News by Jeroen De Dauw. Updated on March 9, 2026

AI Assistant: An AI Chatbot for MediaWiki

Your wiki users can now ask questions in natural language and get answers grounded in your wiki content. We are happy to announce our new MediaWiki AI Assistant.

What Is AI Assistant?

AI Assistant adds a chatbot widget to every page of your wiki. Your users type a question in plain language and get an answer drawn from your wiki's content.

Source citations tell you what pages the answers are based on and inline links allow for easy navigation.

AI Assistant answering a question about onboarding with three source citations

Multi-turn conversation about remote work policy in the AI Assistant

Instead of browsing categories or guessing the right search terms, your users just ask. The AI retrieves relevant pages and synthesizes them into a single answer.

Capabilities

The chatbot is permission-aware: answers only draw from content the current user is allowed to see. If your wiki has restricted namespaces or role-based access, the AI respects those boundaries.

Users can save and resume conversations. The conversation history persists across page navigations and browser sessions, so you can pick up where you left off.

AI Assistant is multilingual. Your users can ask questions in their language of choice and get relevant answers, even if your wiki content is in other languages. The UI itself is also available in multiple languages.

You can choose between Anthropic Claude and OpenAI ChatGPT as the underlying AI provider. Other providers, including locally running models, are available on request.

Configuring AI Assistant

You can configure your AI Assistant through the Admin Panel.

The dedicated AI Assistant tab lets you set the AI provider, toggle features like source citations and conversation history, and customize the widget's appearance including its title, placeholder text, and icon.

We will likely add further customization options such as system prompt, namespace controls, and user-group-based access controls in the near future.

AI Assistant configuration tab in the ProWiki Admin Panel showing feature toggles and appearance settings

Using AI Assistant

AI Assistant settings panel showing source and history toggles and keyboard shortcuts

The chatbot widget appears on every page of your wiki. You can navigate between pages while waiting for a response without losing it. The answer will be there when you come back.

Each user can personalize their experience via the settings panel: toggle source citations on or off, and enable or disable conversation history.

Conversation history is accessible via the history panel. Resume, view, or delete your previous conversations.

Keyboard shortcuts

Press / from any page to open the panel, Escape to close it, and use Alt combinations for quick actions like starting a new chat, browsing history, or toggling the enlarged view.

Get Started

AI Assistant is available via ProWiki and our other MediaWiki hosting options. Once we've made it available for your wiki, simply enable it via the Admin Panel and enjoy the highly-integrated AI chatbot experience. Contact us for a demo or a quote.