Submission declined on 15 August 2025 by Jlwoodwa (talk). This draft reads like an essay or opinion piece. Wikipedia is not a place for original research or personal opinions. The draft should: summarize secondary sources: do not offer your own analysis or arguments; be written from a neutral point of view: represent the subject without bias, avoiding praise, criticism, or persuasive or promotional language; not contain original research: do not include new theories, unpublished ideas, or personal experiences. Instead, only summarize in your own words a range of independent, reliable, published sources that discuss the subject. This draft does not have sufficient content to warrant a standalone article of its own, but it could be merged into the existing article at Artificial intelligence in Wikimedia projects. Edit the existing article to include your text and citations into an appropriate section. If the article is protected and you cannot edit it, propose your changes on the article's Talk page. If you would like to continue working on the submission, click on the "Edit" tab at the top of the window. If you have not resolved the issues listed above, your draft will be declined again and potentially deleted. If you need extra help, please ask us a question at the AfC Help Desk or get live help from experienced editors. Please do not remove reviewer comments or this notice until the submission is accepted. Where to get help If you need help editing or submitting your draft, please ask us a question at the AfC Help Desk or get live help from experienced editors. These venues are only for help with editing and the submission process, not to get reviews. If you need feedback on your draft, or if the review is taking a lot of time, you can try asking for help on the talk page of a relevant WikiProject. Some WikiProjects are more active than others so a speedy reply is not guaranteed. How to improve a draft Wikipedia:Contributing to Wikipedia – a basic overview on how to edit Wikipedia. Help:Wikitext – how to use the markup Help:Referencing for beginners – how to include references Wikipedia:Article development – how to develop your article Wikipedia:Writing better articles – how to improve your article Wikipedia:Verifiability – make sure your article includes reliable third-party sources You can also browse Wikipedia:Featured articles and Wikipedia:Good articles to find examples of Wikipedia's best writing on topics similar to your proposed article. Improving your odds of a speedy review To improve your odds of a faster review, tag your draft with relevant WikiProject tags using the button below. This will let reviewers know a new draft has been submitted in their area of interest. For instance, if you wrote about a female astronomer, you would want to add the Biography, Astronomy, and Women scientists tags. Add tags to your draft Editor resources Easy tools: Citation bot (help) | Advanced: Fix bare URLs Declined by Jlwoodwa 9 months ago. Last edited by Citation bot 4 months ago. Reviewer: Inform author. Resubmit Please note that if the issues are not fixed, the draft will be declined again.

• Comment: Please only merge some of this draft, leaving out the persuasive essay portions. jlwoodwa (talk) 23:06, 15 August 2025 (UTC)

AI's unchecked use in Wikipedia presents profound risks. These include the spread of misinformation via fabricated citations, eroded content quality, diminished volunteer engagement, diminished credibility, editorial overload, amplified biases, and strained infrastructure. To preserve Wikipedia's core values of trust, accuracy, and collective human wisdom, human oversight must remain central, rigorous policies must be enforced, and community participation must be protected.

One of the most critical issues is AI's tendency to hallucinate facts or invent citations altogether. A study highlighted that nearly half of citations generated by AI models like GPT-3 were either fabricated or pulled from real sources but misrepresented them—only around 7% were accurate. Furthermore, AI-generated Wikipedia entries have previously included entirely fictional articles that looked plausible, revealing how convincingly fabricated content can slip through editorial gaps.^[1]

A growing concern is the influx of “AI slop”—high-volume, low-effort content that lacks depth or context. This filler content prioritizes quantity and speed over substance and often undermines Wikipedia’s reputation as a trusted knowledge base. Additionally, AI-generated articles tend to be superficial, lacking nuanced understanding, critical analysis, or integration into Wikipedia’s broader knowledge network.^[2][3]

Wikipedia thrives on human volunteerism and editorial oversight. Yet, as AI assumes more of the writing tasks, volunteers may feel their role diminished or made redundant. This dehumanization risks reducing participation, which is essential for quality control, debate, and editorial vigilance. ^{[2] [4]} In turn, fewer contributors and lower quality control threaten the encyclopedia's long-term vitality.

AI-based summaries and article creation have already drawn backlash. In June 2025, the Wikimedia Foundation paused its trial of AI-generated summaries after volunteer editors warned it could cause “immediate and irreversible harm” to Wikipedia’s credibility.^[5] Similarly, when tech outlet CNET published AI-written articles riddled with inaccuracies, Wikipedia editors downgraded its reliability rating, demonstrating concern for source quality even among external references.^[6]

Rather than easing the burden, AI-generated content has added labor for human editors tasked with filtering misinformation. The WikiProject AI Cleanup was initiated to help volunteers detect and remove poor-quality AI contributions—often improperly sourced or deceptively convincing in their presentation.^{[7] [8]}

There’s a concerning feedback loop: AI reads from Wikipedia and then contributes AI-generated content back to Wikipedia, forming a cycle prone to perpetuating errors and biases ^{[3] [9]}. Study findings suggest that increased bot activity has already contributed to a decline in human readership and raw engagement with Wikipedia, potentially paving a path toward disintermediation—where AI systems bypass Wikipedia and reduce its role in knowledge discovery. ^[4]

AI models inherit biases present in their training data. Left unmanaged, these can surface in AI-generated articles—skewing perspective or privileging certain narratives over others.^{[10] [2]}. For languages or cultures with sparse digital representation, problems are especially acute: in the Scots Wikipedia, a decade of edits by a misguided contributor created broadly inaccurate pages that reinforced flawed language representations—now affecting AI tools trained on that data. ^[9]

AI’s appetite for training data means much of Wikipedia's content is consumed rapidly. This comes at a cost: bots accounted for 35% of page views yet generated 65% of the most bandwidth-intensive requests, driving up infrastructure costs and risking sustainability.