Wikipedia's Cleanup of AI-Generated Content

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AI-generated text is harder to spot, but that hasn’t deterred them.

人工智能生成的文本更难被发现，但这并没有阻挡他们。

Eliza Strickland is IEEE Spectrum’s features editor. She also covers AI and biomedical engineering.

Eliza Strickland 是《IEEE Spectrum》的专题编辑。她也负责报道人工智能和生物医学工程。

Ellia Lebleu is a cofounder of the WikiProject AI Cleanup effort to keep Wikipedia human-written.

Ellia Lebleu 是“维基百科人工智能清理计划”（WikiProject AI Cleanup）的联合创始人，该项目旨在保持维基百科由人类撰写。

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.

Ellia Lebleu 是“维基百科人工智能清理计划”的创始成员，这是一项于 2023 年发起的志愿者工作，旨在发现并删除维基百科上违反网站准则的人工智能生成内容。清理工作刚开始时，人工智能写作往往会因明显的陈词滥调而暴露。如今，该项目的志愿者们正在开发工具来检测更隐蔽的机器生成内容，并讨论人工智能在这一全球使用最广泛的百科全书中的角色。

When did you realize Wikipedia had a problem with AI-generated material?

你是什么时候意识到维基百科存在人工智能生成内容问题的？

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 decided, let’s create an official project on Wikipedia so more people can deal with this.

Ellia Lebleu：大约是在 2023 年 12 月。当时我和其他几位编辑在维基百科的 Discord 服务器上聊天，我们都看到了一些非常奇怪的文章，它们有着相同的怪异特征。它们重复使用诸如“stands as a testament”（作为一种证明）或“rich cultural heritage”（丰富的文化遗产）之类的短语。它们有时会有结论部分，或者名为“为什么这很重要？”的部分。这在 2023 年和 2024 年初的 ChatGPT 中非常典型，但对于维基百科文章来说却非常奇怪，而且很容易被发现。于是我决定，让我们在维基百科上创建一个官方项目，这样更多人就能处理这个问题了。

Ellia Lebleu is a founding member of the WikiProject AI Cleanup. Lebleu is pursuing a Ph.D. in AI at the Inria Center of the University of Rennes, part of France’s national research institute for digital science and technology.

Ellia Lebleu 是“维基百科人工智能清理计划”的创始成员。Lebleu 目前正在雷恩大学 Inria 中心攻读人工智能博士学位，该中心隶属于法国国家数字科学与技术研究院。

How do editors spot AI-generated writing today?

编辑们今天是如何发现人工智能生成的写作的？

Lebleu: By 2025, the signs of AI writing were becoming subtler and more structural. For example, AI loves the “rule of three,” negative parallelisms, and other structures of speech that aren’t conclusive by themselves but become meaningful as they accumulate. We also look beyond the article. If someone writes five articles of thousands of words each in 5 minutes, there is reason to suspect AI.

Lebleu：到 2025 年，人工智能写作的迹象变得更加微妙和结构化。例如，人工智能喜欢“三段式规则”、否定排比以及其他本身并不具有决定性，但随着积累而变得有意义的语言结构。我们也会关注文章之外的情况。如果有人在 5 分钟内写出五篇数千字的文章，就有理由怀疑是人工智能所为。

Does the AI problem just appear in the main text, or also in citations?

人工智能问题是只出现在正文中，还是也出现在引文中？

Lebleu: Fake or misleading citations have become a major worry. Sometimes an AI hallucinates a citation entirely, although that’s much rarer today because of retrieval-augmented generation that allows the AI to find sources. More often, it finds a real source but gets its content completely wrong. AI citations that don’t actually support what is being written are extremely commonplace.

Lebleu：虚假或误导性的引文已成为一个主要担忧。有时人工智能会完全凭空捏造引文，尽管由于检索增强生成技术使人工智能能够找到来源，这种情况在今天已经少见得多。更多时候，它能找到真实的来源，但内容却完全弄错了。人工智能生成的引文无法真正支持所写内容的情况非常普遍。

English Wikipedia recently prohibited editors from using LLMs to generate articles. How much AI-generated content is still getting through?

英语维基百科最近禁止编辑使用大语言模型（LLM）生成文章。目前还有多少人工智能生成的内容漏网？

Lebleu: I’ve been working with [AI-detection company] Pangram to estimate the proportion of AI-generated content. I tested it on Wikipedia content from before ChatGPT and found no false positives, so its results provide a very conservative lower bound. In late 2025, it flagged perhaps 20 percent of new articles and drafts as AI-generated. In early 2026, that went down to 15 or 16 percent. But we don’t yet know whether that’s because our recent policies have had an effect or because models are getting more powerful and Pangram hasn’t had time to adapt.

Lebleu：我一直在与 [人工智能检测公司] Pangram 合作，以估算人工智能生成内容的比例。我在 ChatGPT 出现之前的维基百科内容上对其进行了测试，没有发现误报，因此其结果提供了一个非常保守的下限。2025 年底，它标记了大约 20% 的新文章和草稿为人工智能生成。2026 年初，这一比例下降到了 15% 或 16%。但我们尚不清楚这是因为我们最近的政策产生了效果，还是因为模型变得更强大了，而 Pangram 还没来得及适应。

Is Wikipedia using AI to combat AI?

维基百科是否正在利用人工智能来对抗人工智能？

Lebleu: Another Wikipedia editor has made an AI source verifier, which goes through the sources on a page and checks whether they match the claims. Since it is itself an AI model, there is no guarantee that it will be correct every time. But if you want something that works at scale and filters out obvious cases, it’s a good first step. The Wikimedia Foundation is also working on a tool called Paste Check, which can flag text pasted directly from some AI chatbots.

Lebleu：另一位维基百科编辑制作了一个人工智能来源验证器，它可以检查页面上的来源，并核实它们是否与文中的主张相符。由于它本身就是一个人工智能模型，不能保证每次都正确。但如果你想要一种能够大规模运作并过滤掉明显案例的工具，这是一个很好的第一步。维基媒体基金会也在开发一种名为“粘贴检查”（Paste Check）的工具，它可以标记直接从某些人工智能聊天机器人粘贴过来的文本。

And we’ve seen Claude sometimes say, “I can’t write a Wikipedia article; it would go against Wikipedia’s policies.” If all major AI companies implemented that kind of prompt refusal, it wouldn’t solve the problem entirely, because there are still open-weight models that can be tweaked to avoid restrictions. But it would help with people who use commercial models and aren’t especially familiar with the technology.

我们还看到 Claude 有时会说：“我不能撰写维基百科文章；这会违反维基百科的政策。”如果所有主要的人工智能公司都实施这种提示拒绝机制，并不能完全解决问题，因为仍然存在可以调整以规避限制的开源权重模型。但这对于那些使用商业模型且对该技术不太熟悉的人来说会有所帮助。

Can you tell if the rule prohibiting AI writing is working?

你能判断禁止人工智能写作的规则是否有效吗？

Lebleu: It’s still a little early to tell. We see possible effects, such as prompt refusal and the apparent slight drop in AI-generated content. But again, we don’t yet know if that is because models are getting better or because beginners are learning the rules. The vast majority of AI-generated content is submitted by beginner editors, so we’ve made many efforts to make the rule very visible in welcome messages, editing help, and advice.

Lebleu：现在下结论还为时过早。我们看到了可能的效果，例如提示拒绝和人工智能生成内容明显的轻微下降。但同样，我们还不知道这是因为模型变得更好了，还是因为新手正在学习规则。绝大多数人工智能生成的内容都是由新手编辑提交的，因此我们做了很多努力，在欢迎信息、编辑帮助和建议中让这一规则变得非常显眼。

What if AI becomes capable of writing truly reliable Wikipedia articles?

如果人工智能有能力撰写真正可靠的维基百科文章，会怎样？

Lebleu: That’s one of the big questions we’re facing. When the guideline was passed, it was for very practical reasons: We were flooded with AI content, we didn’t have good tools, and we needed to put a stop to it. But since then, it has taken on a more philosophical dimension. Many people have called Wikipedia “the last good place on the internet.” Being a place that was, in theory, free from AI slop has become part of Wikipedia’s identity.

Lebleu：这是我们面临的重大问题之一。当该准则通过时，是出于非常实际的原因：我们被人工智能内容淹没了，我们没有好的工具，我们需要阻止它。但从那时起，它具有了更深层的哲学意义。许多人称维基百科为“互联网上最后一片净土”。作为一个理论上没有人工智能垃圾内容的场所，这已成为维基百科身份的一部分。

A lot of Wikipedia’s communication is now centered on the idea that we’re a human-written encyclopedia. Even AI companies find that interesting. It can be valuable to have a purely human-written corpus on which to [train] AI systems. The fact that Wikipedia is still that, and will remain that for at least the near future, makes it a precious resource that isn’t replicated anywhere else.

维基百科现在的许多交流都围绕着我们是一个由人类撰写的百科全书这一理念。甚至人工智能公司也觉得这很有趣。拥有一个纯粹由人类撰写的语料库来 [训练] 人工智能系统是很有价值的。维基百科仍然保持着这一点，并且在可预见的未来也将保持下去，这使其成为一种在其他任何地方都无法复制的宝贵资源。

But will the people who read and contribute to Wikipedia want it to become partially AI-generated if that makes it more comprehensive? We could preserve Wikipedia’s identity as a human-written corpus while also offering an AI-assisted option.

但是，如果人工智能生成能让维基百科更全面，阅读和贡献维基百科的人们会希望它部分由人工智能生成吗？我们可以在保留维基百科作为人类撰写语料库的身份的同时，提供人工智能辅助的选项。

Has Wikipedia reckoned with the idea of “Google Zero”—a possible future in which websites no longer get traffic from Google search?

维基百科是否考虑过“零谷歌”（Google Zero）的概念——即未来网站不再从谷歌搜索获得流量的可能性？

Lebleu: If everything goes through AI search and websites plummet to zero visibility.

Lebleu：如果一切都通过人工智能搜索进行，而网站的可见度降至零。