Last weekend 25th to 27th of September, members of Wikimedia Slovensko met in Dubnica nad Váhom. It was great to meet the fellow Wikipedians in the flesh again (Matej, Patrik and Filip), and to meet Kormi in 3D for the first time.
It was mainly a planning, coordination and brainstorming meeting, but part of the programme happened outdoors, with cameras. By Sunday the town’s 18th-century Calvary had its own photos on Wikimedia Commons, a record on Wikidata and the start of a Slovak Wikipedia article. The local Jewish cemetery gained a set of new photographs too. That weekend is a good small example of what this whole thing is about.
Why two Wiki in the title and what is Wikimedia? #
Pretty much everybody knows that Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia that anyone can read and anyone can edit. Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger founded it in 2001. Today it exists in 348 language editions. The English one alone has more than 7.2 million articles, and the Slovak Wikipedia has about 261,000. Nobody is paid to write it. The articles come from volunteers, and every statement is meant to be backed by a published, reliable source. Every edit is public and can be traced in the page history.
What is Wikimedia, and how does it relate to Wikipedia? #
“Wikimedia” is the name of the family around Wikipedia, and it means three things:
- The Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit in San Francisco, founded in 2003. It runs the servers, develops the software (MediaWiki) and hosts Wikipedia and its sister projects. It does not write or edit the content; the volunteer communities do.
- The Wikimedia movement: the volunteers who write, photograph, check and discuss, organised per language and per project.
- Local organisations such as Wikimedia Slovensko (website, in Slovak; English page on Meta), a Slovak civic association (občianske združenie), known internationally as Wikimedians of Slovakia. They organise events, workshops, photo walks and competitions, and bring Wikipedia to schools, libraries and museums.
In short: Wikipedia is the best-known project; Wikimedia is everything that makes it and its siblings possible.
It is not just an encyclopedia: the sister projects #
There are many wiki things under the Wikimedia umbrella. They complement each other and address different aspects of free knowledge sharing.
- Wikimedia Commons: a free media library of more than 148 million photos, maps, recordings and videos. Our Dubnica photos went here.
- Wikidata: a shared database of facts that people and machines can both read, with over 120 million entries. Wikipedias in every language can draw dates, coordinates and links from it.
- Wiktionary (Slovak: Wikislovník): a dictionary in many languages.
- Wikisource (Slovak: Wikizdroje): a library of free source texts.
- Wikiquote (Slovak: Wikicitáty), Wikibooks (Slovak: Wikiknihy), Wikivoyage, Wikispecies, Wikiversity and more.
Wikipedia: the foundation the AI boom stands on #
The best-known large language models learned to write in part from Wikipedia. Where the training recipes are published, they say so plainly:
- GPT-3 (Brown et al., 2020, Table 2.2) sampled Wikipedia more often than the rest of its data. Wikipedia was passed through the training 3.4 times, compared with less than half a pass (0.44) for the general web crawl. The authors did this because they viewed it as higher-quality data.
- LLaMA (Touvron et al., 2023) built its model “using publicly available datasets exclusively” and used Wikipedia dumps in 20 languages.
Two things make Wikipedia so valuable for this. The first is quality: its text is sourced, edited, discussed and corrected by people. The second is licence: its text is published under CC BY-SA 4.0, an open licence that explicitly allows reuse on two conditions: credit the authors and share alike. Much of the rest of the web carries no such permission, and whether it may be used for training is contested. Wikipedia is one of the largest bodies of text whose reuse is plainly allowed.
The Wikimedia Foundation put it bluntly in November 2025: “AI cannot exist without the human effort that goes into building open and nonprofit information sources like Wikipedia.” It asks AI companies for two things in return: to credit Wikipedia and its volunteers, and to support it financially, for example through the paid Wikimedia Enterprise service.
The other side of that coin: models are only as good as what people write. If fewer people edit Wikipedia, the source that the AI world depends on gets thinner. Every sourced sentence you add improves both the encyclopedia and the tools built on it.
Four reasons to start editing #
Some work is simply useful. Nobody pays for it, and someone still has to do it: a sourced paragraph about a village church, a photo of a monument before it crumbles, a date that is finally correct. Going part-time gave me something I had not had for decades: a choice about a big part of my week. I could have filled it with more paid work. Instead I put a fair share of it here. Not because I have nothing else to do, but because I think this is where those hours count. If you also have some say over where your time goes, this is worth a thought.
1. Your knowledge is missing, and your edit counts. The Slovak Wikipedia has about 261,000 articles, but only around 1,200 users were active in the last 30 days. Your town, your field of study, the local church, a forgotten scientist: often nobody has written about them yet. Until last weekend, the Calvary in Dubnica had no article at all. It will have a proper one soon.
2. You learn skills that matter everywhere. Finding sources, telling a reliable source from a weak one, writing neutrally and briefly, and accepting criticism of your text. That is research and media literacy in practice, and in an age of AI-generated text it is worth more than ever.
3. What you write reaches people, and machines. Wikipedia is one of the most visited websites in the world. As the section above shows, what is written there also shapes what AI assistants answer. A good paragraph about your region will be read, and reused, long after you write it.
4. You don’t have to write a whole article, and you are not alone. You can start with a typo fix, a photo from your phone uploaded to Commons, or a missing fact on Wikidata; those two work the same in any language. Wikimedia Slovensko runs events and training in Slovakia. Every Wikipedia also has a place where experienced editors answer newcomers’ questions: the Teahouse on the English one, and Kaviareň (“the café”, in Slovak) on the Slovak one. If you read Slovak, go to the second: that is where a new pair of hands makes the biggest difference.
How to start #
Create an account on Wikipedia and fix one thing you know is wrong. One account works in every language. (If your first language is a smaller one, your national Wikipedia needs you the most. The Slovak Wikipedia has around 1,200 active editors. The English and Spanish ones are doing just fine, although they are still a good place to share local knowledge that nobody outside your region has written up.)
If you read English, the introduction tutorials walk you through your first edits, and the Teahouse is there for questions. If Slovakia is what interests you, WikiProject Slovakia on the English Wikipedia gathers the articles about the country and the people who look after them. And wherever you live, there is probably a Wikimedia group near you: the list of Wikimedia affiliates has the national chapters and user groups.
If you read Slovak, come and find us. Wikimedia Slovensko is a small, entirely volunteer association. Its contact page has the e-mail address and the mailing lists, and news goes out on Facebook. The yearly photo competitions, Wiki miluje pamiatky (Wiki Loves Monuments) and Wiki miluje Zem (Wiki Loves Earth), make an easy first project with a clear goal. Membership costs 10 euros a year, 5 for students, and if you pay income tax in Slovakia you can also assign 2% of it to the association. The easiest way in, though, is simply to write, or to catch one of us at the next meetup.