Wikipedia Is Filling Up So Much With AI-Generated Content That It Has a Group Dedicated to Finding It
The WikiProject AI Cleanup group is a team of volunteers who search Wikipedia for AI-generated content to edit or remove it.
It’s not an easy job.
Content generated by AI has reached every corner. It’s appeared on Amazon, where books written by ChatGPT are now available. It's also reached media outlets, scientific articles, videos, music, images, and photographs—essentially, everything. Given that landscape, it’s no surprise that generative AI is also present on Wikipedia.
What is Wikipedia
From Wikipedia)
Wikipedia is a free content online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the wiki software MediaWiki. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read reference work in history, and is consistently ranked among the ten most visited websites; as of August 2024, it was ranked fourth by Semrush, and seventh by Similarweb. Founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on January 15, 2001, Wikipedia has been hosted since 2003 by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American nonprofit organization funded mainly by donations from readers.
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That’s a problem. As such, the platform is addressing it with a group of collaborators dedicated to finding and removing this content. They call themselves the WikiProject AI Cleanup group.
How Wikipedia works. Understanding that Wikipedia is open for anyone to write and edit articles is essential. This openness has a positive side. If you have information about a topic or are an expert in a field, you can enhance the encyclopedia by adding new information, refining existing content, or correcting errors.
However, the downside is that anyone can edit Wikipedia and create false information. Introducing tools like ChatGPT complicates this issue further.
AI floods everything. According to 404 Media, Ilyas Lebleu, founder of the WikiProject AI Cleanup initiative, explains that the project began when they noticed “the prevalence of unnatural writing that showed clear signs of being AI-generated.” Using ChatGPT, the team replicated similar styles, making it an obvious step.
404 Media cites a notable example: the Ottoman fort of Amberlisihar, allegedly built in 1466. Its Wikipedia page, a 2,000-word article, detailed its history, construction, materials—everything you would expect. The issue is that this fort doesn’t exist. It’s a product of an AI hallucination. The article appeared in January 2023, but Wikipedia only discovered it in December.
The same goes for photographs. An article on the Islamic seminary Darul Uloom Deoband included the image below, which at first glance may seem authentic. However, a closer look at the hands and feet—pay attention to detail below—reveals it is AI-generated. The WikiProject AI Cleanup team removed the image because it “contributes little to the article, could be mistaken for a contemporary artwork, and is anatomically incorrect.” The team doesn’t remove all AI-generated images, only those deemed inappropriate.
Initially only available in English, editions of Wikipedia in more than 300 other languages have been developed. The English Wikipedia, with its almost 6.9 million articles, is the largest of the editions, which together comprise more than 63 million articles and attract more than 1.5 billion unique device visits and 13 million edits per month (about 5 edits per second on average) as of April 2024. In July 2024, over 25% of Wikipedia's traffic was from the United States, followed by Japan at 6.2%, the United Kingdom at 5.8%, Russia at 5.2%, Germany at 5%, and the remaining 51% split among other countries.
Wikipedia has been praised for its enablement of the democratization of knowledge, extent of coverage, unique structure, and culture. It has been criticized for exhibiting systemic bias, particularly gender bias against women and geographical bias against the Global South (Eurocentrism). While the reliability of Wikipedia was frequently criticized in the 2000s, it has improved over time, receiving greater praise from the late 2010s onward while becoming an important fact-checking site. Wikipedia has been censored by some national governments, ranging from specific pages to the entire site. Articles on breaking news are often accessed as sources for frequently updated information about those events.