The three principles that drive the Foundation’s deployment of machine learning solutions in Wikimedia projects are sustainability, equity, and transparency.

The key is that knowledge is a human endeavor, and the development of Wikipedia and its sister projects depends on human collaboration and consensus. Machine learning tools can augment the process, but AI cannot replace volunteer Wikimedians.

MANIFESTO

After working in fashion e-commerce for years I've come to the conclusion that in e-commerce we do not sell clothes... we sell images of clothes. Compressed, digital versions of physical products. As Roland Barthes pointed out in The Fashion System, a product image is a symbol or metaphor of a product. Media--in this case images--mediates ... See more

The second is the idea of “gray swan” events, which are both predictable and unprecedented. Together, these two ideas explain how we will face a rush of extremes, all scientifically imaginable but utterly new to human experience.

warriors

Welcoming language, customized wayfinding, instructional onboarding, familiar contribution and consumption interfaces, suggested actions, and explicit gratitude and feedback are all areas where small changes could make significant improvements in the Wikimedia experience—and potentially improve the quality of new editor contributions and overall re... See more

they view the encyclopedia as a “consensus truth,” as one of them put it: It acts as a reality check in a society where facts are increasingly contested. That truth is less about data points — “How old is Joe Biden?” — than about complex events like the Covid-19 pandemic, in which facts are constantly evolving, frequently distorted and furiously de... See more

“Sharing knowledge is by nature an act of kindness,”

“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.