In the future, will Wikipedia still be written by humans?
This episode asks what happens to that promise as two very different futures close in.
Co-host and author Richard Cooke calls Wikipedia ‘the last best place on the internet’ - one of the only things still standing from the early web's promise of a civic, collaborative internet.
This episode traces two futures already taking shape. The first is AI.
It might surprise you how long Wikipedia has used AI successfully. And unsuccessfully...
Like in the strange true story of a Wikipedia language edition almost entirely about insects, written in Cebuano by one Swedish professor's bot, as a tribute to his wife.
Now generative AI like ChatGPT is raising the stakes again.
The second future is hiding in plain sight, on Wikipedia's own turf: an ambitious project to turn its millions of articles into structured, machine-readable facts that could be translated into any language, instantly.
A utopian dream - or the thing that replaces human editors?
Voices
Heather Ford is an ARC Future Fellow and Professor in the School of Communication and Social Sciences at UTS. She is a former Advisory Board member of the Wikimedia Foundation and the author of “Writing the Revolution: Wikipedia and the Survival of Facts in the Digital Age” published by MIT Press.
Dr Francesca Sidoti is a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the ARC Discovery project ‘Wikipedia and the nation’s story: towards equity in knowledge production’ in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.
Richard Cooke is an author, reporter and screenwriter. The author of three books, he is the former US correspondent and current contributing editor to The Monthly magazine. His latest book is The Last Best Place On The Internet: A Human History of Wikipedia.
Dr Michael Falk is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Studies at the University of Melbourne, and is a computational literary scholar, data scientist, speaker and writer. In all his work, he aims to combine the creativity of the arts with the rigour and precision of data science.
Josh Lim a long-time Wikipedia editor, and the founder of Wikimedia Philippines. He speaks seven languages and works as a community manager. He has a strong interest in studying the dynamics of tech communities, particularly on the Wikimedia projects but also at large.
Research
Falk, Michael. ‘Wikilambda the Ultimate: The Wikimedia Foundation’s Search for the Perfect Language’. AI & SOCIETY, 2026, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-026-02899-w.
In 2020 the Wikimedia foundation launched its first new project in nearly a decade, and includes Abstract Wikipedia, a language-agnostic Wikipedia that will be dynamically translated into the reader’s native tongue.
The project is designed to address a fundamental bias in Wikipedia, namely its bias towards majority languages such as English and Spanish.
More reading
'Wikipedia Warriors'
List of people imprisoned for editing Wikipedia (Wikipedia)
EFF Launches New Offline Campaign for Saudi Wikipedian Osama Khalid by Jillian C. York (Electronic Frontier Foundation, 2026)
Wiki warriors: activists fighting to keep truth of brutal Marcos regime in Philippines alive (The Guardian, 2017)
The last best place
The Last Best Place on the Internet: A Human History of Wikipedia by Richard Cooke (Black Inc Books, 2026)
Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet by Richard Cooke (Wired, 2020)
How Wikipedia became the responsible adult of the internet by Stephen Harrison (Australian Financial Review, 2019)
Peer production
Here Comes Everybody: How change happens when people come together by Clay Shirky (Penguin, 2009)
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler (Yale University Press, 2006)
Wikipedia and AI
Wikipedia bans AI-generated content in its online encyclopedia (The Guardian, 2026)
Breathe, Don’t Panic, there is a different story about Wikimedia + AI futures by Sadads (The Signpost, 2026)
Wikipedia goes to war against AI slop articles with new deletion policy (PC World, 2025)
Vandalism on Wikipedia (Wikipedia)
Cebuano Wikipedia
Wikipedia's largest non-English version was created by a bot. Generative AI poses new problems (ABC, 2025)
Cebuano Wikipedia, a large language edition Wikipedia finally has a WikiClub! (Wikimedia 2024)
Wikidata
Teaching Wikipedia to write itself by Rebecca J. Rosen (The Atlantic, 2012)
Abstract Wikipedia
WikiLambda the Ultimate by e mln e and Tilman Bayer (The Signpost, 2026)
Some reflections on designing Abstract Wikipedia so far by Maria Keet (Keet blog, 2023)
