Overview
- The English Wikipedia community approved the policy on Friday, March 20, in an overwhelming vote after months of discussion.
- LLMs are barred from drafting or rewriting entries, with two exceptions that require human checks: basic copyedits to an editor’s own text and first‑pass translations by editors fluent in both languages.
- Enforcement hinges on human review because AI detectors are unreliable, and moderators are told to judge sourcing compliance and an editor’s history rather than writing style alone.
- Editors cite risks such as hallucinated facts, fabricated sources, and a feedback loop where bad AI‑written text gets scraped into future training data, with a suspected agent called TomWikiAssist in early March showing how fast such edits can spread.
- The rule applies only to the English edition, and Spanish Wikipedia has a stricter, no‑exceptions ban on LLM use.