Wikipedia and Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence can have a great influence on how Wikipedia will be used by writers, readers, and machines.

Wikimedia Belgium, like other affiliates, cannot be directly involved in how Wikipedia works, its content, nor in the way in which the content is produced. Even the Wikimedia Foundation has no rights in this regard. How Wikipedia is written and the determination of its content is a role reserved exclusively for the Wikimedia community, all 270,000 (?) volunteers worldwide. It is even more restrictive: each Wikipedia language has its own rules, based on the five pillars.

Artificial intelligence (AI) influencing the content of Wikipedia is maybe not the greatest danger; every Wikipedian, even if AI might be initially used individually to generate a draft version of a text, is expected to rework every piece of text before it is published on Wikipedia. Ultimately, every volunteer is responsible for their own contributions. I refer to the extremely interesting Who Wrote That tool and the importance of citing sources.

A greater risk, is that Wikipedia will no longer be read (directly), because individual readers will fall back to asking questions to ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Duck.ai; even the related search engines Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc. will be less often used. Wikidata and Wikipedia also run the risk of no longer being consulted directly, but only through AI platforms.

One important risk here is that individuals, if they only use AI, will only read filtered information and will no longer think critically, or check sources themselves.