Banned the people who openly admit it, anyway.
this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2026
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Good news. Hopefully they’ll get rid of those two exceptions in the future.
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 .
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
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.
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.
Fucking hate those anti human filth pushing slop into everything. I want to take one apart with power tools.
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.
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.
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
Sell licenses of what? It's already all in the creative commons iirc.
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.
;-)
So, it should be used reasonably, as it should have always been.
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."
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. 🙄
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.