AI and the Commons: the Wikimedia movement – Open Future

The challenge for the open movement is already clear: build an alternative to corporate, closed machine learning systems. And to protect the commons from exploitation by these systems.

he world needs access to open and democratic AI systems that function as digital public goods.

“We’ve had artificial-intelligence tools and bots since 2002, and we’ve had a team dedicated to machine learning since 2017,” Selena Deckelmann, Wikimedia’s chief technology officer, told me. “They’re extremely valuable for semiautomated content review, and especially for translations.

Open-source projects: Some of the most ambitious creative collaborations take place in open-source co-edited projects like Wikipedia, where thousands co-create increasingly canonical content. Platforms like GitHub and GitLab facilitate similar codevelopment for software, while others like Hugging Face allow this for development of Generative Founda

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Alongside technical tools, we need ways of defining and explaining social norms and expectations about contribution and value sharing. We need collective mechanisms for decision-making about shared assets, that make people feel heard while recognising the limitations, constraints and realities of their maintenance. We need people and organisations ... See more

Still, it’s incorrect and counterproductive to characterize Wikipedia as a bastion of algorithm-free people power. In a 2019 op-ed, Katherine Maher cautioned against empty Web 1.0 nostalgia and underscored the important role that artificial intelligence plays in spotting potential vandalism and directing editors to pages that might need evaluation.