Wikimedia Foundation

Founded in 2003, the Wikimedia Foundation operates Wikipedia and its sister projects — the largest collaboratively built knowledge base in history, and one of the most heavily mined sources of AI training data. Rather than fight that role, the Foundation has tried to shape it: its Wikimedia Enterprise arm sells structured, high-throughput data feeds to companies including Google, giving AI firms a paid, sustainable channel to content that is free by design.

Humans first

On April 30, 2025, machine-learning director Chris Albon and research head Leila Zia published the Foundation’s three-year AI strategy, arguing that while the industry leaned away from human-created knowledge, Wikipedia should lean in — using AI for moderation workflows, translation, and onboarding so volunteers can spend their time on judgment and consensus. The strategy committed to human agency, open-source models, and transparency.

The limits of that bargain surfaced weeks later. On June 2, 2025, the Foundation began piloting machine-generated “Simple Article Summaries” atop mobile articles; volunteer editors responded with “strongest possible oppose,” “very bad idea,” and simply “Yuck,” warning hallucinated summaries would wreck Wikipedia’s credibility. The experiment was paused within days. The Foundation has also raised alarms in the other direction: AI scraper bots ballooned its bandwidth costs, and executives have warned that chatbots which strip-mine Wikipedia without attribution threaten the volunteer ecosystem that keeps it accurate.