Generative AI and Wikipedia editing: What we learned in 2025

> That means the article contained a plausible-sounding sentence, cited to a real, relevant-sounding source. But when you read the source it’s cited to, the information on Wikipedia does not exist in that specific source. When a claim fails verification, it’s impossible to tell whether the information is true or not.

This has been a rampant problem on Wikipedia always. I can't seem to find any indicator that this has increased recently? Because they're only even investigating articles flagged as potentially AI. So what's the control baseline rate here?

Applying correct citations is actually really hard work, even when you know the material thoroughly. I just assume people write stuff they know from their field, then mostly look to add the minimum number of plausible citations after the fact, and then most people never check them, and everyone seems to just accept it's better than nothing. But I also suppose it depends on how niche the page is, and which field it's in.

I trust Grokipedia way more, even though it's AI-generated. Wikipedia on any current topic is dominated by various edit gangs trying to push an agenda

The title I've chosen here is carefully selected to highlight one of the main points. It comes (lightly edited for length) from this paragraph:

Far more insidious, however, was something else we discovered:

More than two-thirds of these articles failed verification.

That means the article contained a plausible-sounding sentence, cited to a real, relevant-sounding source. But when you read the source it’s cited to, the information on Wikipedia does not exist in that specific source. When a claim fails verification, it’s impossible to tell whether the information is true or not. For most of the articles Pangram flagged as written by GenAI, nearly every cited sentence in the article failed verification.

So, a small proportion of articles were detected as bot-written, and a large proportion of those failed validation.

What if in fact a large proportion of articles were bot-written, but only the unverifiable ones were bad enough to be detected?

Note that this article is only about edits made through the Wiki Edu program, which partners with universities and academics to have students edit Wikipedia on course-related topics. It's not about Wikipedia writ large!

I feel like this is such a tragedy of the commons for the LLM providers. Wikipedia probably makes up a huge bulk of their dataset, why taint it? Would be interesting if there was some kind of "you shall not use our platform on Wikipedia" stance adopted.

> That means the article contained a plausible-sounding sentence, cited to a real, relevant-sounding source. But when you read the source it’s cited to, the information on Wikipedia does not exist in that specific source.

This happens a lot on Wikipedia. I'm not sure why, but it does and you can see its traces through the Internet as people post the mistaken information around.

One that took me a little work to fix was pointed out by someone on Twitter: https://x.com/Almost_Sure/status/1901112689138536903

When I found the source, the twitter poster was correct! Someone had decided to translate "A hundred years ago, people would have considered this an outrage. But now..." as "this function is an outrage" which honestly is ironically an outrageous translation. What the hell dude.

But it takes a lot of work to clean up stuff like that! https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Weierstrass_funct...

I had to go find the actual source (not the other 'sources' that repeated off Wikipedia or each other) and then make sure it was correct before dealing with it. A lie can travel halfway around the world...

I find it very interesting that the main competitor to Wikipedia which is Grokipedia is taking a 180 degree approach being AI first.

There seems much defensiveness in the comments here along the lines of "not a new thing" and "not unique to LLM/AI".

It seems to deflect, even gaslight TFA.

> For most of the articles Pangram flagged as written by GenAI, nearly every cited sentence in the article failed verification.

So why deflect that into convenient other pedantry (surely not under the guise tech forums often do so)?

WSo why the discomfort for part of HN at an assertion AI is being used for nefarious purposes and creation of alternate 'truths'?

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