Wikipedia:WikiProject AI Cleanup

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Wikipedia editors are making a guide to identifying AI-generated writing. Your contributions are welcome!

To report issues with AI use, please go to Wikipedia:WikiProject AI Cleanup/Noticeboard.

Welcome to WikiProject AI Cleanup, a collaboration to combat the increasing problem of poorly written AI-generated content on Wikipedia. If you would like to help, add yourself as a participant in the project, inquire on the talk page, and see the to-do list.

Since 2022, large language models (LLMs) like GPTs have become a convenient tool for creating text at scale. Unfortunately, these models virtually always fail to properly source claims and often introduce errors. Since March 2026, the Wikipedia guideline WP:LLM has prohibited the use of LLMs to generate or rewrite article content, with limited exceptions for translation and basic copyediting. However, a lot of LLM-generated text inserted from 2022 to 2026 remains on Wikipedia. The purpose of this project is to identify and address the misuse of AI in articles. Specifically, these are the project's goals:

• To identify text written by AI, and scrutinize such text to make sure it follows Wikipedia's policies. Any unsourced or likely inaccurate claims should be removed in priority.
• To identify AI-generated images and ensure appropriate usage.
• To keep track of AI-using editors who may not realize the deficiencies of AI as a writing tool.
• To educate editors about the issues with AI-generated text and English Wikipedia's expectations around AI use.
• To protect against disruption from AI agents.

• Tag articles with appropriate templates, remove unsourced information and/or content added in violation of WP:NEWLLM, and warn users who add AI-generated content to articles.
• Any pages (not just articles) that are clearly entirely LLM-generated without human review can be nominated for speedy deletion under WP:G15.
• Identifying AI-assisted edits is difficult in most cases since the generated text is often indistinguishable from human text. The signs of AI writing page provides a list of characteristics that are associated with text generated by AI chatbots.
  • Text that was present in an article before November 30, 2022 (the release date of ChatGPT) is very unlikely to be AI-generated.
• Most AI content is not "unsourced"—sometimes it has real sources that are unrelated to the article's topic, sometimes it creates its own fake sources, and sometimes it uses legitimate sources to create the AI content. When removing bad AI content, check the cited sources for legitimacy, and if they are legitimate, consider preserving them on the article talk page for eventual use in human-written content.
  • Example: the article Leninist historiography was entirely written by AI and included a list of completely fake sources in Russian and Hungarian at the bottom of the page. Google turned up no results for these sources.
  • Other example: the article Estola albosignata, about a beetle species, had paragraphs written by AI sourced to actual German and French sources. While the sourced articles were real, they were completely off-topic, with the French one discussing a completely unrelated lifeform.
  • As of 2026, recent models will usually cite real sources, although they will likely not verify the content they are being cited for. The existence of these sources should not, by itself, be taken as evidence that the content is human-written.
• Sometimes entire articles are AI-generated, and in such a case, make sure to check that the topic is legitimate and notable. Occasionally, WP:HOAXes have made it onto Wikipedia because AI tools can create fake citations that may appear legitimate.
  • Example: the article Amberlihisar was created in January 2023, passed articles for creation, and was not discovered to be entirely fictional until December 2023. It has since been deleted from mainspace.

See Category:Articles containing suspected AI-generated texts for all articles that have been tagged as possibly {{AI-generated}}. The tasks page recommends ways to handle articles, talk page discussions, and sources that use AI-generated content.

Primary contacts:

Feel free to add yourself here!

• Large language models

• AI - Article text generation
• Perennial sources - Large language models
• LLM dungeon, a list of LLM-created articles with bogus sources maintained by JPxG
• LLM demonstration 1 & LLM demonstration 2, experiments with AI and Wikipedia done by JPxG
• AI Images and German Wikipedia
• Academic sources regarding synthetic content

These threads may be useful for editors seeking information about how AI has previously been handled on Wikipedia.

• List of uses of ChatGPT at Wikipedia
• Articles using ChatGPT as a reference
• AI images in non-AI contexts
• Wikipedia:Signs of AI writing
• AI cleanup thread in the Wikimedia discord
• Wikipedia:WikiProject AI Cleanup/VWF bot log, an automated log of images categorised as AI/upscaled on Commons which are in use on Wikipedia. It updates every Sunday, using the script at User:DreamRimmer/commonsfileusage.py, and has an ignore list for AI-related articles.
• Cite Unseen, user script that marks citations that link to AI-generated websites or URLs that contain LLM tracking parameters

• Wikipedia:Artificial intelligence resources