Introducing WikiVault: A new chapter in Wikipedia contributions with AI

Countless editors, administrators, and bots have contributed to Wikipedia over the years, and their efforts have made it a treasure trove of human knowledge. As a volunteer technical editor and administrator active on Korean Wikipedia, with a background in developing tools. I believe that the essence of Wikipedia is that it is an encyclopedia. Here is the question I have: “How can we improve the quality of this encyclopedia, make it easier for more people to write, and enrich the quantity of articles?” This has been a long-standing question for me.

Two barriers: Translation and writing.

One of the main ways to contribute to Wikipedia is to translate articles from other language editions, or to write new articles yourself, but there are two major barriers to doing so.

First, there’s the difficulty of translation. Human translation is ideal, but it takes a lot of time and effort. Machine translation, such as Google Translate, is fast, but quality is an issue. Especially in languages like Korean, where honorifics and semi-honorifics (plain language) coexist, machine translation often results in awkward honorifics or a mix of the two styles. Since Wikipedia articles are supposed to be written in consistent plain language, with the exception of quotations, it becomes a laborious task to manually edit the generated translations to make them stylistically correct. This is a challenge shared by the Japanese Wikipedia. In addition, machine translation is limited by its inability to understand context: it doesn’t take into account how a particular word is used, what grammatical flow it follows in the article, and so on, but simply substitutes it sentence by sentence, often resulting in wording that is distorted or out of context. These problems are also difficult to avoid when using Wikipedia’s built-in translation tools. In the end, the irony is that the tools chosen for convenience often end up increasing the burden on editors.

Second, the difficulty of writing articles. In my early days on Wikipedia, I used to browse and read media technology books at a library in the United States and contribute to the English Wikipedia. I was passionate about the topics I wanted to write about, but the process of finding and manually verifying reliable sources was a daunting task for me at the time. Today, the internet has made research easier, but the process of navigating search engines, finding the right sources, and typing them into complex citation frames is still a huge hurdle that can deter new writers.

WikiVault, The new possibilities in the AI era

I believed that the era of generative AI could offer solutions to these challenges. If AI can assist with high-quality translation and structured drafting, contributing to Wikipedia can become a much more enjoyable and productive activity. With this idea in mind, I developed WikiVault, an AI-powered editing assistant tool for Wikipedia.

WikiVault offers two core features:

• AI Translation: Provides high-quality translations optimized for Wikipedia style.
• AI Writing: Drafts articles based on reliable sources.

Key Feature 1: Translation

WikiVault streamlines Wikipedia translation through six key steps:

1. Request Handling: Loads user settings and translation input.
2. Link & Template Analysis: Checks if internal links and templates exist in Korean Wikipedia.
3. Pre-processing: Cleans up unnecessary templates, converts incompatible ones, removes excess italics, and standardizes template names.
4. Contextual Translation Input: Supplies the AI with relevant context to ensure accurate, meaningful translations.
5. Real-time AI Translation: Provides live progress as the AI performs the translation.
6. Post-processing: Cleans up redundant links and enhances overall translation quality.

Feature 2: AI writing

This is a quick drafting feature designed to overcome the difficulty of starting a new article. Simply enter a topic, and the AI will search for relevant information online and generate a draft that includes proper sources.

WikiVault’s RAG-based Writing Process:

1. Settings & Request Validation: Confirms the user’s configuration and writing request.
2. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG): Instead of relying solely on its internal knowledge, the AI uses a Google Search tool to retrieve up-to-date information from the web. This allows it to generate more accurate and timely content.
3. Real-time AI Writing: Based on the retrieved data, the AI writes content in the format of a Wikipedia article.

Lowering the Barrier to Contribution, Elevating the Value of Collaboration

First and foremost, I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to the Korean Wikipedia community for your enthusiastic support throughout the development process and for already embracing WikiVault with such interest. Your active use and thoughtful feedback affirm that the direction WikiVault is taking is the right one.

WikiVault is not a tool that replaces editors. Human review and input remain essential. Rather, I envision this tool as a starting assistant—something that makes beginning easier, a guide for taking that important first step in writing a Wikipedia article. By automating repetitive and tedious tasks, it empowers editors to focus on more meaningful and creative work: enhancing content quality and verifying knowledge.

I developed WikiVault with the belief that technology should not undermine the core values of Wikipedia, but instead help expand and amplify them. By lowering the entry barrier to contributing, I hope more people can experience the joy of sharing knowledge.

Activate WikiVault now and join us in building a better Wikipedia—together with AI. I look forward to your continued feedback and participation.