Jan Eißfeldt
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Jan Eissfeldt serves as Director and Global Head of Trust & Safety at the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit hosting Wikidata, Wikipedia, and other free knowledge projects. He is also an External Applied Complexity Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute and holds a range of other roles in the technology industry.
Jan Eißfeldt joins the Paris IAS in May 2026 for a one-month writing residency.
Research topics
Artificial Intelligence; Collective Intelligence; Complexity Science; Computational Complexity; Digital Platform Governance; The Edge of Chaos; Geoeconomics.
Troubled Twins: Collective and Artificial Intelligence
Being both the cornerstone data set used to build AI models from Boston to Beijing and a complex collective intelligence project, Wikipedia plays an outsized role in shaping the development possibilities of emerging AI approaches and in turn is uniquely impacted by them. The collaborative online encyclopedia, created and curated by self-governing volunteer communities in more than 380 languages that partner with a non-profit platform provider, the Wikimedia Foundation, is employing adaptive coordination strategies to navigate the impact of AI model outputs flooding digital content ecosystems.
In the digital economy, model outputs are competing for monetizable attention with academia and journalism, bringing down the market value of traditional high quality content production. Historically relying on the latter, Wikipedia's epistemic ontology of reliable sources is guiding the project's collective peer production of its freely licensed content. This CI-produced content is itself the most widely used high quality data set to train AI models. The interdependent dynamic has created an epistemic feedback loop between collective and artificial intelligence with distinct enabling conditions and impacts across languages.
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