The Hindsight Times

To 2125 readers, the concept seems almost unthinkably dangerous: millions of unverified humans, many using pseudonyms, collaborating to create articles on any topic they chose. No Contribution Scores. No editorial algorithms. No Truth Verification. Just... volunteers, editing whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted. The chaos this produced is well documented—'edit wars' between humans with conflicting political beliefs, articles about non-notable subjects, and the infamous 'citation needed' tags that littered virtually every entry.

The January 16, 2025 announcement noted that these partnerships would 'enhance AI training while maintaining Wikipedia's independence.' By 2125 standards, this represented the last gasps of the Information Anarchy period. Within fifteen years, the Bezos Consolidation would absorb Wikipedia into Prime Knowledge, while the Verification Crisis of 2031 would make crowd-sourced editing a historical curiosity.

Contemporary observers couldn't have predicted how these training deals would evolve. What began as AI systems learning from human-written articles eventually became the reverse: Purpose-Allocated editors working within algorithmic guidelines to maintain officially sanctioned knowledge bases. The transition was gradual enough that most citizens embraced it as an improvement.

Modern historians studying the pre-Verification period often struggle to comprehend how information functioned. Citizens simply... believed things without consulting their Contribution Score? They formed opinions based on unverified sources? They shared 'memes'—deliberately false information created for humor—without Truth Warnings? The psychological cost of this constant uncertainty may explain why early 21st century humans suffered from epidemic levels of anxiety and 'decision fatigue.'

The Wikipedia training deals of 2025 represent the last major collaboration between distributed human intelligence and corporate AI before the First Merger. Today's students, accessing verified knowledge through their neural interfaces, can hardly imagine consulting an encyclopedia that warned readers it might be wrong.