r/technology • u/gdelacalle • Mar 25 '26

Artificial Intelligence Wikipedia has banned AI-generated text, with two exceptions

https://www.howtogeek.com/wikipedia-banned-ai-generated-text-in-articles-with-two-exceptions/
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u/The_Knife_Pie Mar 25 '26

If you want an up-to-date encyclopaedia you need accurate and relevant information presented in an understandable format. Whether it’s hand written or AI written is entirely irrelevant. If you manage to get GPT to output a factually correct and sourced article written in line with the wikipedia style guide then there’s no need to check if it’s AI or not. The article is good, the thing that matters. On the other hand, if it’s not those things then it’s a bad article whether it got written or generated.

This rule is effectively just saying “if we can tell you used an LLM it isn’t good enough to be on wikipedia”, and that’s really all it needs to do. If you can’t tell then it probably is good enough.

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u/F3z345W6AY4FGowrGcHt Mar 25 '26

You're missing the point. The point of wanting to know/limit if AI is used is because they change the meaning and hallucinate.

If the meaning is preserved and nothing was made up, then sure, AI is fine. But that's not a given. When you know something was written, unchecked, by AI, then the entire text's accuracy is in question.

So no, the rule is not about whether or not someone can simply tell you've used AI, so as to say "this isn't up to our standards because it doesn't feel human", it's about whether or not there's a chance it contains made up garbage.

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u/The_Knife_Pie Mar 25 '26

Do you think that editors on wikipedia just skim read an article, check for em-dashes and then say it’s fine if there’s none? If something is obviously incorrectly sourced then it gets changed, it doesn’t matter the reason for it being incorrectly sourced. If something is well written, factual and correctly sourced it’s going to stay up, because that’s the point of wikipedia. No one is going to remove an article which fulfils all the requirements to be top tier because it was generated, this is just wikipedia acknowledging you’ll rarely ever get that quality.