‘Wikimedia Foundation will bank on human editors to stay relevant’

KOCHI: Jorge Vargas, senior director of Community Investments and Partnerships at Wikimedia Foundation, noted that even in the era of AI boom, the foundation would bank on human editors to stay relevant in providing knowledge to the world.Speaking to TNIE, Jorge said, “Human knowledge is powerful and we are relying on it. However, many AI models have been using data from Wikipedia platforms for training and hence we are experiencing a lot of bot traffic these days. We are practising a mechanism to enforce how much they are actually being able to access, as Wikipedia is free, but maintaining the service and technology is not.” He added that even before the AI expansion, Wikipedia, which always relied upon open data source, has been using machine learning. He also stressed on the need for Wikipedia to remain vital, relevant and up to date in the AI era.Talking about the rapid spread of misinformation, Jorge noted that Wikimedia volunteers are the first line of defence who take care of the spread of false information, vandalism or edits in bad faith done on Wikipedia. In addition, the Wikimedia Foundation has the trust and safety team and disinformation team — who handles rare cases of systematic disinformation.“Especially during the election time in various countries, we keep an eye on related content and coordinate with regional volunteers when information that seem doubtful appears,” he added.