Wikipedia launches researcher training as AI reliance grows
A new free online course designed to help researchers engage more effectively with Wikipedia has launched on WikiLearn, the Wikimedia Foundation’s learning platform.
Titled Wikipedia for Researchers: Building reliable knowledge through citations, the self-paced course was co-developed by: Kath Burton, Co-Director at the Center for Humanities Communication; Carlos Areia of Digital Sciece; and Asaf Bartov, a Lead Program Officer for the Community Development team at the Wikimedia Foundation. The initiative comes amid growing recognition of Wikipedia’s role as a gateway to knowledge for students, journalists, policymakers and increasingly the AI systems that draw on publicly available information. Despite its influence, many academic researchers have never contributed to the online encyclopaedia, while numerous scholarly disciplines remain under-represented.
According to the course creators, this under-representation can have wider implications for research visibility and public understanding. Fields that are poorly cited on Wikipedia can be harder for non-specialists to discover, more difficult for AI systems to represent accurately, and less visible beyond their own disciplinary communities.
The course builds on findings from a 2025 peer-reviewed study examining researchers’ attitudes towards Wikipedia. The study — Areia C, Burton K, Taylor M, Watkinson C (2025) Research citations building trust in Wikipedia: Results from a survey of published author – described as the first large-scale survey of published authors on the experience of having their work cited on the platform, found that most respondents viewed Wikipedia positively and regarded it as an important route through which readers discover scholarly research.
The authors concluded: “…as researchers are primarily engaging with Wikipedia as a teaching and research tool, there may be opportunities to encourage specialist researcher-authors to update Wikipedia articles where they have expertise and as such improve the accuracy of citations in Wikipedia”.
The new course seeks to provide researchers with a practical pathway for contributing to Wikipedia while navigating the platform’s editorial standards and community expectations.
Hosted on WikiLearn, Wikipedia for Researchers is structured around three core questions:
- How is research represented on Wikipedia?
- Can Wikipedia really be trusted?
- How can academics make Wikipedia more reliable?
Participants are encouraged to explore how scholarly knowledge is represented in their own fields, examine the role of citations and editorial policies in establishing reliability, and gain hands-on experience with Wikipedia’s editing tools.
The course also addresses common challenges faced by academics, including conflicts of interest, self-promotion and responsible editing practices.
A key theme throughout is Wikipedia’s growing significance as a knowledge source for artificial intelligence systems, and the importance of ensuring that research is accurately represented and properly cited.
Designed primarily for researchers, the course requires no previous Wikipedia editing experience and takes approximately four hours to complete. However, it is open to anyone interested in learning more about how Wikipedia works and how knowledge is curated on the platform.