What did Jimmy Wales say about AI and Wikipedia on its 25th birthday?

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales told the BBC's Johnny Diamond that traffic has dipped mainly for quick answers people now get from search engines, while readers still come for long reads. He said AI companies depend on Wikipedia's human-written knowledge and should avoid undermining it, warning of model collapse if AI trains only on AI output.

Wales described Wikipedia's editors as a community of nerds writing an encyclopedia as a hobby.
He said some AI companies are listening more than others.
He grouped journalism, academic work and books with Wikipedia as human knowledge worth preserving.

▸In their words

“If AI only trains on the output of AI, it can quite easily spiral into nonsense.” Jimmy Wales · at 27:23 — open in the transcript →

Source: our own transcription of the episode. The full conversation is on Global News Podcast (2026-11-01). Read the whole episode summary →

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