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|LLM|LLM IMPACT|WIKIPEDIA|AI GENERATED TEXT|

Is Wikipedia an Endangered Species? Is ChatGPT Its Predator?

Exploring the Impact of Large Language Models on Wikipedia’s Future

Salvatore Raieli
Level Up Coding
Published in
9 min readMar 7, 2025

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Here’s an SEO-optimized version of your abstract: “This paper analyzes the impact of Large Language Models (LLMs) on Wikipedia, exploring how LLMs influence page views, article content, and Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks such as machine translation and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Our findings show a 1%-2% impact on Wikipedia articles and potential risks like inflated model scores and decreased RAG effectiveness. This study highlights the need for careful consideration of LLMs
Image generated by the author using AI

A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on. — Winston Churchill

Large Language Models (LLMs) are now a major source of information for many people. Especially because of their ability to answer any question asked of them (even if it contains some errors), replacing some of the users’ main sources. For example, many sites, such as Stack Overflow or Quora, have seen a decrease in the number of visits. Wikipedia has changed the way we search for information and undermined the use of traditional encyclopedias. Wikipedia is an important source for many researchers, students, and even LLMs. In fact, a great many datasets have been created from Wikipedia data, and it is an important quality source for training various datasets. At the same time, it was proposed to use LLMs to enhance Wikipedia, articles, Wikidata, and editing processes.

If this is a possibility, how does the arrival of LLMs impact Wikipedia? Could the use of AI-generated text harm Wikipedia?

This article talks about exactly that and how if AI-generated text becomes widespread in Wikipedia, the effects could be very problematic.

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Previous studies have shown that rewriting articles with artificial intelligence can lead to different conclusions for an article. In fact, LLMs are not free of bias and do not necessarily respect Wikipedia’s neutrality. For this and other reasons, some studies have suggested that Wikipedia quality may be impacted by the arrival of bots and AI-generated text:

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Written by Salvatore Raieli

Senior data scientist | about science, machine learning, and AI. Top writer in Artificial Intelligence

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