Long before the storm of AI struck Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Foundation was making preparations. Wikipedians battened down the hatches and made confident-sounding predictions that it would break and wash over them. Large language models might even improve Wikipedia, it was said, automating more of the housekeeping—formatting, sources, citations, missing links—and so freeing up humans to do creative work. It was not so simple. In 2019, then-Wikimedia Foundation head Katherine Maher wrote an op-ed in The New York Times under the headline “Without Humans, A.I. Can Wreak Havoc.” “Too often,” she wrote, “artificial intelligence is presented as an all-powerful solution to our problems, a scalable replacement for people.” The issue confronting Wikipedia, retaining human control over machines, was the same one soon being faced everywhere.
Already in 2018 Google was training AI to write “Wikipedia-like articles,” and by October 2024, a Princeton University study found that about 5 percent of nearly 3,000 newly created articles on English Wikipedia in a single month (August 2024) contained a substantial amount of AI-generated content. There were signs. ChatGPT was fond of em dashes—parenthetical statements that look like this one—and curly quotation marks. Sometimes, residues from the prompts used to compose articles were left behind (“Here is your Wikipedia article,” they might say.)
At first, Wikipedians tried to shape and control AI, to make its output “acceptable and constructive,” or to fix or remove if it proved otherwise. Generic fluff like “praising a village for its fertile farmlands, livestock, and scenic countryside” and fake sources were weeded out. By March 2026, AI content was found to violate its core principles so often that writing with large language models was banned outright, and their role restricted to translation and minor proofreading.
A much-read essay titled “Death of Wikipedia” explained this defensive posture. It predicted a ripple effect: As contributors reduced their contributions in response to AI pervading the platform, there might be a temptation to replace their work with still more AI, creating a downward spiral. One viral X post lamented that artificial intelligence seemed to be changing things in the wrong direction: “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.” The “Death of Wikipedia” warned against something similar: Rather than AI performing Wikipedia’s “housekeeping” roles, it might compose its articles instead, leaving humans relegated to formatting and cleanup. The result would trap editors in an endless curatorial project derived not from human priorities but from the frostbitten harvests of machines.
“The potential ‘whittling down’ each year of our pool of talented writers is the greatest threat to Wikipedia,” another Wikipedian wrote, “as we must increase the number of editors, especially expert editors, to be able to fix the sprawling hellscape of weak, inaccurate and incomplete articles that drag down the project.” A Wikipedia written and read by machines threatened to create a new, deracinated Wikipedia, stripped not only of its context, but of its animating passion. It would be artless, and soulless. When the Wikimedia Foundation says that the care and commitment of Wikipedians to “reliable encyclopedic knowledge is something AI cannot replace,” that is not the same as saying that it will not be replaced.
Once Google introduced AI Overviews in search, they quickly became as central to the experience as Wikipedia was until recently. (This also means Wikipedia still does play a crucial role as a source, only at one step removed.) Anyone who uses AI agents knows that they give plausible, almost intuitive answers, which can pass a superficial review of their sourcing. They are also often wrong. If Wikipedia itself becomes corrupted by artificial intelligence, by what means will we prove when they are wrong?
Implicit in the idea of a single, machine-edited encyclopedia to rule them all is that such a phenomenon should act as a final authority. Its appeal, to the kind of people who find it appealing, is that it will be coolly rational, a kind of digital King Solomon that can act as a disinterested arbiter. There is no reason to think such cold logic would not be cruel instead. Its aesthetic failings are a clue: “Slop” is a useful word for the product of artificial intelligence, which implies something unvariegated and monotonous, absent not only of nutritional value but also of the flavor that makes nutrition a pleasure.
There is also no reason to believe an AI encyclopedia, or any other encyclopedia, should be unifying. Whatever its shortcomings and eccentricities, Wikipedia is the closest thing to an “encyclopedia of everything” we have ever had. Once smartphones became widespread after the iPhone’s launch in 2007, the old speculations, however far-reaching, were realized: Wikipedia was costless, portable, immediate, and electric. Enormous and omnipresent, it really became an approximation of the “sum of all human knowledge.” But so what? What did access to this oracle mean for human flourishing? What good has Wikipedia done?
