tl;dr: Generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini are siphoning readers from Wikipedia while simultaneously scraping its content for training, threatening the volunteer community that sustains it. The author argues academics have an ethical duty to defend Wikipedia by contributing expertise, citing it in scholarly work, and teaching students to edit it—noting that Wiki Education programs already supply roughly 19% of new active editors. For this to work, universities must formally recognize Wikipedia contributions as legitimate public service in tenure and evaluation processes.