Wikipedia's Cleanup of AI-Generated Content

clarionbell

There will be a point in the future, possibly near future, when AI will be capable of reliably producing encyclopedic content, and we'll have tools to verify that the content produced passes reasonable standards. Today is not the day. Especially not regarding the verification.

HelloUsername

Related: " Low-background Steel: content without AI contamination (jgc.org)" 10.jun.2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44239481 269 comments " Wikipedia: Database Download (wikipedia.org)" 27.apr.2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43811732 99 comments " Low Background Steel (lowbackgroundsteel.ai)" 27.apr.2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43814531 2 comments

grd_dev

Almost all of these websites or platforms are doing these massive cleanup to remove ai content from them. Well appreciated.

davedx

Ironically enough I just started an "Encylopedia of AI" project, and I've decided to generate all of the content with DeepSeek, with me being an editor/reviewer. I'm not really doing it for anyone except myself but I'm quite enjoying it so far. https://enkuklios.com/

berkes

If we leave out environmental (energy, datacenters, coolant) and political arguments (copyright stealing, private data harvesting etc.) even if we agree that those are "bad". What then, is the problem of AI-Generated Content in Wikipedia? > Fake or misleading citations have become a major worry. Why is this not a standalone problem? Humans can fake and mislead in citations too, in fact, this is a major problem and has been so, for literally centuries in science. > Being a place that was, in theory, free from AI slop has become part of Wikipedia’s identity. Isn't this a separate issue in itself too? One of "quality". If AI generates poor quality content, than I would think the poor quality is the problem, not the producer of it. The article mentions several times how hard it is to detect AI content. If it is that hard, then obviously AI is doing a good job and producing content that matches that of humans. Why then insist on one type of producer?

gwbas1c

About a decade ago, I read the history of AIDS on Wikipedia. It was a very informative (and satisfying) 20 minute read. Now it's pages and pages and pages of text: probably factual, but not a satisfying read. It feels like it's for a different audience, and it's not satisfying to read. Is it AI generated? I don't know for sure, but it feels like either someone (or something)'s missing the point of who Wikipedia's audience is; or that someone is following an agenda, (or that there's an edit war going on between dueling agendas and the facts are added to drown out the "AIDS is a consequence of bad morals" agenda.)

dunham

> It was around December 2023. A few other editors and I were chatting on Wikipedia’s Discord server, and we had all seen very strange articles with the same odd characteristics. I was afraid of that. I grabbed a 2024-04-20 copy as a backup, in case it turned to slop, but I suspected it might be tainted already.

talon8635

Good luck with that. I can’t see how it’s even possible, today, let alone in the future.

Ericson2314

I wonder if the AI companies would even pay for this, because it increases the quality of the training data.

liveoneggs

I attempted to fix some AI-generated content that I found on wikipedia recently - it had broken formatting, confusing + made-up text, and links on the wrong keywords; just generally very low quality edits. I made my edits and they were immediately reverted by wikipedia's own AI bot. I gave up.

manlymuppet

I mean this is good, because AI generated content is explicitly against the guidelines, however I can't help but think there is some utility to be had with AI and online encyclopedias, and we might be missing out on that. Of course I'd love for this experiment to be done outside of the main site, and only integrated when it's mature, stable, and proven to be actually useful, but other than that implementation concern, I feel this is something that needs to be explored.

simianwords

Wikipedia can gain a lot by doing a cleanup using AI instead. There’s a lot of incorrect information in Wikipedia that you can easily detect using AI with a prompt like “find something wrong in a few randomly selected Wikipedia articles”. Usually it does find something. If it’s that easy for me to correct it, it should be automated.

CPUHall

Its much appreciated. Reminded me of runescape (a game) wiki devs blogpost, its an interesting read: https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/User:Cook_Me_Plox/OSRS_Wi...

delichon

Effectively this is a project to help evolve AI to pass the Turing test for Wikipedia contributors.

rvba

have they cleaned up the scottish wikipedia which is generated gibberish? (english translated to pseudo scottish by a teenager) https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-...

cdrnsf

All of these companies helped themselves to resources like Wikipedia and then turn around and allow their tools to dump slop everywhere. It's appalling.

BatmansMom

Wow what a nuanced take from Wikipedia. Despite taking such strong efforts to protect human input, still admitting it has a place on the platform: > Yesterday, AI was something to clean up. Today, it’s a tool to help us with the cleanup. Tomorrow, it will be the air we breathe.

aizk

I can talk about this personally. A year ago somebody make a page for wikitok, my 15 minutes of fame website. About a year after that, the user was banned for mass creating articles, allegedly. The article was then nominated to be deleted, because of the nature of the creator being banned for AI generated slop. A little while later, the article was deleted just because nobody bothered to vouch for it, funny times. When you think of something in wikipedia, you may associate it with longevity, archival... Not the case, just like the web, links rot, things change, people play games / politics. It's all the same!

rythmshifter

What about cleaning up biased human editors

peter_d_sherman

>Wikipedia's Cleanup of AI-Generated Content What I think is interesting is that in this day and age of AI with free Open Source web server software, unbelievably cheap data storage, and very inexpensive Internet hosting prices, basically anyone can run their own version of Wikipedia So, do specific Wikipedia articles lean too far to the left or too far to the right for your tastes? Do specific Wikipedia articles lean too liberal or too conservative for you? Do specific Wikipedia articles lean too pro-Democrat or pro-Republican for you? Maybe you're just a Scientist or Physicist or Electrical Engineer and you don't like the censorship of "Free Energy" articles, er, I mean "Overunity", er, I mean "Cold Fusion", er, I mean "Low Energy Neutron Reactions" (LENR), er, I mean, "Free energy can't possibly exist, and we know this to be absolutely true!"... Maybe you're a Programmer or Sysadmin, and you have your own opinions on the "systemd is not good" vs. "systemd is good" debate! Maybe you're a Mathematician and you feel that some of the Wikipedia Math articles are either too complex for anyone to understand them effectively -- or conversely, too simple, and omit important facts! Heck, maybe you think Chunky is a Soup, but then again, maybe you think it "eats like a meal!" and the associated Wikipedia page doesn't accurately reflect this belief! Maybe you think New Shimmer is desert topping! But then again, maybe you think it's a floor wax! But you believe that the associated Wikipedia page doesn't present these facts accurately or fairly, in a non-biased way! Well, there's a simple solution to all of these problems, all of these dilemmas, and more! Which is: Basically run your own version of Wikipedia! AI can be used en masse , to clean up the content of any Wikipedia web pages you don't like! Simply fork Wikipedia, grab copies of its data (which is or should be public domain), write a prompt to look for and change (according to your own political, relgious, moral, or just-plain-common-sense beliefs!) all of the Wikipedia web pages that you feel are not "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help [them/me/you/they] G-d!", and then host the thing yourself! It's not impossible in this AI age! Note that I am not suggesting that everyone do this; I am merely alluding to the fact that with AI, this task is now within the realm of possibility to be accomplished, whereas previously, it would have been significantly difficult... Anyway, great article! (And for the record -- Wikipedia is usually about 98%-99% correct on most hard STEM subjects, and an excellent starting point for research, so I'm not saying all of the above to knock Wikipedia in any way! We should all remember that Wikipedia was revolutionary for its time, and remains an excellent starting point for STEM research!)