Wikipedia's Cleanup of AI-Generated Content

This feels like a microcosm of software development as a whole.

There's more software than ever, yet there are fewer people engaging with said software than ever, and the good software gets buried under a giant pile of crap.

And so the goalposts move, oh now we've always cared about user resources, AI is using too much, but in 3 months when it's better than all human programs at resource management what will they move onto? Did we forget that unused resources are wasted resources? Or can that only justify poorly human-written programs.

https://wikiedu.org/blog/2026/01/29/generative-ai-and-wikipe...

https://wikiedu.org/blog/2026/07/14/generative-ai-and-wikipe...

It feels like the distribution of sources/links it outputs is 33% Reddit, 33% Random blog, 33% Not Found.

Most of its non-neutral articles are biased and don't say they are biased. The only articles that are decent are math or astrophysics, anything related to news or current events always leans one way.

- ADL report finds 91% of banned editor’s Israel-related edits still live on key pages. https://www.timesofisrael.com/biased-wikipedia-edits-on-isra...

- Forensic details of Oct. 7 atrocities (sexual violence, burned victims) removed and never restored on Gaza war page. https://www.adl.org/resources/press-release/adl-wikipedias-d...

- Editor JDiala admits 10-15% of active accounts since Oct. 7 were sockpuppets or Discord-coordinated for pro-Palestine bias. https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-911291

- Hamas page restructured days after Oct. 7 to move antisemitism and abuses material to low-traffic “Criticism” article. https://www.foxnews.com/media/first-fox-wikipedias-editorial...

- New cohort of 19 editors uses subtle methods (undoing, hedging, slow rewrites) and controls latest versions on ~60% of examined pages. https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-911852

Still, 2023-10 is probably the last pure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel

And while I agree it's too long, do note that about 50% is the References section.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_HIV/AIDS

On reflex, I searched for "reagan". 0 results as of the morning of October 27, 2026.

I was there in the 1980s when the AIDS outbreak started getting mainstream news coverage. I watched the Ryan White movie on TV, when it was the biggest topic at school for months afterwards:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_White

I can tell you what really happened. HIV/AIDS scared the bejesus out of the political establishment of the time. Who then stoked that fear to push their socially conservative agenda onto everyone in an attempt to return the US to what they viewed as a morally just culture (basically the 1950s), much like MAGA today.

And just like when Donald Trump refused to wear a mask to set an example in protecting the elderly and other vulnerable groups from infection by COVID-19, Ronald Reagan refused to devote real resources to slowing the spread of of AIDS and finding a cure. Because AIDS furthered the GOP's efforts to expand the War on Drugs, push abstinence-only sex education, demonize same-sex relationships and criticize secular culture in general.

In a very real sense, Ronald Reagan and his administration let AIDS grow from being a manageable disease to becoming an epidemic that killed millions of people. His misplaced priorities set back research and treatment options by decades.

Omitting Reagan's name from the history of AIDS is like casually leaving Benedict Arnold out of the history of the American Revolutionary War.

The domino effect of his abdication of duty has touched everything from US police interventions in developing nations that it's exploited to its $40 trillion national debt. It's literally fogged the lens through which we see the world.

Its easy to forget all of that now that once-daily HIV treatment pills and bi-monthly preventative injections exist, and we're finally seeing cures on the horizon.

Revisionist history now dominates our political discourse. I write this because the "AIDS is a consequence of bad morals" agenda is not something to be lightly swept under the rug. It's literally a pillar upon which the alternate timeline we're on now stands.

Of course AI can be used to check sources, get critical feedback and translate to languages. But content should be 100% human driven.

Not to mention this exact question is being discussed in the article.

There are over 7m articles in English Wikipedia.

AI doesn't even have a motive, it's just dumb - so you can't even track the mistakes to specific motivated users or networks of users. There's no way to clean it up.

Although I have to agree with you (probably, because I'm going to put words in your mouth) that this is a basic problem with wikipedia and how it is structured and governed, rather than a problem with AI. Anybody could always just put nonsense anywhere at any time; AI is just a chaos monkey. Wikipedia can't rely on groupthink to maintain itself, it has not worked and will not work, chaos monkeys are needed.

It's a pretty short article compared to what usually gets posted here.

So the answer to "Why do we assume AI-generated means slop?" is probably "experience", and any proposition starting with "If the content is good enough" is trivially true as a conditional statement with a false antecedent (i.e., ⊨(⊥⇒Q) for all Q).

Yes, but who will review the mountains of slop to determine whether it is of acceptable quality? The main problem AI introduces is high volume at low quality, often overwhelming the human resource bottlenecks these systems have in place.

As a result, I don't think LLMs will reach this state easily.

Even subtle bias can manifest in significant ways. Given that the predominant market leaders in producing such models are currently : A country that's attempting to squeeze the word "america" in any geographic formation possible + rewriting history to put itself first, and a country that has perfected censorship en-mass and already actively doctors its own history.

I'm not convinced giving LLMs carte blanche to write authoritative sources on topics that - often are ideologically sensitive/controversial isn't just needlessly reckless and short-sighted. It's not a far reach to imagine such models reflecting the current views of administrations in these countries and becoming reluctant to mention certain colonial ambitions, environmental damage, political corruption, etc. where it might be relevant to authoritative content.

Wikipedia already struggles with issues in idealogical bias from authors - human validation (somewhat)helps mitigate that. You could argue that human validation is still prone to same bias - but you can always draw on a more diverse pool of editors with little ideological overlap. With LLM validation you're pretty much at the mercy of a pretty incestuous pool of data & a handful of self-serving corporates & governments.