Generative AI and Wikipedia editing: What we learned in 2025

Summary

Like many organizations, Wiki Education has grappled with generative AI, its impacts, opportunities, and threats, for several years. As an organization that runs large-scale programs to bring new editors to Wikipedia (we’re responsible for about 19% of all new active editors on English Wikipedia), we have deep understanding of what challenges face new content contributors to Wikipedia — and how to support them to successfully edit. As many people have begun using generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude in their daily lives, it’s unsurprising that people will also consider using them to help draft contributions to Wikipedia. Since Wiki Education’s programs provide a cohort of content contributors whose work we can evaluate, we’ve looked into how our participants are using GenAI tools. We are choosing to share our perspective through this blog post because we hope it will help inform discussions of GenAI-created content on Wikipedia. In an open environment like the Wikimedia movement, it’s important to share what you’ve learned. In this case, we believe our learnings can help Wikipedia editors who are trying to protect the integrity of content on the encyclopedia, Wikipedians who may be interested in using generative AI tools themselves, other program leaders globally who are trying to onboard new contributors who may be interested in using these tools, and the Wikimedia Foundation, whose product and technology team builds software to help support the development of high-quality content on Wikipedia. Our fundamental conclusion about generative AI is: Wikipedia editors should never copy and paste the output from generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT into Wikipedia articles. Let me explain more. AI detection and investigation Since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, we’ve been paying close attention to GenAI-created content, and how it relates to Wikipedia. We’ve spot-checked work of new editors from our programs, primarily focusing on citations to ens...