How Wikipedia’s Editors Keep the Online Encyclopedia Human-Written

Ellia Lebleu is a founding member of the WikiProject AI Cleanup, a volunteer effort launched in 2023 to find and remove AI-generated material from Wikipedia that breaks the website’s guidelines. When the cleanup began, AI writing was often betrayed by conspicuous clichés. Today, the project’s volunteers are developing tools to detect subtler forms of machine-generated content and debating AI’s role in the world’s most widely used encyclopedia. When did you realize Wikipedia had a problem with AI-generated material?Ellia Lebleu: It was around December 2023. A few other editors and I were chatting on Wikipedia’s Discord server, and we had all seen very strange articles with the same odd characteristics. They repeated phrases like “stands as a testament” or “rich cultural heritage.” They sometimes had conclusion sections, or sections called “Why is this important?” That was very typical of ChatGPT in 2023 and early 2024 but very odd for Wikipedia articles—and ver