How Wikipedia’s Editors Keep the Online Encyclopedia Human-Written
IEEE Spectrum Eliza Strickland
Wikipedia’s editors formed the WikiProject AI Cleanup to find and remove AI-generated content that violates site guidelines. In late 2025, Pangram flagged about 20 percent of new Wikipedia articles and drafts as AI-generated, dropping to 15–16 percent in early 2026. The project is now building tools like AI source verification and Paste Check detection while evaluating whether new rules banning LLM-written articles are reducing AI posts and how Wikipedia’s “human-written” identity may shift with AI assistance.
Why it matters
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 very easy to spot. Then I dec