Langbahn Team – Weltmeisterschaft

Wikipedia:Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence is used on a number of Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects. This may be directly involved with creation of text content, or in support roles related to evaluating article quality, adding metadata, or generating images. As with any machine-generated content, care must be used when employing AI at scale or in applying it where the community consensus is to exercise more caution.

When exploring AI techniques and systems, the community consensus is to prefer human decisions over machine-generated outcomes until the implications are better understood.

Applications

AI-related efforts on Wikipedia include but are not limited to:

Revision scoring

The Objective Revision Evaluation Service (ORES) was started in 2015 as a project of the Wikimedia Foundation, and provides a revision score against machine learning models that have been trained in order to report article quality or vandalism. This is used in tools such as ClueBot NG to help immediately revert vandalism, or in evaluation tools like the Program and Events Dashboard to measure the outcomes of classwork, edit-a-thons, or organized editing campaigns.

Text translation

Guidance can be found at Help:Translation#English Wikipedia policy requirements. There is a Content Translation Tool used across Wikimedia projects that can use the output of machine translation from one Wikipedia article to another, using services like Google Translate. However, on the English Wikipedia, it currently states that "machine translation is disabled for all users and this tool is limited to extended confirmed editors." As a result, only manual translation on the English Wikipedia is supported by the tool, though some users have used translation to Simple English as a workaround. Relatedly, there is a section of the Help:Translation page with the broad advice: "avoid machine translations." However, this guidance was last edited in 2016, and the state of the art for machine translation has advanced significantly since then, meriting a re-examination of that advice.

Article text generation

The explosion of interest in ChatGPT in 2022 has led to increased curiosity in using generative AI to help compose Wikipedia articles. The status of machine-generated text from tools such as ChatGPT is generally accepted to be public domain, so the copyright issues are not a blocker to using the generated text from a legal standpoint. These issues are generally governed by Help:Adding open license text to Wikipedia#Converting and adding open license text to Wikipedia, which advises to make sure content is adjusted for style and that reliable sources are used. Conversations on the Village Pump and in some test articles (i.e. Artwork title) have noted positive aspects of machine generated text, but a serious warning that content must be checked for facts and accuracy and never used straight from ChatGPT.

A good general page looking at the issues can be found at: Wikipedia:Using neural network language models on Wikipedia.

A major community discussion took place on Village Pump (policy) found at: Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Archive 179#Wikipedia response to chatbot-generated content

Some user experiences can be found here:

Images and Commons

Image metadata – There have been efforts from GLAM institutions to help supplement image keyword data with machine learning efforts. Among them include:

  • Computer aided tagging Started in 2019, "The computer-aided tagging tool is a feature in development by the Structured Data on Commons team to assist community members in identifying and labeling depicts statements for Commons files." See: c:Commons:Structured data/Computer-aided tagging
  • Metropolitan Museum of Art Tagging - This project used Met Museum tagging info to train a machine learning system to help predict new "depiction" recommendations for Wikidata. This resulted in a new Wikidata Game that helped add more than 4,000 new depiction (P180) statements to Wikidata. See the Met Museum blog post by Andrew Lih: "Combining AI and Human Judgment to Build Knowledge about Art on a Global Scale," March 4, 2019, [1]

Image generation

Discussion timeline

Date Type Page Discussion Conclusion/Notes
Dec 2022 Wikipedia:Village pump (policy) Wikipedia response to chatbot-generated content
Feb 2023 Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab) OpenAI and ChatGDP Disclosure suggested
Mar 2023 Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab) Adding LLM edit tag Impractical with current technology
June 2023 Wikipedia:Village pump (miscellaneous) GPT-4 user-created template at top of page
Oct 2023 RfC Wikipedia talk:Large language models RfC: Is this proposal ready to be promoted? Overwhelming consensus to not promote.
Oct 2023 Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab) Project Res-Up About using AI to increase resolution on old photos
Nov 2023 Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals) Scoring for Wikipedia type Articles Generated by LLM External research project hoping to recruit Wikipedia editors for off-wiki feedback (not editing here)
Jan 2024 RfC Wikipedia talk:Large language model policy RFC No consensus to adopt any wording as either a policy or guideline at this time.
Jan 2024 Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab) Can Wikipedia Provide An AI Tool To Evaluate News and Information on the Internet
Jan 2024 Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab) Use of ChatGPT and other LLMs specifically for medical and scientific content For text, not photos
Feb 2024 Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab) Have a way to prevent "hallucinated" AI-generated citations in articles Goal supported in theory
March 2024 Wikipedia:Village pump (technical) AI helper Tool idea for creating articles
March 2024 Wikipedia:Village pump (technical) What if we had an AI to suggest edits along the lines of edits typically made by good editors? Tool idea for smaller edits
March 2024 Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals) AI for WP guidelines/ policies AI-based search of Wikipedia's ruleset
May 2024 Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab) Another job aid proposal, this time with AI
Aug 2024 Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals) Proposal: Create quizzes on Wikipedia AI not seen as integral to the idea
Oct 2024 Wikipedia:Village pump (miscellaneous) Feedback on chatbots as valid sources, or identifiers of them
October 2024 Module talk:Find sources Chatbots as valid sources or identifiers of them Not supported at this time
Nov 2024 Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals) Add AI translation option for translating from English to non-English article. Off topic, as we don't decide what happens to other Wikipedias
Nov 2024 Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab) Wiki AI? Request for a chatbot
Dec 2024 RfC Wikipedia:Village pump (policy) LLM/chatbot comments in discussions "it is within admins' and closers' discretion to discount, strike, or collapse obvious use of generative LLMs"
Jan 2025 Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals) The use of AI-generated content Proposed rule accepting LLMs for translation and grammar but not on talk pages; not accepted
Jan 2025 RfC Wikipedia:Village pump (policy) Wikipedia:Requests for comment/AI images#BLPs Clear consensus against using AI-generated imagery to depict BLP subjects.
Jan 2025 Wikipedia:Village pump (policy) Adding the undisclosed use of AI to post a wall of text into discussions as disruptive editing Not inherently disruptive, but can be disruptive
Feb 2025 Wikipedia:Village pump (policy) The real use case for AI on Wikipedia Ideas for copyediting and grammar fixes
March 2025 RfC Wikipedia:Village pump (policy) Wikipedia:Requests for comment/AI images#Relist with broader question: Ban all AI images? Pending

See also

General

Wikimedia

Demonstrations of generative AI using LLMs