Free online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, has ruled out allowing artificial intelligence (AI) to directly edit articles on its platform, citing ongoing concerns about the technology’s reliability, according to its co-founder, Jimmy Wales.
Speaking on the sidelines of a Climate Action Week event in London on Monday, Wales said AI systems still cannot be trusted to directly change Wikipedia content because of their tendency to generate false information, a phenomenon widely known as “hallucination.”
While acknowledging that newer AI models have shown improvements, Wales stressed that the problem remains significant.
“The problem of AI hallucinations has been reduced with newer AI models, but it is still very, very bad,” he said.
As a result, Wales said Wikipedia had no plans to permit artificial intelligence tools to edit articles independently.
“We would not let it edit directly because you can’t really trust it enough,” he added.
However, the Wikipedia co-founder noted that AI could still play a supportive role by helping the platform’s vast community of volunteer editors identify niche or emerging news stories that might otherwise go unnoticed.
The comments come as artificial intelligence companies increasingly rely on Wikipedia’s vast repository of information to power chatbots and answer user queries.
According to Wales, the growing use of Wikipedia by AI systems has led to a surge in visits from automated bots, even as traffic from human users has declined by about eight per cent.
Wales, who serves on the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, described the drop in human visitors as significant but not alarming.
“The fall in human traffic is meaningful, but not a disaster,” he said.
Founded in 2001, Wikipedia remains one of the world’s ten most-visited websites. Unlike many digital platforms, its operations are largely funded through user donations rather than advertising revenue, meaning its financial sustainability is not directly tied to website traffic.
Wales also called on artificial intelligence companies to contribute financially to the platform, arguing that the heavy demand generated by AI systems places additional strain on Wikipedia’s infrastructure.
“AI companies should pay their fair share because hammering us with millions of requests costs real money,” he said, referring to the expenses associated with maintaining servers and supporting the platform’s operations.
He revealed that Wikipedia has already secured agreements with several major technology companies to address the issue.
“We’ve been very successful in signing agreements with a number of tech giants,” Wales said.
At the same time, he warned that the Wikimedia Foundation was taking a tougher stance against organisations that continue to use Wikipedia’s resources without appropriate arrangements.
“We’re starting to block the ones who aren’t behaving themselves, but we’ll see how that goes,” Wales added.
