The Wikimedia Foundation plans to use AI to assist—not replace—Wikipedia’s human editors by automating tedious tasks, improving content discovery, and aiding translation. Emphasizing transparency and open-source AI, the strategy aims to enhance efficiency while upholding Wikipedia’s reliability and community-driven values
The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit behind Wikipedia, announced its AI strategy for the next three years—and it’s good news for the platform’s community of human editors and volunteers. Rather than replacing them with artificial intelligence, the foundation plans to use AI as a tool to streamline their work.
The organization aims to develop AI-powered features that eliminate technical hurdles, making it easier for editors, moderators, and patrollers to focus on their tasks without getting bogged down by technical complexities.
While concerns persist that AI could disrupt jobs, particularly in content creation, Wikipedia is taking a different approach: leveraging AI to enhance human efforts rather than replace them.
As reported by TechCrunch, Generative AI will be applied in areas where it can be most effective, such as automating repetitive tasks and improving information discovery on Wikipedia. This will free up editors to focus on the nuanced discussions needed to reach consensus on article creation, edits, and updates.
Additionally, AI will help with language translation and assist in training new volunteers, making the onboarding process smoother.
Chris Albon, Wikimedia’s Director of Machine Learning, and Leila Zia, Director and Head of Research, emphasized in a blog post that the foundation’s AI strategy is guided by its core values.
“Our approach will remain human-centered, prioritizing transparency, open-source (or open-weight) AI models, and a thoughtful approach to multilingual content, which is central to Wikipedia’s mission,” they wrote.
The foundation also highlighted that Wikipedia’s role in maintaining reliable knowledge has become even more crucial with the rise of generative AI, which is still prone to errors and inaccuracies.