Wikipedia is now introducing generative AI to help its dedicated volunteer editors. You’re not seeing a robot takeover—far from it. Instead, the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs the world’s biggest free online encyclopaedia, offers AI support to reduce the pressure on its unpaid team of editors, moderators, and content reviewers.
On Wednesday, the foundation shared its plans to include AI tools in editing. However, the goal isn’t to replace the people behind Wikipedia. It’s to make their work a little easier and give them more time to focus on what matters—checking facts, improving articles, and guiding new contributors.
Supporting editors, not replacing them
Chris Albon, Director of Machine Learning at the Wikimedia Foundation, made it clear that human editors are still the heart of the site. “We will take a human-centred approach and prioritise human agency,” he said in a statement. He also highlighted a few other important points: the foundation will favour open-source or open-weight AI systems, ensure transparency, and consider the needs of editors who work in different languages.
Albon explained that the AI tools would be used for background research, translating articles into different languages, and helping new volunteers get started. These tasks are often time-consuming and distract editors from their main job—improving Wikipedia. With AI handling the more technical parts, editors can spend more time on thoughtful content creation and review.
AI tools already in use behind the scenes
Wikipedia has been using AI for a while now, just not in a direct way for its editors. The site relies on AI to spot vandalism, predict how readable an article is, and help with translations. But now, editors can work directly with AI tools as part of their editing process for the first time.
This move is part of a wider effort by the foundation to support its volunteer community. Over the past few years, the Wikimedia Foundation has added new features to make editing easier and even offered legal help to protect editors from online harassment—especially politically motivated attacks.
Battling bot overload
AI isn’t just helping Wikipedia’s editors and creating new challenges. The amount of information online is growing fast, and so is the number of bots trying to copy content from Wikipedia. Bot traffic has surged so much that it’s putting extra load on Wikipedia’s servers and has increased bandwidth usage by 50 percent.
To tackle this, the Wikimedia Foundation recently launched a project to build an open-access dataset made just for machine learning. This special version of Wikipedia content will allow AI developers to train their models without overloading the live site. The idea is to keep Wikipedia as a space for real people while supporting those who want to use its content for research and development.
So, while AI is starting to play a bigger role on Wikipedia, it’s still under human control. You won’t see articles written entirely by machines anytime soon—but you will see editors getting more help when needed.
