Our new AI strategy puts Wikipedia’s humans first – Wikimedia Foundation

The community of volunteers behind Wikipedia is the most important and unique element of Wikipedia’s success. For nearly 25 years, Wikipedia editors have researched, deliberated, discussed, built consensus, and collaboratively written the largest encyclopedia humankind has ever seen. Their care and commitment to reliable encyclopedic knowledge is something AI cannot replace. 

That is why our new AI strategy doubles down on the volunteers behind Wikipedia.

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. Our investments will be focused on specific areas where generative AI excels, all in the service of creating unique opportunities that will boost Wikipedia’s volunteers: 

• Supporting Wikipedia’s moderators and patrollers with AI-assisted workflows that automate tedious tasks in support of knowledge integrity; 
• Giving Wikipedia’s editors time back by improving the discoverability of information on Wikipedia to leave more time for human deliberation, judgment, and consensus building; 
• Helping editors share local perspectives or context by automating the translation and adaptation of common topics;
• Scaling the onboarding of new Wikipedia volunteers with guided mentorship. 

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.

Providing freely accessible knowledge to anyone on the planet is Wikipedia’s mission, one that has only grown in importance since the rise of generative AI. Its success is why Wikipedia is at the core of every AI training model. With this new AI strategy, we are making a promise and a commitment to the world we serve and the volunteers who have made—continue to make—Wikipedia the largest encyclopedia that humanity has ever known.

You can read the Wikimedia Foundation’s new AI strategy over on Meta-Wiki.

—

Chris Albon is the Director of Machine Learning at the Wikimedia Foundation. You can follow him at @chrisalbon. Leila Zia is the Head of Research at the Wikimedia Foundation.