Wikipedia Unveils AI Strategy: Empowering Volunteers, Not Replacing Them

Wikipedia says it will use AI, but not to replace human volunteers | TechCrunch

Wikipedia on Wednesday revealed its new AI strategy for the next three years -- and it's not replacing the Wikipedia community of editors and volunteers with artificial intelligence, thankfully. Instead, Wikipedia says it will use AI to build new features that "remove technical barriers," allowing editors, moderators, and patrollers tools that allow them to accomplish what they need to do, without worrying about how to "technically achieve it." Amid concerns that AI could eventually impact jobs held by people today, especially in terms of content creation, Wikipedia indicates that it intends to use AI as a tool that makes people's jobs easier, not replace them. Instead, the organization says that it will utilize generative AI in specific areas where it tends to excel. This includes the creation of AI-assisted workflows that will automate tedious tasks. In addition, AI will be used to improve the discoverability of information on Wikipedia, giving editors more time for the human deliberation that's required to build consensus over the creation, changes, and updates to Wikipedia entries. AI will also aid editors by automating translation and will assist in the onboarding process of new volunteers. "We believe that our future work with AI will be successful not only because of what we do, but how we do it," writes Chris Albon, the director of machine learning at the Wikimedia Foundation, in a blog post announcing the news. "Our efforts will use our long-held values, principles, and policies (like privacy and human rights) as a compass: we will take a human-centered approach and will prioritize human agency; we will prioritize using open-source or open-weight AI; we will prioritize transparency; and we will take a nuanced approach to multilinguality, a fundamental part of Wikipedia," Albon adds. The director also argued that maintaining Wikipedia's knowledge base is a mission that's grown in importance since the rise of generative AI, which today is known to make mistakes and hallucinate answers at times.

Wikipedia is using (some) generative AI now

Tina Nguyen is a senior reporter for The Verge, covering the Trump administration, Elon Musk's takeover of the federal government, and the tech industry's embrace of the MAGA movement. Wikipedia isn't replacing their human editors with artificial intelligence yet -- but they're giving them a bit of an AI boost. On Wednesday, the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that runs Wikipedia, announced that it was integrating generative AI into its editing process as a means to help its volunteer and largely unpaid staff of moderators, editors, and patrollers reduce their workload and focus more on quality control. In a statement, Chris Albon, the Director of Machine Learning at the foundation, emphasized that he did not want AI to replace their human editors or end up generating Wikipedia's content. Rather, AI would be used to "remove technical barriers" and "tedious tasks" that impeded editors' workflow, such as background research, translation, and onboarding new volunteers. The hope, he said, was to give editors the bandwidth to spend more time on deliberation and less on technical support. "We will take a human-centered approach and will prioritize human agency; we will prioritize using open-source or open-weight AI; we will prioritize transparency; and we will take a nuanced approach to multilinguality," he wrote. The site already uses AI to detect vandalism, translate content, and predict readability, but until this announcement, it had not offered AI services to their editors. In recent years, the Wikimedia Foundation has attempted to make life easier for their volunteer workers, from adding new features to improve the editing experience, to offering them legal protection from right-wing harassment campaigns. But the amount of information and content in the world is rapidly outpacing the number of active volunteers able to moderate it, and Wikipedia faces a future where AI would, quite literally, eat it alive. Earlier this month, the Wikimedia Foundation announced a new initiative to create an open access dataset of "structured Wikipedia content" -- that is, a copy of Wikipedia content optimized specifically for machine learning -- with the aim of keeping the bots off the site meant for human browsing. In recent years, the number of AI bots scraping the site has drastically scaled to the point that bot traffic has actually put a strain on their servers and increased bandwidth consumption by 50 percent.

Wikipedia turns to generative AI to support its volunteer community

Serving tech enthusiasts for over 25 years. TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust. What just happened? Companies building AI-focused ventures have heavily mined Wikipedia's content, placing significant strain on its servers in the process. Now, the Wikimedia Foundation is looking to reclaim some of that value by introducing a new set of assistive AI services. Despite these changes, the organization insists that the encyclopedia's core mission will remain unchanged. Wikipedia says it has found a way to embrace generative AI without compromising its core mission. The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization behind Wikipedia and other widely used wiki-based services, will use generative AI to build tools that assist the editors and volunteers who contribute their time and effort to the platform. These AI-powered features will aim to reduce technical barriers for contributors, freeing up human editors from the more tedious aspects of content curation. Wikimedia plans to deploy AI in areas where the technology can be most effective. The foundation is investing in generative models to support moderators and "patrollers" responsible for maintaining the integrity of Wikipedia's knowledge base. Additionally, improvements in information discoverability will give editors more time for "deliberation, judgment, and consensus building." Wikimedia will also use generative AI to automate translations, accelerating the localization of common topics. There will also be a "guided mentorship" program to help scale the number of new contributors. According to Wikimedia, the global community of volunteers that has built Wikipedia over the past 25 years remains its most vital asset - one that no generative AI model or chatbot can replace. The foundation has outlined a set of guiding principles that will shape its AI-driven future. Wikipedia will maintain a human-centered approach, prioritizing human agency over full automation. It will rely on open-source or open-weight AI models and uphold transparency, with particular sensitivity toward multilingual content, a cornerstone of Wikipedia's mission. Wikimedia emphasized that Wikipedia has always been dedicated to providing freely accessible knowledge to everyone on the internet. In the era of generative AI and large-scale chatbot deployments, that mission is more important than ever. As AI companies increasingly rely on Wikipedia's content to train their models, the strain on the encyclopedia's infrastructure continues to grow. To keep the community informed, Wikimedia has launched a new meta-wiki page explaining the organization's AI strategy to Wikipedia volunteers.

Wikipedia Brings AI Strategy to Help Its Editors | AIM

Wikipedia is using AI to improve the information it provides. The Wikimedia Foundation has announced a three-year strategy outlining how AI will support contributors to Wikipedia and related projects while maintaining a human-led editorial model. The Foundation's work from July 2025 to June 2028 will be guided by its new strategy, emphasising the continued critical role of volunteer editors in the creation and curation of content. It positions AI as a tool to assist with routine and technical tasks rather than as a replacement for human judgment or editorial decision-making. The Foundation notes that while AI has been used for over a decade to support tasks such as vandalism detection and article translation, recent advances in generative technologies present opportunities and risks. "We will use AI to build features that remove technical barriers to allow the humans at the core of Wikipedia to spend their valuable time on what they want to accomplish, and not on how to technically achieve it," the Foundation stated in a blog post. The strategy outlines four areas of focus: supporting moderators and patrollers with AI-assisted workflows; improving information retrieval and translation to free up time for human-led editing and discussion; assisting editors working in underrepresented languages by automating translation of commonly shared topics; and facilitating the onboarding and mentoring of new editors through AI-driven guidance. The Foundation states that this targeted approach is necessary due to limited technical and financial resources and to avoid diluting efforts across too many initiatives. It has also chosen to prioritise the use of open-source or open-weight AI models where possible. While reaffirming its commitment to transparency, human rights, and multilingual access, the Foundation acknowledges trade-offs in the chosen approach. These include focusing initially on content integrity over content generation, and applying AI in select high-impact areas rather than across all functions. The document also reflects on Wikipedia's broader context, noting the growing prevalence of low-quality content and disinformation online.

Wikipedia Won't Be Using AI to Replace Humans, Thank Goodness

Google Turns Into a Language Tutor With This New Labs Experiment AI can do a lot of things, but it's not good enough to replace human editors just yet. Wikipedia's new AI strategy understands that, and won't be replacing humans on the platform anytime soon. Wikipedia Volunteers Are About To Get AI Support The Wikimedia Foundation has announced that it will be using AI to build new features. However, these new features are all in the "service of creating unique opportunities that will boost Wikipedia's volunteers." In other words, instead of replacing editors, volunteers, and moderators, Wikipedia's new AI tools will automate tedious tasks and help onboarding new volunteers with "guided mentorship." AI will also be used to improve the platform's information discoverability. This gives editors more time to think and build a consensus when creating, editing, or updating Wikipedia entries. Wikipedia wants its volunteers to spend more time on what they want to accomplish instead of worrying about technical details. Tasks like translating and adapting common topics will also be automated, which Wikipedia feels will help editors better share local perspectives or context. Related How to Become a Wikipedia Editor Wikipedia is open for updates from everyone, but did you know you can become an editor? Here's how to become a Wikipedia editor. Posts At a time when AI is threatening to impact human jobs, especially in content creation, it's good to see Wikipedia take a stance for its volunteers. You can read the foundation's new AI strategy on Meta-Wiki, but this excerpt from the announcement sums it up well: We believe that our future work with AI will be successful not only because of what we do, but how we do it. Our efforts will use our long-held values, principles, and policies (like privacy and human rights) as a compass: we will take a human-centered approach and will prioritize human agency; we will prioritize using open-source or open-weight AI; we will prioritize transparency; and we will take a nuanced approach to multilinguality, a fundamental part of Wikipedia. Generative AI Isn't As Good as Human Oversight Wikipedia isn't the most credible source of information on the internet. But it does have human oversight, which makes it better compared to generative AI solutions, which often hallucinate or make facts up, in my opinion. Most, if not all, AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, and others have scraped the internet to form their training dataset, and errors in this dataset lead to the AI model experiencing hallucinations or giving incorrect information. Wikipedia claims that it's at the "core of every AI training model," meaning it needs to ensure the information it's giving out is factual and provides the necessary context. Generative AI tools lack human creativity, empathy, understanding of context, and reasoning. These are great tools if you want to research something or need to quickly analyze a big spreadsheet. But when you're looking at facts, information, and history, having a human look over the text is always the better option.