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Cool Stuff Daily

Artificial Intelligence And The Future of Wikipedia

Cool Stuff Daily

Reggie Risseeuw and Marques Pfaff

News, Tech News, Science, Society & Culture

4.6732 Ratings

🗓️ 11 November 2025

⏱️ 6 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

How AI could soon be used by Wikipedia, according to its founder Contact the Show: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Welcome, welcome to Cool Stuff Daily. My name's Marcus Path, and today we're taking a look at an article from BBC Science Focus and author Tom Howorth, examining the future of Wikipedia and the potential use of AI.

0:17.0

From chatbots to search engines, the artificial intelligence systems that power modern life all seem to have studied the same site.

0:25.6

Wikipedia. With over 7 million English language articles and a free use policy, the site is a gold mine of high-quality training data.

0:33.6

But will be online encyclopedia embrace the technology itself. Speaking to BBC Science

0:39.7

Focus on the Instant Genius podcast, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said that for editing and error

0:45.7

spotting, the answer is an unequivocal yes, but he's less convinced about its usefulness for

0:50.7

writing entire articles. Per Wales quote, for me, what's really exciting about AI is the potential that we might find some ways to use AI

0:59.0

to support our community in Wikipedia, end quote.

1:02.0

Explaining what some of those ways might be, Wales said he'd been experimenting with a tool

1:06.0

to analyze short Wikipedia entries alongside supporting sources to identify missing information

1:12.4

or statements not backed up by evidence.

1:14.8

Quote, it turns out it's pretty good at that."

1:17.0

Wailz added that it's not just his own tinkering, the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit

1:23.1

that operates Wikipedia, has created a dedicated machine learning team to develop useful AI tools

1:29.4

for the Wikipedia community.

1:31.7

Again, per Wales, quote, that kind of work, which is just maintenance for Wikipedia,

1:36.0

people do a lot of.

1:37.2

These tools could be very exciting in terms of helping us elevate the quality, end quote.

1:42.0

Asked if he could see Wikipedia articles being drafted in the near

1:45.0

future, Wales said he didn't think it was likely. Quote, I wouldn't say absolutely never,

1:49.9

but at least not in the short run. The latest models are still, from a Wikipedia's standpoint,

1:54.7

nowhere near good enough, end quote. One area the Wikipedia founder thought AI could be of

...

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