Technology

To save you another few clicks: this is the discussion (RfC) that implemented the changes, and the policy is linked at the top.

AIbros: we're creating God!!!

AI users: it can do translation & reformating pretty well but you got to check it's not chatting shit

Seems pretty reasonable to use it as a grammar checker. As long as it's not changing content, just form or readability, that seems like a pretty decent use for it, at least with a purely educational resource like Wikipedia.

Liar. I already read the article before opening the comments. YOU SAVED ME NOTHING.

;-)

So, it should be used reasonably, as it should have always been.

Wikipedia probably wants to sell access to LLMs to train. It’s only valuable if Wikipedia remains a high-quality, slop-free source.

I think even AI zealots think there should be silos of content to train from that are fully human generated. Training slop on slop makes the slop even worse.

It has to be said, they originally changed their stance due to the considerable editor pushback when they tried to introduce LLM summaries on the top of articles. So kudos to the editor community's resistance! ✊

there are ai detectors, although Im not sure about accuracy of those

How do you win an award from editing Wikipedia?

You could make that argument about any tool Wikipedia editors use. Why should they need spellcheck? They were typing words just fine before.

...except it just makes it easier to spot errors or get little suggestions on how you could reword something, and thus makes the whole process a little smoother.

It's not strictly necessary, but this could definitely be helpful to people for translation and proofreading. Doesn't have to be something people are wholly reliant on to still be beneficial to their ability to edit Wikipedia.

Why should we use (insert tool) when we did just fine before?

Because when used correctly it can be great for helping you be more productive, and find errors/make improvements. The two exceptions are for grammar which AI does a surprisingly good job with. Would you have gotten mad if they used Grammarly >5 years ago? Having it rewrite an entire article is gonna be a bad idea, but asking it to rephrase a sentence, or check your phrasing for potential issues is a much safer thing. Not everyone who speaks Spanish uses it the same way. Some words are innocuous in some regions, but offensive in others.

That exception probably would be twisted into permission to add an “AI summary” section to each article.