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On 4 November 2025, Wikimedia CH, Open Future, and IMD Business School brought 20 participants together in Lausanne for a roundtable on the future of knowledge commons in the age of AI. The group included Wikimedians, AI developers, data scientists, data governance experts, journalists, and researchers.
The central question was both simple and urgent: what happens to the Wikimedia Movement when AI stops merely reading Wikipedia and starts replacing it as a key source of knowledge?
A new “knowledge loop” is taking shape, with access to knowledge increasingly intermediated by AI tools, and machines becoming as significant as humans as users of knowledge. This creates a real risk that knowledge commons like Wikipedia and other Wikimedia platforms will be used to train and power AI systems without AI companies giving back to them.
The roundtable explored four interconnected challenges: the Paradox of Open, Wikipedia’s role as a data commons, the tension between public and private knowledge, and the dynamics of this new information loop. Discussions also touched on the relationship between Wikipedia, democracy, and information integrity, and on how AI-generated content may erode the conditions that make Wikipedia’s model of collective knowledge production possible.
The core argument that emerged is that Wikimedia should redefine its role in the AI age as the backbone of a public, human-governed knowledge infrastructure. The insights gathered were presented in the white paper Collective intelligence vs artificial intelligence, published in January 2026, which aims to help shape the Wikimedia Movement’s shared position on generative AI technologies and support active work on standards and governance rather than remaining a passive data source.
