Wikipedia won’t let AI edit articles, cofounder says

Wikipedia Will Not Allow AI to Edit Articles Directly, Co-Founder Says

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales said Monday that the platform will not permit artificial intelligence to directly edit its articles, citing persistent problems with AI-generated falsehoods that make the technology too unreliable for an encyclopedia relied upon by hundreds of millions of people.

“We would not let it edit directly because you can’t really trust it enough,” Wales told AFP during a climate action week event in London. He said the issue of AI “hallucinations” — where systems confidently assert false information — has seen some improvement with newer models but remains “very, very bad”.yahoo

Traffic Decline and AI’s Toll

Wales acknowledged that AI platforms’ heavy reliance on Wikipedia content has contributed to an 8 percent drop in human traffic to the site. The Wikimedia Foundation first disclosed the decline in October 2025, attributing it to generative AI tools and social media platforms that summarize Wikipedia content without sending users to the site.channelstv

Wales called the decline “meaningful” but “not a disaster,” even as AI bot traffic to Wikipedia has surged dramatically. The foundation reported that AI bots generated 88 billion views on Wikipedia in 2025 alone.instagram

Paying Their Fair Share

Wales urged AI companies to “pay their fair share,” stating that “hammering us with millions of requests costs real money” in server costs. The Wikimedia Foundation has already secured licensing agreements through its commercial Wikimedia Enterprise program with major technology firms including Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Perplexity, and Mistral AI, granting them premium API access to Wikipedia’s 65 million articles.mediapost

Wales said the foundation is “beginning to block those who aren’t adhering to our guidelines” but would monitor how the situation develops. Despite his caution about direct editing, Wales noted that AI tools could still prove useful by alerting Wikipedia’s volunteer editors to niche topics that might otherwise go unnoticed.yahoo

The stance reflects a broader tension across the internet: platforms that provided the training data for generative AI now face declining traffic as those same AI systems answer user queries without directing them to original sources.