Wikipedia, the Internet’s default go-to for pretty much everything, is entering the AI era—but it’s entering it on its terms. Rather than retreating from artificial intelligence, the Wikimedia Foundation has released a three-year strategy for AI centered around assisting the worldwide community of volunteer editors, while remaining faithful to those values that created Wikipedia in the first place.
Let’s get real: Wikipedia has been a goldmine for the training of AI. Corporations have scraped their articles to power everything from chatbots to search engines. That’s been a drain—not just on Wikipedia’s servers, but also on the volunteers who put in the hard work of making it accurate and up to date. Now, the Foundation is turning the tables. It’s bringing in AI tools designed not to take over, but to give back and support the people who make the site run.
So why is Wikipedia adding AI to the mix now? The short answer: it needs a helping hand keeping up. Edits are coming in at breakneck speeds, false information is rampant, and volunteers are burning out on drudge tasks such as vandalism patrolling, translation, and supporting new users. AI can do the drudge work, leaving humans free for the good stuff—such as fact-checking, arguing, and consensus-building. That’s the sort of job computers simply can’t do well.
But do not get it confused, Wikipedia is not handing control over to AI. Wikimedia machine learning director Chris Albon and research head Leila Zia both emphasized that the goal is to help—not substitute—for human editors. The whole approach rests on privacy, ethics, and human oversight. It is about taking technical barriers away so more people can contribute, and not pushing humans aside.
This is where AI shines. It can help automate the work that exhausts volunteers. Consider smarter moderation software that helps facilitate patrolling for vandalism, better search options for editors, and translation tools that eliminate language barriers. With AI taking the tedium off these time-consuming efforts, editors can save their energy for what counts.
Language is a significant part of Wikipedia’s mission, and AI can help to make knowledge accessible to more individuals. With better translation, editors can move articles between languages seamlessly, bringing communities together. AI is also assisting the Foundation in mentoring new editors with support programs that offer real support from day one—no more solo struggle through confusing edits.
Transparency is the most important part of Wikipedia’s AI agenda. Rather than employing secret, black-box algorithms, the Foundation is holding to open-source or open-weight AI models. In that way, the community can truly observe how the tools operate, inquire, and hold the system accountable. It’s a sharp contrast with many tech firms’ approach to AI—and one consistent with demands for greater transparency in the way technology is created and employed.
In a world where technology is more likely to bring fear of job loss and out-of-control automation, Wikipedia is taking a different approach. It’s demonstrating that technology can be a force for augmenting humans, not replacing them. By prioritizing volunteers and leveraging AI to automate their most mundane tasks, the Wikimedia Foundation is proposing a smarter, more intelligent way of creating and sharing knowledge in the digital world. And as institutions, including schools and newsrooms, grapple with how to deal with AI, Wikipedia’s approach may prove to be the template to emulate.
