolved industry where SEO is becoming generative engine optimization, I think is the most popular term GEO but AEO for answer engine optimization is also quite popular, we'll see what shakes out.

What we're counselling, and frankly, we are ourselves starting to look at expanding services in order to meet this. We’ve been Wikipedia-first, there's a very realistic chance that we are AI search-first, at some point in the not too distant future. Wikipedia remains a core of that.

Very few SEO firms have a good handle on that, so that is good for our position. Wikidata is the sister project of Wikipedia. That's like a knowledge database. It is in some ways easier to work with because it allows more topics to be covered, but it's a lot more technical than Wikipedia, so it could be harder as well.

It is not as strong a signal as Wikipedia is to the LLMs, but it is understood that it helps to establish relationships and cut down on hallucinations, and that can be valuable. And that's something we are doing a lot more of. We've done it for years, but it was sort of a niche play.

Now it's becoming something that people are like, “Oh, I get it. Yeah, okay, well let's do that too.” Or “Let's do that instead.” If we can't get them an article.

Reddit matters a lot. There's been Reddit marketing for a number of years and Reddit advertising. But I think Reddit PR is something that is also going to be increasingly a discipline, something that either PR firms will be looking into. We are looking at it certainly.

So I think traditional SEO still matters. But these platforms that will amplify or have the opportunity to correct your information, you want them to be in alignment. And if they're saying different things, then the LLMs will be confused.

So there's a whole discipline, I think, ahead of us that yes, I'm obviously looking at very closely. How to bring your public information in alignment with your owned media and  you're getting into earned media. PR absolutely fits in here as well.

Here's one bit of unusual development that I find very amusing. For the longest time, for 20 years, people like myself have looked down upon the press release as a means of sharing information . People will still do them, but fewer and fewer and no one looks at them. No human wants to go read a press release.

But you know who doesn't mind reading press releases? And is also willing to cite them is ChatGPT and its cousins Gemini and Claude. And so it's kind of the return of the press release in some ways.

So I think it'll be a lot of interesting ways it shakes out but we don't know all of them yet, but I am excited because it feels like things are new again in a way that they haven't really been since the explosion of social media 20 years ago.

Dusty Weis

Yeah, it's really fascinating, and it puts all of us in a position where, once again, we have to kind of examine the strategies and tactics that we use to get their message out there. I know that after our prep call a couple of weeks ago, I got curious and I sat down and I asked Google Gemini, “What's the best podcast production company in Milwaukee?”

And thankfully it came back and Podcamp Media was at the top of the search results.

Now, that's not because of anything intentional that I did. That's essentially because our SEO is really strong, and so far, SEO and answer engine optimization haven't diverged too far from each other in terms of their efficacy.

But as those streams continue down, I would imagine that you're going to see more and more tactics that specifically target the answer engines.

But of course, we also have to look at this not only as strategic communicators and agency owners, but I always come back to these big macro trends as just a regular person too. And I get the feeling from having spoken with you that you do too.

Anyone who worries about the public good, about fostering an informed and engaged public, we've had a rough decade, Bill, because the fact of the matter is that misinformation has the upper hand in the information wars, right now, and Wikipedia might just be one more casualty in a very, very brutal tally.

 So why should we care as people if we lose Wikipedia as a resource?

Bill Beutler

So I'll get to that. But I do worry the same as you about Wikipedia being caught up in things. I remember in the first Trump administration, the Wikimedia Foundation put out, like this blog about how “We are the bulwark of true facts.” You know, as opposed to alternative facts, and at the time it was like, great, Wikipedia is like the last place we can all agree on. Now, in the second Trump administration, Wikipedia has really come under a pretty strong assault by allies of the president and the movement behind him.

And that worries me because it proves Wikipedia is important enough to be a target like the New York Times is. They know people care what Wikipedia says, and they do not like the fact they can't control it.

That said, it still has very broad appreciation, usage, support, people have generally good feelings about it. I think people don't recognize the ways in which they depend on it or other platforms that they use depend upon it. Because we spent the time talking about how AI does and how search does.

But TikTok and YouTube and other social media platforms, there are ways in which they depend upon it. I remember that back when Twitter was still Twitter, they oftentimes were looking to Wikipedia to verify whether somebody should get their blue checkmark or not. Obviously, the blue checkmark doesn't work like that anymore, but like that basically put a burden on Wikipedia that it didn't ask to have necessarily.

But because it's been so successful, so prominent for so long, one of the challenges it has is that people look to it without really understanding what its own community thinks that it is, and asking you to do things that Wikipedia never asked to do.

So I think the community has to ask itself in the near next decade, do we want to like, stick to our knitting, as it were, and just keep doing what we do regardless of what people expect out of us?

Or does it actually have some kind of like, broader responsibility to do more than it initially wanted to in order to support the information ecosystem of the internet and I would think the latter is more likely true.

I do think the editors of Wikipedia have a little bit of an activist bent. I don't think it would be entirely wrong to say that it is left of center, but again, there's a whole other topic to be had about, like whether the right really cares about journalism the same way that the left or center left does.

The political landscape is fraught for everybody and for Wikipedia too. But like on top of that, to step out of politics, it is a useful educational tool for millions of people around the world who can gain information through Wikipedia that they would not otherwise. It really does reflect and shape the world in a way that there's really nothing out there like it.

The closest thing probably was Twitter, so maybe that's okay that it's no longer doing that. But there's no replacement for it. And I do worry if it becomes less salient.

Dusty Weis

People talk all the time in this field about how the evening news used to be a trusted bastion of what was real and what was not. And that's a problematic statement in and of its own right. But certainly it was a place where people could turn to at least agree on what constituted reality.

And I would argue that in 2025, where we're sitting right now, Wikipedia is the last, best, closest thing that we have to that shared reality that we're all stuck in together.

And so certainly I care if we lose it as that kind of resource. I care if we lose it as, frankly, just a quick way to research something really, really important. And so it's useful in that sense. So I think that you're ahead of the curve in having this conversation the way that you are right now.

I hope that this conversation continues in the communities in which you run, because decisions are going to have to be made about the future of Wikipedia and about the future of fact-based journalism. And so I'm glad to hear that those conversations are being fomented right now.

One last sort of non-sequitur observation in closing, Bill, because your agency, at the end of the day, helps clients optimize their presence on Wikipedia. But in my research, I couldn't help but notice that you don't have a Wikipedia page, Bill, nor does your company, Beutler, Ink.

Now, certainly you probably could have a presence there if you wanted to. So that leads me to deduce that it's a decision on your part to go unrepresented. Why is that?

Bill Beutler

Largely true. So I have in the past compiled the media that I have accumulated over the years. Both for this company and for some projects that I have done, I did in my 20s and 30s. And, yeah, it's conceivable that a Wikipedia article for me personally could be created. I don't think the company has quite the sources there yet, but it is a double-edged sword.

Both what is there is that kind of all of what people know, if it's there it’s what people know, and if it's not there, they don't. I think that even the coverage that I have would not really tell the story that I want to. So I still would rather tell the story that I want to on my own “about page” on the company website.

And, you know, if we get more press coverage in the future, I'd be willing to reconsider that. I don't think we are controversial in the way that someone should be afraid of having a page, but that said, the price of being on Wikipedia is eternal vigilance that someone, anyone can come along and make any change they want to. Oh yeah, I know my Democracy quotes.

It's true, we have not made a point of having one. Honestly, we haven't in the past made a point of having a Wikidata page for me or the company, but we're going to get around to that very soon, because if you ask ChatGPT about me, for some reason, it thinks I went to the University of Chicago, which is a more prestigious college than I actually went to school, go Ducks.

But I would like it to get that accurate at some point in the future, so there's some use for it. But as a publicity tool, keeping it in my back pocket, let's say that.

Dusty Weis

Well, certainly in this case, it seems like humility is the better part of valor, and this at least can serve as one more potential source for that eventual bid to get Bill Butler put up on Wikipedia.

I’ll also point out I myself don't have a Wikipedia page either, but Wikipedia sleuths who do a little bit of careful poking around might discover that I was actually the original drummer for an internationally touring metal band, but that is about the extent of my presence on the platform, and that's as much as I'll say about that.

This has been a great conversation, Bill. I really appreciated the light that you were able to shine on this deeply nerdy topic, and I enjoyed the heck out of the conversation. Bill Beutler, Founder and President of Beutler, Ink. Thank you for joining us here on Lead Balloon.

Bill Beutler

Thank you. Dusty. This was a lot of fun.

Dusty Weis

And thank you for tuning in. Here on Lead Balloon, we like to take a look at the PR and marketing stories that are too weird or too nerdy or too detailed for other comms podcasts to touch.

So we hope to see you back here in this feed again sometime soon. Follow us on your favorite podcast app, or check out our YouTube feed.

Lead Balloon is produced by Podcamp Media, where we provide branded podcast production solutions for businesses. Our podcast studios are located in the heart of beautiful downtown Milwaukee, Wisconsin. We work with brands all over North America to help them launch and build podcasts that work. Check out our website, PodcampMedia.com.

Music for this episode by Neon Beach. Editing by Matt Covarrubias.

And until the next time, folks, thanks for listening. I'm Dusty Weis.