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Generative AI and Wikipedia editing: What we learned in 2025

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Re: Generative AI and Wikipedia editing: What we learned in 2025

#21

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.

Wikipedia having incorrect citations is way older than LLMs. As many other people have pointed out in this thread, if you start pulling strings a lot of what people write starts falling apart.

Its not even unique to Wikipedia. Its really not difficult to find very misleading statements cited through a citation that doesn't even support the claim when you check the original.

Re: Generative AI and Wikipedia editing: What we learned in 2025

#23
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, this is a fairly common problem on Wikipedia in political articles, predating AI. I encourage you to give it a try and verify some citations. A lot of them turn out to be more or less bogus. I'm not saying that AI isn't making it worse, but bad-faith editing is commonplace when it comes to hot-button topics.

Any articles where newspapers are the main source are basically just propaganda. An encyclopaedia should not be in the business of laundering yellow journalism into what is supposed to be a tertiary resource. If they banned this practice, that would immediately deal with this issue.

That is probably 95% of wikipedia articles. Their goal is to create a record of what journalists consider to be true.

Re: Generative AI and Wikipedia editing: What we learned in 2025

#25

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.

Wikipedia having incorrect citations is way older than LLMs. As many other people have pointed out in this thread, if you start pulling strings a lot of what people write starts falling apart. Its not even unique to Wikipedia. Its really not difficult to find very misleading statements cited through a citation that doesn't even support the claim when you check the original.

This is like saying handing out machine guns is no big change because people have been shooting arrows for a long time. At some point volume becomes the story once it overwhelms the community’s ability to correct errors.

Re: Generative AI and Wikipedia editing: What we learned in 2025

#26

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

Main competitor? I’m pretty sure that Uncyclopedia is a more relevant competitor to Wikipedia than Grokipedia. Likely more accurate, too.

Re: Generative AI and Wikipedia editing: What we learned in 2025

#28
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'?

Re: Generative AI and Wikipedia editing: What we learned in 2025

#29

> 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…

The problems I've run into is both people giving fake citations (the citations don't actually justify the claim that's being made in the article), and people giving real citations, but if you dig into the source you realize it's coming from a crank.

It's a big blind spot among the editors as well. When this problem was brought up here in the past, with people saying that claims on Wikipedia shouldn't be believed unless people verify the sources themselves, several Wikipedia editors came in and said this wasn't a problem and Wikipedia was trustworthy.

It's hard to see it getting fixed when so many don't see it as an issue. And framing it as a non-issue misleads users about the accuracy of the site.

Re: Generative AI and Wikipedia editing: What we learned in 2025

#30
post #17

> 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…

When I've checked Wikipedia citations I've found so much brazen deception - citations that obviously don't support the claim - that I don't have confidence in Wikipedia. > Applying correct citations is actually really hard work, even when you know the material thoroughly. Why do you find it hard? Scholarly references can be sources for fundamental claims, review articles are a big help too. Also, I tend to add things…

It's not that I personally find it hard.

It's more like, a lot of stuff in Wikipedia articles is somewhat "general" knowledge in a given field, where it's not always exactly obvious how to cite it, because it's not something any specific person gets credit for "inventing". Like, if there's a particular theorem then sure you cite who came up with it, or the main graduate-level textbook it's taught in. But often it's just a particular technique or fact that just kind of "exists" in tons of places but there's no obvious single place to cite it from.

So it actually takes some work to find a good reference. Like you say, review articles can be a good source, survey articles or books. But it can take a surprising amount of effort to track down a place that actually says the exact thing. I literally just last week was helping a professor (leader in their field!) try to find a citation during peer review for their paper for an "obvious fact" in the field, that was in their introduction section. It was actually really challenging, like trying to produce a citation for "the sky is blue".

I remember, years ago, creating a Wikipedia article for a particular type of food in a particular country. You can buy it at literally every supermarket there. How the heck do you cite the food and facts about it? It just... is. Like... websites for manufacturers of the food aren't really citations. But nobody's describing the food in academic survey articles either. You're not going to link to Allrecipes. What do you do? It's not always obvious.

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