With generative AI’s ability to create text and videos, the online world has fundamentally changed.
However, many people do not recognize that there is something distinctly familiar behind all that AI-generated content: knowledge curated, debated, and documented by humans.
That’s why Wikipedia’s role as the backbone of all knowledge on the internet has never been more important.
Let us explain.
Human-created knowledge isn’t replaceable
Science communicator Hank Green recently wondered about the future of AI and whether it would end up eating itself. That’s because generative AI cannot exist without continually updated human-created knowledge—without it, AI systems will fall into model collapse.
Wikipedia’s strength is its volunteer editor communities, hundreds of thousands strong, who constantly improve the site’s information. The Wikimedia Foundation—the nonprofit that supports Wikipedia—provides technology and legal support but does not write or control the content on Wikipedia; volunteer editors do.
Humans bring elements to knowledge creation that AI cannot replace. Current generative AI tools may be able to synthesize or summarize existing knowledge, but they cannot engage in the process of discussion, debate, and consensus that Wikipedia’s volunteer editors undertake every day. They are not able to discover items buried in an archive, nor can they take a photo of an event or underdocumented place to help improve that knowledge. Moreover, the Wikimedia projects are available in over 300 languages, often written by native speakers, providing a multilingual corpus that supports the development of inclusive, culturally aware AI models. This human-centered approach to knowledge creation provides high-quality and reliable information that, through regular editorial collaboration and disagreements, leads to more neutral and comprehensive articles. The more humans take part in Wikipedia, the better the internet’s knowledge becomes.
Wikipedia also excels at transparency. Everyone sees the exact same information on Wikipedia; there are no algorithms tracking your behavior or serving you content to deliver profits. When you read that information, accompanying citations point to reliable sources where you can verify who originally reported it. If you want to learn more about why that information is in the article in the first place, Wikipedia’s processes and the actions taken by its volunteers can be inspected by anybody, as they are publicly logged on the website. You can also add information to Wikipedia, in line with the site’s policies and guidelines, ensuring this living knowledge resource is continually updated. Openness is why Wikipedia remains one of the world’s most trusted platforms. Conversely, generative AI systems can ‘hallucinate‘ information in response to questions, a phenomenon where they present plausible-sounding false information as factual.
Is Wikipedia using AI?
We recognise AI’s potential to help us achieve our mission to make reliable information more accessible to more people. However, this needs to be done the Wikipedia way—meaning supporting humans in creating and sharing knowledge, and not replacing them.
For example, we know that a large amount of Wikipedia volunteer time is spent on mundane tasks like flagging vandalism. This can divert attention from more intricate tasks like content creation and reviewing edits. That’s why much of our AI strategy for editors, released earlier this year, focuses on ways where we can give those editors more time to do that sort of crucial encyclopedic work.
In all cases, volunteers create and enforce guidelines for responsible use of AI tools across Wikipedia, ensuring that they are being used to best support human contributors.
AI relies on Wikipedia
AI cannot exist without the human effort that goes into building open and nonprofit information sources like Wikipedia. That’s why Wikipedia is one of the highest-quality datasets in the world for training AI, and when AI developers try to omit it, the resulting answers are significantly less accurate, less diverse, and less verifiable.
That’s also why we are calling on AI developers and other content reusers who access our content to use it responsibly and sustain Wikipedia. They can accomplish this through two straightforward actions: attribution and financial support.
Attribution means that generative AI gives credit to the human contributions that it uses to create its outputs. This maintains a virtuous cycle that continues those human contributions that create the training data that these new technologies rely on. For people to trust information shared on the internet, platforms should make it clear where the information is sourced from and elevate opportunities to visit and participate in those sources. With fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers may grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors may support this work.
Financial support means that most AI developers should properly access Wikipedia’s content through the Wikimedia Enterprise platform. Developed by the Wikimedia Foundation, this paid-for opt-in product allows companies to use Wikipedia content at scale and sustainably without severely taxing Wikipedia’s servers, while also enabling them to support our nonprofit mission.
Through proper attribution of information sources and better financial support for AI’s technological impacts on Wikipedia, AI developers can secure both their own long-term futures and Wikipedia’s.
The bottom line
Wikipedia is “the last best place on the internet“. It is the only site of its scale with standards of verifiability, neutrality, and transparency powering information all over the internet, and it continues to be essential to people’s daily information needs in unseen ways. In a world increasingly awash with AI, Wikipedia’s human knowledge is more valuable to the world than ever before.
On 15 January 2026, Wikipedia will celebrate its 25th birthday. As we reflect on this milestone, we are optimistic that Wikipedia will still be here for another 25 years, ensuring the internet provides free, accurate, human knowledge, for generations to come.
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