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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.
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