Having conversations on AI’s role in Wikipedia, says founder Jimmy Wales

Wikipedia is exploring roles Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems will play in the volunteer-run online encyclopedia’s future, the site’s founder Jimmy Wales told The Hindu in an interview recently.

“We are having a lot of conversations these days about AI, so that’s a big part of the intellectual work we are doing these days, thinking and talking with people in the community for what that means for the future,” Mr. Wales said.

Wikipedia’s traffic, at least from human readers, has gone down over the past few months by around 8%. The dip has been due to AI models, such as those built into Google Search, which repackage precise queries from users with answers sourced from Wikipedia and other sources. Since the site is ad-free, the fall in human traffic does not impact it as it would a news website, Mr. Wales said, adding that the Wikimedia Foundation has taken steps to share articles with AI developers in a responsible way.

Mr. Wales said that even before large language models (LLM) were introduced, “Google started getting smarter and smarter, and then it could tell you how old Tom Cruise is” without users having to visit the Wikipedia page. Now with LLMs, “quick questions” are being answered without driving traffic to Wikipedia.

He indicated that if the source of information remains unknown to the user, it may affect donations to the site. “For us, there is a difference,” he said. “Obviously, if people don’t know the information came from Wikipedia, they don’t remember, ‘oh, I’d like to donate to support Wikipedia’, that would be a problem. So, attribution is really important. Exact page views are not really something we obsess about.”

AI licensing

Last year, Wikimedia Enterprise put out an AI-friendly dataset of its English and French articles on the platform Kaggle so that LLM developers do not just scrape the data from its site. Some volunteers have expressed discomfort that their contributions are being part of an LLM’s training data. On this, Mr. Wales said, “I’m sure there are some [complaints] because obviously it’s a large, noisy community.”

Mr. Wales pointed out that Wikipedia’s content was provided under a Creative Commons licence that had always allowed both non-profit and for-profit commercialisation. “The CC-BY-SA [a licence-mandating attribution to the source and a “share-alike” requirement mandating that the same licence be applied by those adapting it] is like open-source software,” he said. “So, you’re free to copy, to modify, and redistribute versions… We didn’t give any new rights to AIs to use that data; they’ve always had that right.” 

Indian languages and quality translation

He said Wikipedia’s Indian-language community could see some opportunities from AI-enabled translations. However, that could be somewhat tricky and require a lot of human oversight, he added.

Recalling the poor quality of translations in the past, Mr. Wales said that “the objection [to machine-translated Wikipedia articles] wasn’t some sort of hatred of machines or technology…” but due to the quality. “It was just like, wow, the translations are really bad, so you shouldn’t do that.”

An “experiment” with translations in a small Austronesian language — likely Cebuano, which uncharacteristically rivals the major world languages in the number of articles — resulted in substandard articles in that language.

Pointing to the experience across other languages, he said bad content is not an ideal platform to start a community. “It’s almost like an SEO [search engine optimisation] strategy, right? People would click and they would see it and they would see bad content, but they could edit it and make it better. And so, would that be a way of starting a community? Turns out the answer is no. That hasn’t grown a community. And in fact, it probably was bad because in that language, probably people were like, oh yeah, Wikipedia is terrible.”

Mr. Wales said it would be a welcome development if AI “can increase the productivity” of contributors across languages. However, “even a good machine translation can easily [fall short of] traditional standards” if “cultural questions” were not addressed, he said. 

Legal fights and censorship

Wikipedia has been fighting court cases around the world, and in India has been up against newswire agency ANI. For the first time, it took down an English Wikipedia article globally, marking a break from the encyclopedia’s traditional resistance to censorship. But Mr. Wales hinted that it was done as part of a tactic to navigate the legal battle.

“Our view is the fundamental right of access to knowledge is really, really important to us, and to have something truthful and neutral up,” Mr. Wales said. “Obviously, what we have to do when we’ve got a legal situation is you’ve got to manoeuvre and you’ve got to sort of be very careful to not do anything that would eliminate your right to move forward in the next stages.”

Published – March 07, 2026 07:15 am IST