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Jimmy Wales Says Wikipedia Could Use AI. Editors Call It the 'Antithesis of Wikipedia'
(www.404media.co)
Why would anyone want an editor that doesn’t fact check?
this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2025
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tbh i somehow didnt even realize that wikipedia is one of the few super popular sites not trying to shove ai down my throat every 5 seconds
i'm grateful now
Don't count your chickens before they hatch, Jimmy Wales founded Wikipedia and already used ChatGPT in a review process once according to this article.
damn T_T
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I will stop donating to Wikipedia if they use AI
Wikipedia already has a decades operating cost of savings.
No they don't because they blast it on inflated exec wages.
Why don't they blast execs and reduce the expenses.
Just got back from asking them. They said they like cash moneys and don't like blasting themselves.
This is such a tiresome aspect of society. Even if you believe in executives, they certainly don’t need to get paid more than anyone else.
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jimmy wales is also the president and co-founder of fandom
to give you an idea of who that guy is
Oh gross
Why?
Fandom (previously Wikia) is an extremely shitty service with low-quality wikis mostly consisting of content copied from independent wikis and a terrible layout that only exists to amplify their overwhelming advertising.
While this is true, the majority of the wikis are not at all low quality. Some are the only ones existing for a topic. The wikis are community-based, after all.
But its easy to vandalize and is highly profit-driven. The fandom wikis are filled with ads that absolutely destroy navigation. Infamous is the video ad that scrolls you up automatically in the middle of reading once it finishes. You have to pause it to read the article with no interruption.
my one weird trick for using fandom.com is to disable javascript for that domain.
What if they put anubis on it ?
Anubis only does a proof of work challenge if you lack a specific cookie that it gives you. You can temporarily enable JavaScript, pass the challenge, get the cookie, then disable JavaScript.
I use uBlock Origin, btw, to make selectively enabling/disabling JavaScript per domain a simple two-click task.
they captured the "niche wiki" market as wikia, then rebranded and started serving shittons of ads. the vim wiki is unusable these days because it runs like ass and looks like a gamer rgb nightmare
There's an addon for that, Indie Wiki Buddy.
It tries to redirect you to non fandom/fextralife wikis if they exist, and if not, it proxies fandom wikis through BreezeWiki which just displays the content.
And I'll take this opportunity to plug Hohser and the uBlock AI blocklist as well.
I mean, the Wikipedia page does say it was sold in 2018. Not sure how it was before but it's not surprising that it enshittified by now.
I guess in his defense it wasn't too bad before 2018, as far as I can remember. Most of the enshittification of fandom I can remember has happened since.
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He can also stick AI inside his own ass
Christ, I miss when I could click on an article and not be asked to sign up for it.
Oh, right! Thanks for reminding me. I tried to archive it the last time but it took forever.
Edit. There ya' go: https://archive.is/oWcIr
You know, I remember way back in the day when…
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…and that’s why I’m no longer welcome in New Zealand. Crazy!
As I have adblock mostly because of the abuse of trackers, I understand people trying to monetize their work.
Journalists monetizing their work is totally reasonable. The problem for me is that it seems unfair to ask that literally everyone trying to read an article have to sign up. Maybe I’m missing something.
He is nobody to Wikipedia now. He also failed to create a news site and a micro SNS.
Not sure about Wikipedia, but Conservapedia would find it very useful. In fact, since most of their entries are factually incorrect and appear as fantasy I think AI writing articles would save them a lot of time.
Bonus: hallucinations can help create new conspiracy theories!
Fuck AI
Important context: he’s not suggesting AIs writing content for Wikipedia. He’s suggesting using AI to provide feedback for new editors. Take that how you will.
Right, which makes it just as bad. Wikipedia had enough proofreaders. You don't need AI for that, because the need is already filled.
This is entirely different from a book writer who is going everything solo and has exactly one publishing window.
And writing feedback software has existed for decades. So AI adds nothing new. Again it is snake oil. It is always snake oil. Except when it's bait and switch, to pretend it wasn't snake oil in the first place.
Honestly, translating the good articles from other languages would improve Wikipedia immensely.
For example, the Nanjing dialect article is pretty bare in English and very detailed in Mandarin
You can do that, that's fine. As long as you can verify it is an accurate translation, so you need to know the subject matter and the target language.
But you could probably also have used Google translate and then just fine tune the output yourself. Anyone could have done that at any point in the last 10 years.
Google translate is horrendously bad at Korean, especially with slang and accidental typos. Like nonsense bad.
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I recently have edited a small wiki page that was obviously written by someone that wasn’t proficient in English. I used AI to just reword what was already written and then I edited the output myself. It did a pretty good job. It was a page about some B-list Indonesian actress that I just stumbled upon and I didn’t want to put time and effort into it but the page really needed work done.
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So I fed the page to ChatGPT to ask for advice. And I got what seems to me to be pretty good. And so I'm wondering if we might start to think about how a tool like AFCH might be improved so that instead of a generic template, a new editor gets actual advice. It would be better, obviously, if we had lovingly crafted human responses to every situation like this, but we all know that the volunteers who are dealing with a high volume of various situations can't reasonably have time to do it. The templates are helpful - an AI-written note could be even more helpful.
This actually sounds like a plausibly decent use for an LLM. Initial revision to take some of the load off from the human review process isn't a bad idea - he isn't advocating for AI to write articles, just that it can be useful for copy-editing and potentially supplement a system already heavy in Go/No Go evaluations.
Which is weird, really. Jimmy Wales is just fucking awful. I didn't realize he was anatomically capable of not talking out of his ass.
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