
Research news on @Wikipedia @Wikidata @Wikimedia, hot off the press. Volunteer-curated by @tilmanbayer & @mad_astronaut. Read our newsletter for full coverage
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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…
"Can Language Models Play the Wikipedia Game?" (get from one article to another via article links) arxiv.org/html/2610.13948v1
"No model significantly outperformed humans, although the best models (GPT-o3 mini, GPT-4o, QwQ:32B, and DeepSeek-R1:70B) achieved comparable success."
WikiResearch retweeted
An new Pleias paper: in collaboration with AI Bridges and @Wikimedia Deutschland we developed a new harness for complex semantic search over the largest knowledge database, @wikidata
WikiResearch retweeted
What happens when a Wikipedia language edition starts using LLMs?
Unlike in other languages, Korean Wikipedia embraced LLMs through WikiVault: only 0.1% of editors use it weekly, but it accounts for ~30% of added bytes!
New preprint led by @song_inhwa_ (who's at @ACM_CSCW)
🧵
"WikiCoach: Scaffolding Learning for Novices in Online Apprenticeship Communities" doi.org/10.1145/3774935.3806…
"a Q&A–style LLM system designed to scaffold learning-through-doing in Wikipedia"
"WiCleanData: Guaranteeing the Type Consistency of Wikidata by Taxonomy Refinement and Constraint Enforcement" arxiv.org/abs/2609.20057
Pipeline "cleans the taxonomy with [LLM] assistance, then simplifies type constraints by hierarchical aggregation, and finally filters facts"
Web interface for the resulting knowledge graph: wicleandata.r2.enst.fr/
"Sanctioned by Others: Remediating Knowledge Exclusion on Wikipedia Through Design" doi.org/10.1145/3816994
"a more inclusive Wikipedia is one in which editors can acquire the skills to invoke, bend, and even break the platform policies that dictate encyclopedic content."
"The Evolution of Coordination in a Collective Intelligence System: 25 Years of English Wikipedia and the Emergence of Generative AI" arxiv.org/html/2609.16856v1
"participation in coordination spaces has declined relative to content production, particularly in governance areas"
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.…
"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"
"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
"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)
"SimpleWikiSearch: A Clean Offline Wikipedia Environment for Agentic Search" arxiv.org/pdf/2607.26070
(Code: github.com/JimXiongGM/simple… )
#RAG
"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
"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"
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
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)
(While @SSRN deletes earlier revisions, in this case they are still preserved at @arxiv : arxiv.org/abs/2602.18455 )
See also @makoshark's discussion of this paper in the annual "State of Wikimedia Research" talk at last month's Wikimania youtube.com/watch?v=Gk83IgVm…
(NB: featuring an earlier version with the now revised/retracted 15% estimate)












![The four waves of Wikimedia research and their concerns (2005–2025) [from Jankowski 2026]](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HSHuziGaIAAnU4K.jpg?name=small&format=webp)









!["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)](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HRToAWba8AAWCcr.jpg?name=small&format=webp)
