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Wikipedia: WikiProject AI Cleanup

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Re: Wikipedia: WikiProject AI Cleanup

#71
Although Wikipedia has no firm rules (WP:PILLARS), the admins reference the policies (that aren’t rules) when reverting content and banning. So here’s what I gathered

* no new Articles from LLM content (WP:NEWLLM)

* Most images wholly generated by AI should not be used." (WP:AILLM)

* “it is within admins' and closers' discretion to discount, strike, or collapse obvious use of generative LLMs" (WP:AITALK)

There doesn’t seem to be an outright ban on LLM content as long as it’s high quality .

Just an amateur summary for those less familiar with Wikipedia policy. I encourage people to open an account, edit some pages and engage in the community. It’s the single most influential piece of media that’s syndicated into billions of views daily, often without attribution.

Re: Wikipedia: WikiProject AI Cleanup

#73

Contrarian take: Wikipedia could use more AI, as well as less. A major flaw of Wikipedia is that much of it is simply poorly written. Repetition and redundancy, ambiguity, illogical ordering of content, rambling sentences, opaque grammar. That should not be surprising. Writing clear prose is a skill that most people do not have, and Wikipedia articles are generally the fruit of collaboration without copy editors. AI…

Strongly disagree. At least on English Wikipedia, articles tend to be high quality, and it's AI - not Wikipedia - that has repetition and redundancy.

Re: Wikipedia: WikiProject AI Cleanup

#74

I found the page Wikipedia:Signs of AI Writing[1] very interesting and informative. It goes into a lot more detail than the typical "em-dashes" heuristic. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing

Turned this into a ruleset[0] for vale.sh[1]

[0]: https://ammil.industries/signs-of-ai-writing-a-vale-ruleset/ [1]: https://vale.sh/

Re: Wikipedia: WikiProject AI Cleanup

#75

I wish they also spent on the reverse: automatic rephrasing of the (many) obscure and very poorly worded and/or with no neutral tone whatsoever. And I say that as a general Wikipedia fan.

there are many copy editing projects that do this.

If you mean the left leaning tone / bias, that will be a bit more spicy. But general grammar, tone, ambiguity , superlatives – that’s the goal of copy editing.

I copy edit typesetting , for example.

Re: Wikipedia: WikiProject AI Cleanup

#76

Contrarian take: Wikipedia could use more AI, as well as less. A major flaw of Wikipedia is that much of it is simply poorly written. Repetition and redundancy, ambiguity, illogical ordering of content, rambling sentences, opaque grammar. That should not be surprising. Writing clear prose is a skill that most people do not have, and Wikipedia articles are generally the fruit of collaboration without copy editors. AI…

Strongly disagree. At least on English Wikipedia, articles tend to be high quality, and it's AI - not Wikipedia - that has repetition and redundancy.

AI isn’t one thing. The consumer AI bots (e.g. ChatGPT) are heavily dumbed down. Asking it a Wikipedia topic without prompting will of course produce low quality content.

With a good model , fine tuning & supervision AI can produce stellar content.

AI is at least a thousand tools. It’s a mistake to write it off so trivially.

Re: Wikipedia: WikiProject AI Cleanup

#77

Contrarian take: Wikipedia could use more AI, as well as less. A major flaw of Wikipedia is that much of it is simply poorly written. Repetition and redundancy, ambiguity, illogical ordering of content, rambling sentences, opaque grammar. That should not be surprising. Writing clear prose is a skill that most people do not have, and Wikipedia articles are generally the fruit of collaboration without copy editors. AI…

> AI is perfectly suited to fixing this problem. I recently spent several hours rewriting a somewhat important article. I did not add or subtract information from the article, I simply made it clearer and more concise.

I'm confused by this. Is this written by an AI?

> Repetition and redundancy, ambiguity, illogical ordering of content, rambling sentences, opaque grammar.

This pile of words is missing a verb.

"You" (whoever that is, human or not) edited a single article, and that experience convinced you that "AI is perfectly suited to fixing this problem"?

Ironically, the lack of evidence to support such a strong assertion is one of the key problems with AI writing in general.

The idea that you could edit an article extensively without adding or subtracting information is facile. I would love to see this edit.

Re: Wikipedia: WikiProject AI Cleanup

#79
post #63

I wish they also spent on the reverse: automatic rephrasing of the (many) obscure and very poorly worded and/or with no neutral tone whatsoever. And I say that as a general Wikipedia fan.

I would hate it so much if all the articles on Wikipedia were suddenly all rewritten to have a smiliar tone and style. Its beauty is its diversity.

It’s explicitly in Wikipedia’s goal to keep a neutral tone. See WP:neutral

Re: Wikipedia: WikiProject AI Cleanup

#80
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can easily do this with normal GPT 5.2 in ChatGPT, just turn on thinking (better if extended) and web search, point a Wikipedia page to the model and tell it to check the claims for errors. I've tried it before and surprisingly it finds errors very often, sometimes small, sometimes medium. The less popular the page you linked is, the more likely it'll have errors. This works because GPT 5.x actually properly use…

Have you verified those errors?

Yes, I did.
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