In the September issue of our newsletter:
* Google's AI overviews may have reduced search engine referrals to English Wikipedia by 5% (according to a preprint that has seen substantial changes)
And other recent research publications meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Rese…
ALT "Google AI Overview results.png" (via Wikimedia Commons, uploader: Belbury, PD)
My new research on the experiences of Jewish editors on English Wikipedia has just been published.
The study exposes the harassment Jewish contributors face when trying to keep Israel‑related topics neutral. Reforming Wikipedia matters.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.…
"Wikimedia research methodologies: a bibliometric history of peer production and AI (2005–2025)" doi.org/10.1007/s00146-026-0…
Argues that "industry-funded research popularized the idea that Wikipedia existed as a semantic resource to be mined"
ALT The four waves of Wikimedia research and their concerns (2005–2025) [from Jankowski 2026]
"AI Use among [Swiss] Wikipedians in Science-Related Information & Communication" upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped…
* Wikipedians much more cautious about using AI than scientists or journalists
* Only 22.6% find AI useful for their Wikipedia contributions
* Polarized on AI disclosure
ALT Compared with other groups, Wikipedians are more cautious about future AI use (from Schäfer et al., "AI Use among Wikipedians in Science-Related Information & Communication", CC BY-SA 4.0)
ALT AI is mainly used as a language and support tool (from Schäfer et al., "AI Use among Wikipedians in Science-Related Information & Communication", CC BY-SA 4.0)
ALT Disclosure of AI use is polarized (from Schäfer et al., "AI Use among Wikipedians in Science-Related Information & Communication", CC BY-SA 4.0)
"WikiStar: A System for Shedding Light on the Hidden History of Scientific Wikipedia Articles", detecting edit types such as "technical term added" using an LLM classifier arxiv.org/html/2607.12441v3
(with human-annotated benchmark dataset)
ALT Overview of the WikiStar system (Figure 2 from Ehrlich et al. 2026, WikiStar-A System for Shedding Light on the Hidden History of Scientific Wikipedia Articles, CC BY 4.0)
ALT Editors distribution by quality class (from Scalable Methods for Storing and Retrieving Wikipedia Revision Histories for Large-Scale Analysis, CC BY 4.0)
"Festivities at the edge of data: an interdisciplinary study of Andean festivals in wikidata" nature.com/articles/s41599-0…
"Wikidata’s semantic model, classification properties, linking practices, and editorial accumulation make some cultural relations more visible than others"
ALT Table 1 Overview of entity types and their corresponding Wikidata relations used to capture ritual, geographic, and heritage dimensions (from Zúñiga and Meza 2026, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
ALT Community detection (excerpt from Zúñiga and Meza 2026, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
How Wikipedia editors "with different opinions and perspectives work through disagreement guided by the rules and norms of a Wikipedian superordinate identity" on the talk page of the article about Australia's "Indigenous Voice to Parliament" proposal doi.org/10.1111%2Fbjso.70049
ALT "Conceptual figure outlining how competing opinion-based groups may work through intergroup conflict" (figure 1 from Haines et al. 2026, CC BY-NC 4.0)
ALT "Demographic information on wikipedia editors" [on the talk page of 'Indigenous Voice to Parliament'] (Table 1 from Haines et al. 2026, CC BY-NC 4.0)
Impact of Google AI Overviews on Wikipedia:
"default AIO availability reduced English [Wikipedia] search traffic by 5.45% and 4.82%, respectively" in mid 2024 papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.…
(NB: revises/retracts 15% estimate for *overall* traffic from the paper's earlier versions)
ALT excerpt from "3.1 Model-Free Analysis" in Khosravi and Yoganarasimhan 2026, "Impact of AI Search Summaries on Website Traffic: Evidence from Google AI Overviews and Wikipedia"
See also @makoshark's discussion of this paper in the annual "State of Wikimedia Research" talk at last month's Wikimania piped.video/watch?v=Gk83IgVm…
(NB: featuring an earlier version with the now revised/retracted 15% estimate)
In the latest issue of our monthly newsletter:
* Women in blue? Wikipedia's gender gap reverses in some areas
And other new research publications
meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Rese…
ALT Percentage of female versus male faculty with Wikipedia biographies from 2014 to 2024 (Figure 4 from Alvarez-Ponce and Iyengar, Monitoring the gender gap in the coverage of biology professors on Wikipedia, CC BY 4.0)
Contrary to expectations, "Female professors in STEM fields had a higher predicted probability of having a Wikipedia biography than their male colleagues. Outside STEM, no gender effects were observed." (in Germany, on German Wikipedia)
nature.com/articles/s41599-0…
ALT Predicted probabilities differentiated by university type, gender, and discipline [From: Spagert et al, Who gets a Wikipedia biography..., CC BY 4.0]
"Wikipediautism: A Multilingual Analysis of Autism-Related Wikipedia Articles in Six Languages" doi.org/10.1007/s10803-026-0…
E.g. "smaller language communities (Georgian, Norwegian and Italian) showed the highest relative demand"
"all LLM-judges, including Grok, ... rate Grokipedia less neutral than Wikipedia"
"Grokipedia particularly favours economically rightwing politicians and penalises socially liberal ones, while Wikipedia is rated as favourably biased towards the latter"
arxiv.org/html/2607.15146v1
ALT "Fig. 1. Methodology overview: members of government (WhoGov, 20162023) are mapped to expert-coded V-Party ideology scores, their Wikipedia and Grokipedia articles are rated for neutrality by four LLM judges, and the effects of ideology on the ratings are estimated via OLS regression." (from Vlahos et al. 2026, CC BY 4.0)
New paper with Dylan Walker, now open access in Management Science: "The AI Democratization Paradox."
We ask: when AI lowers barriers to knowledge production, does it democratize participation, or amplify existing inequality?
A thread on Wikipedia + AI translation.
In the July issue of our newsletter:
* LLMs and Wikipedia's "Neutral Point of View"
* 20 years of user blocks
* A look at the Esperanto and Volapük Wikipedias
and more: meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Rese…
ALT Figure 2. Proportion of sentences accompanied by a citation in featured articles by language (from Baigutanova et al. 2026, Multilingual Reference Need Assessment System for Wikipedia, CC BY 4.0)
ALT Figure 1. The Reference Need pipeline to compute the reference coverage score of an article revision (from Baigutanova et al. 2026, Multilingual Reference Need Assessment System for Wikipedia, CC BY 4.0)
In the latest issue of our monthly newsletter:
* Proposed tagging system for AI-involved edits on Wikipedia and Commons
* Successful and unsuccessful AI tools for contributors
meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Rese…