Research news on @Wikipedia @Wikidata @Wikimedia, hot off the press. Volunteer-curated by @tilmanbayer & @mad_astronaut. Read our newsletter for full coverage

San Francisco
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…
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WikiResearch retweeted
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.…
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"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"
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"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
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"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)
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"SimpleWikiSearch: A Clean Offline Wikipedia Environment for Agentic Search" arxiv.org/pdf/2607.26070 (Code: github.com/JimXiongGM/simple… ) #RAG
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"Scalable Methods for Storing and Retrieving Wikipedia Revision Histories for Large-Scale Analysis" dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/37874… New "WikECD" Python library can compress them by as much as 94% github.com/descentis/WikECD
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"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"
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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
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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)
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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)
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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…
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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…
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"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
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WikiResearch retweeted
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.
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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…
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"Multilingual Reference Need Assessment System for Wikipedia", using a BERT-based model arxiv.org/pdf/2603.17146 (Model card: meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mach… )
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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…
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