Wikipedia:WikiProject Korea/WikiVault
On April 25, 2025, the Korean Wikipedia introduced an integrated AI machine translation, researching, and writing tool called WikiVault (Korean: 위키볼트) for public use. This page serves to document this effort in English. We do this because activities on the Korean Wikipedia can influence activities on the English Wikipedia.
This page contains my (grapesurgeon) abridged translations of various related pages.
Tool documentation
[edit]The tool currently has three main functions.
- Translation: Using AI to provide more accurate translations
- Writing: Using AI to quickly draft articles
- Quick running: Quickly access AI features on any screen using shortcut keys
[Any registered user can enable this tool] by checking the "WikiVault" option in the "gadgets" section of preferences, then saving your preferences.
- The icon to open WikiVault appears to the right by default (users can move the icon to their desired location)
- Detailed description of features
General:
- Saving options: Users can save writing to a location of their choice [including to a subpage in your userspace, a draft, an article, or as a downloadable file]
- Mobile support: Supported on mobile (beta)
Translation:
- Improving translation system issues:
- [Unlike the existing AI translation tool built into Wikipedia, our tool does not experience technical issues related to templates that operate differently between the English and Korean Wikipedias. We've previously confirmed that such inconsistencies can create semantic errors. Instead, we only translate the names and inputs to templates.] (translator note: bullet that begins with "틀데이터 정보"; difficult to understand but I made clearer (still not very clear) based on explanation here)
- Minimizes awkward translations that are unencyclopedic, such as the use of [Korean] honorifics.
- Document augmentation features: When you are translating [an article from the English Wikipedia] for a topic that already has an article on the Korean Wikipedia, the tool is able to preserve aspects of the existing Korean Wikipedia article
Writing:
- Quick draft feature: Provide an article and context for an article you wish to write, and the tool will quickly create a draft for it.
- Finding sources for you: You won't need to manually search the internet for sources
- However, it is up to the user to decide whether to use sources found or not.
- After clicking on the source, users begin manually verifying whether it should be used. Buttons are displayed to confirm or reject sources.
- Restrictions
- Registered users: This tool is only available to registered users on the Korean Wikipedia
- Translation restrictions: Only articles from the English Wikipedia are available for translation.
- Request limit
- Only one request to the tool can be made at a time.
- Due to AI cost issues, if there are requests from multiple users, requests are queued and processed.
- Development
- Designed and conceptualized over 1 month. Developed over 1 month.
- Completed development on April 25, 2025. Now in maintenance period.
- Inquiries
If you have any concerns (bug reports, questions), please post here.
Q&A page
[edit]- LLM being used is gemini-2.5-flash. Wikidata information is being used to set article title of newly translated articles.
News column announcement for WikiVault
[edit]ko:위키백과:KIWI/2025년 12호/위키칼럼 (a column in their newsletter WikiColumn, called "KIWI". appears to have been authored by meta:User:Youngjin (WMKR)). The following is grapesurgeon's abridged notes of the essay.
- Essay states two major justifications for this tool:
- State-of-the-art machine translation is still relatively poor for the Korean language, especially due to Korean speech levels and Korean honorifics. Such Korean grammar quirks need to be made consistent and encyclopedic, but machine translation is all over the place with it.
- Writing for Wikipedia in general is difficult, in part due to WP's reliable sourcing requirements
- Essay claims the tool helps address the above two points:
- translation model is more suited to producing output in Korean Wikipedia style
- helps with researching sources and filtering out only the reliable ones
General overview
[edit]Essay then gives a visual walkthrough of tool (abridged version below).
Tool can be enabled in preferences page (explained above).
Above is the UI when you open the tool. On the top, the left tab says "translate" and the right says "write". Below is a searchbar with the header "search for things to translate (on the English Wikipedia)". Below that are suggested topics to translate; red is high importance, green middle, and blue low. Below that is "useful links" with links to various related Wikipedia pages that list "needs translation" or "needs creation" articles. On the bottom is a message that says "Translated text must be verified by the user".
Above is settings page for the AI model. The temperature parameter (commonly used in deep learning) can be raised to make the AI make more novel/creative translations. The thinking parameter is this.
Machine translation section of tool
[edit]This is how the machine translation section of the tool works. (note: here's a separate video demo that covers similar content to below)
This is the overall workflow of WikiVault for machine translation:
- Where possible, converts templates and links in enwiki to suitable equivalents on the kowiki.
- Where possible, converts style things (like italics) to suit kowiki standards.
- Machine learning model performs real-time translation.
- Performs some post-processing cleanup of things like links
[[apple|apple]]->[[apple]].
(left pic) Upon entering translation mode, users are first shown the above menu. Here, they're able to edit the enwiki article source text and specify which portions of it you wish to translate. (right pic) In the "translation options" tab, users can set the Korean article title or directly give the AI instructions or requests for the translation. Also, users can press a checkbox for "quick translation"; this skips processing of links and attempts to give a speedy translation (translator note: apparently within 3 seconds regardless of input length, according to here).
When the above prep work is done, the top right button "translate" can be pressed to begin real-time translation.
(left pic) translation in progress. (right pic) results of translation.
Once complete, users can send the translation to user space, draft space, article space, etc. Also on the bottom is "interwiki" settings (translator note: I think this is like for wikidata linking of cross-language articles).
Writing section of tool
[edit]This section of the tool performs Google searches for sources and generates writing based on sources you approve as sufficiently reliable.
(left) here is an example, where a user wants to write an article about Microsoft's Prism emulation software. They provide the title "Prism", but as this is too vague for the AI to go off alone, they also provide a short explanation of the concept: "Prism is an emulator developed by Microsoft to run x86 code on ARM CPUs". (right) outputted text with properly formatted citations. Users can scroll through the sources used in the bottom left menu and approve or reject the sources with the + and - buttons. After this is done, users can publish the document.
Closing statement
[edit]Author says intention of the tool is to assist and not replace editors, as human intervention and review is strictly necessary. Says it's intended to especially help with the initial stages of writing articles. They believe that such tools will help and not harm Wikipedia, by lowering barriers to entry for contributors and making the process less tedious and more enjoyable. They welcome feedback.
Offline meeting
[edit]ko:Event:2025년 6월 21일 오프라인 모임 this page describes an offline meeting held to introduce WikiVault to users. Took place in Seoul on June 21, 2025
Discussion posts
[edit]ko:위키백과:사랑방/2025년 제18주#위키볼트 (May 2, 2025) In this post on kowiki's equivalent of enwiki's Wikipedia:Teahouse, admins introduce the tool. Almost all people in the thread are kowiki admins, with one or two exceptions. Mostly just thanking for developing the tool, few feature and bug reports.
ko:위키백과:사랑방#위키볼트 소도구화 (June 7, 2025) Also on the teahouse-equivalent. Update on progress. Bunch of aesthetic and quality of life changes. Replies basically just thanking main poster.