Wikipedians Bet AI Was a Fad—They Were Wrong, WIRED Reports
nordicinst · x · 2026-10-13
A WIRED feature revisits how the Wikipedia community misjudged AI: editors once assumed LLMs would pass like previous fads, or even help by automating formatting, citations and housekeeping so humans could focus on creative work. Reality proved different.
- Google was already training AI to write "Wikipedia-like articles" in 2018; a Princeton study (Oct 2024) found 5% of nearly 3,000 newly created English Wikipedia articles from August 2024 contained substantial AI-generated content.
- Telltale signs included ChatGPT's fondness for em dashes and curly quotes, and even leftover prompt residue like "Here is your Wikipedia article."
- Former Wikimedia Foundation head Katherine Maher warned in a 2019 NYT op-ed that "without humans, A.I. can wreak havoc," arguing AI is too often framed as a scalable replacement for people.
- With AI Overviews cutting into traffic, the article argues the real loss is more existential than pageviews: human-in-the-loop knowledge production itself is being eroded.
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