W Wikipedia,would be better to remove the exceptions but its fine tbh.
this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2026
326 points (99.4% liked)
Technology
82989 readers
2877 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Banned the people who openly admit it, anyway.
there are ai detectors, although Im not sure about accuracy of those
Good news. Hopefully they’ll get rid of those two exceptions in the future.
Would be pretty shitty to make sure every time you are editing Wikipedia to disable any AI based grammar/spellcheckers (e.g Grammarly), and not being allowed to use translation tools.
Because those are the two exceptions.
Why? That’s how they’ve been doing it for 25 years.
Saved you a click:
After much debate, the new policy is in effect: Wikipedia authors are not allowed to use LLMs for generating or rewriting article content. There are two primary exceptions, though.
First, editors can use LLMs to suggest refinements to their own writing, as long as the edits are checked for accuracy. In other words, it’s being treated like any other grammar checker or writing assistance tool. The policy says, “ LLMs can go beyond what you ask of them and change the meaning of the text such that it is not supported by the sources cited.”
The second exemption for LLMs is with translation assistance. Editors can use AI tools for the first pass at translating text, but they still need to be fluent enough in both languages to catch errors. As with regular writing refinements, anyone using LLMs also has to check that incorrect information hasn’t been injected.
AIbros: we're creating God!!!
AI users: it can do translation & reformating pretty well but you got to check it's not chatting shit
The takeaway from all LLM-based AI is the user needs to be smart enough to do whatever they're asking anyway. All output needs to be verified before being used or relied upon.
The "AI" is just streamlining the process to save time.
Relying on it otherwise is stupid and just proves instantly that you are incompetent.
the user needs to be smart enough to do whatever they're asking anyway
I'm gonna say that's ideal but not quite necessary. What's needed is that the user is capable of properly verifying the output. Which anyone who could do it themselves definitely can, but it can be done more broadly. It's an easier skill to verify a result than it is to obtain that result. Think: how film critics don't necessarily need to be filmmakers, or the P=NP question in computer science.
Fucking hate those anti human filth pushing slop into everything. I want to take one apart with power tools.
Damn that movie was funny. I need to rewatch it.
It holds up better than any movie from the late 90s that I can think of.
I don't think AI users would say it does reformatting either (if they're honest): If you tell a chatbot to reformat text without changing it, it will change the text, because it does not understand the concept of not changing text. It should only take one time for someone to get burned for them to learn that lesson.
Seems pretty reasonable to use it as a grammar checker. As long as it's not changing content, just form or readability, that seems like a pretty decent use for it, at least with a purely educational resource like Wikipedia.
Liar. I already read the article before opening the comments. YOU SAVED ME NOTHING.
;-)
Wikipedia probably wants to sell access to LLMs to train. It’s only valuable if Wikipedia remains a high-quality, slop-free source.
I think even AI zealots think there should be silos of content to train from that are fully human generated. Training slop on slop makes the slop even worse.
Sell licenses of what? It's already all in the creative commons iirc.
The content is CC licensed, but they are trying to block AI scraping because it overloads their servers. They have a paid API that uses a lot less compute for both Wikipedia and the AI, as well as being a revenue source for Wikipedia.
This was only done because the editors pushed to minimize AI involvement. There's a comment here already mentioning that: https://lemmy.world/comment/22826863
So, it should be used reasonably, as it should have always been.
Seems like there should be a third exception. For those occasions where the article is about LLM generated text. They should be able to quote it when it's appropriate for an article.
An extremely measured and level-headed response. Kudos to Wikipedia for maintaining high standards.
It has to be said, they originally changed their stance due to the considerable editor pushback when they tried to introduce LLM summaries on the top of articles. So kudos to the editor community's resistance! ✊
Good point. The real strength of Wikipedia truly lies in the editors .
I know at least one writing major who won an award from his volunteer work at Wikipedia. He did it as a hobby. They don't really need AI, they need people like him.
So in other words, when used responsibly as a tool with limitations, AI has it's uses? Though very environmentally unfriendly uses?
*its
I hoped the exceptions would be like "Quoted example text of LLM output, when it's clearly labeled and styled separately from the article text."
That exception probably would be twisted into permission to add an “AI summary” section to each article.
Ugh. Yeah, it would have to be worded carefully, you're right
Why do they need AI at all? Wikipedia had existed long before it and was doing fine.
You could make that argument about any tool Wikipedia editors use. Why should they need spellcheck? They were typing words just fine before.
...except it just makes it easier to spot errors or get little suggestions on how you could reword something, and thus makes the whole process a little smoother.
It's not strictly necessary, but this could definitely be helpful to people for translation and proofreading. Doesn't have to be something people are wholly reliant on to still be beneficial to their ability to edit Wikipedia.
Why should we use (insert tool) when we did just fine before?
Because when used correctly it can be great for helping you be more productive, and find errors/make improvements. The two exceptions are for grammar which AI does a surprisingly good job with. Would you have gotten mad if they used Grammarly >5 years ago? Having it rewrite an entire article is gonna be a bad idea, but asking it to rephrase a sentence, or check your phrasing for potential issues is a much safer thing. Not everyone who speaks Spanish uses it the same way. Some words are innocuous in some regions, but offensive in others.
Why fire, berries fine
Try using fire in a library.
wikipedia isn't a library.
Neither is AI fire. 🙄
You're the one that implied it was.
Call me mad, call me crazy. AI shouldn't be altering databases of knowledge, especially when it is so inconsistent. If there is a question on whether certain words are appropriate why can't you ask another human being, they have forums for a reason, or someone else comes along and fixes it. Or look at a dictionary. The amount of energy spent for dubious information, holy. It's not like there is a shortage of human beings on earth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Writing_articles_with_large_language_models
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:LLM-assisted_translation
The two related "policies" are rather short, you should read them if you haven't.
AI shouldn’t be altering databases of knowledge, especially when it is so inconsistent
The policy only allows usage as an auto-translater (a task at which they are not worst than old-style auto-translaters that were always allowed) and as spellcheck/grammarcheck (where it is also not worst than other allowed options).
None of those tools were previously seen as altering Wikipedia by themselves. The goal is that LLMs should be used and considered like they were.
To be clear they always were articles for creation submitted from clearly google-translated text, and they always were dismissed as slop. To get an autotranslated article accepted, you need to clean it up until all the information is correct and the grammar is good enough. This is a rather standard workflow for translations. The same thing should apply to LLMs.
The new issue here is that LLMs can "organically" change informations while asked to translate. When a classic autotranslate changes the information, it often (not always) leaves a notable mess in the grammar. LLMs will insert their errors much more cleanly. This is acknowledged by both texts and, well, texts will change if that becomes a reocurring issue.
AI isn’t altering databases or knowledge. AI is telling the writer there’s a better way to do this, and the writer has to explicitly change their wording.
You only know to look at a dictionary for alternative wordings if you know there’s a problem. How do you know there’s a problem?
If you ask someone else what if that same someone else uses your regional dialect and not the one that has problems? Your average writer can review every single word used in the dictionary for every single article they edit. But AI can, and that’s something it’s actually good at. You may only know 5 Spanish speakers, but AI knows everything it was trained on.