this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2025
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WHY poison Wikipédia with AI? I don't get it, what satisfaction does a person get from adding text they didn't write to Wikipédia? It's not like you get a gold medal, or your neighbor sees you as a hero, or you get a discount at McDonald's, there's no glamour on being an editor, so why even bother if you're not going to write quality content out of passion?
Please leave Wikipédia alone, you don't have to shove your AI bullshit everywhere, please leave somewhere in this god forsaken internet alone. Why must AI bros touch everything.
It's possibly from people trying to help, but don't understand AI hallucinations.
For example a Wikipedia article might say, "John Smith spent a year Oxford University before moving to London.[Citation Needed]" So the article already contains information, but lacks proper citation.
Someone comes along and says, "Ah ha! AI can solve this and asks AI, 'Did John Smith spend a year at Oxford before moving to London, please provide citations.' and the AI returns, "Yes of course he did according to the book 'John Smith: Biography of a Man' ISBN 123456789"
So someone adds that as a citation and now Wikipedia has been improved.
Or... has it? The ISBN 123456789 is invalid. No book could possibly have that number. If the ISBN is invalid, then the book is also likely invalid, and the citation is also invalid.
So the satisfaction was someone who couldn't previously help Wikipedia, now thinking they can help Wikipedia. At face value that's a good thing, someone who wants to help Wikipedia. The problem is that they think they're helping, but they're actually harming.
I thought wikipedia mods are overly zealous with checking submissions by new users.
Seemingly not so. Kinda worrisome
The problem is that the volume of slop available completely overwhelms all efforts at quality control. Zealotry only goes so far at turning back the tsunami of shite.
I'd assume Wikipedia implemented a whitelist rule for trusted edits and new accounts edits are hold in limbo until they are confirmes entries, no?
If Wikipedia actually allows for live edits to the page without any further checks, it seems very naive or very stupid to me.
Almost all Wikipedia pages allow not only live edits but anonymous ones as well. It worked remarkably well until the hallucination machines arrived.
People like to help, they don't know that LLMs generate bullshit. This should answer the "why".
He talks about the reasons why people are doing this at 21:30 in the video.