The nonprofit behind Wikipedia on Wednesday revealed a new AI strategy for the next three years. And it’s thankfully not replacing the Wikipedia community of editors and volunteers with artificial intelligence.
Instead, the Wikimedia Foundation says it will use AI to build a new feature “removing technical barriers.”
Amid concerns that AI could ultimately affect the work people have today, Wikipedia shows that it intends to use AI as a tool that makes people’s work easier.
Instead, organizations say they use generation AI in certain areas that tend to excel.
This includes creating AI-assisted workflows that automate boring tasks. Additionally, AI is used to improve Wikipedia’s information discoverability, giving editors more time for the human deliberations needed to build consensus on the creation, modification and update of Wikipedia entries.
AI also helps editors by automating translations and helps new volunteers in the onboarding process.
Chris Albon, director of machine learning at Wikimedia Foundation, is director and research director of Wikimedia Foundation, who writes in a blog post publishing the news, “I believe that future work with AI will not only succeed, but will not only succeed in how it will be done, but how it will be done.”
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“Our efforts use years of values, principles and policies (such as privacy and human rights) as compasses. We take a human-centric approach and prioritize human agents. We prioritize the use of open source or openweight AI. We prioritize transparency.
The organization also states that maintaining Wikipedia’s knowledge base is a mission that has grown important since the rise of generator AI, and is known today to make mistakes and sometimes hallucinate answers.