Wikipedia bans AI-written article text after 44-2 vote

The guideline did not arrive in a vacuum. English Wikipedia discussed AI article writing in December 2025 and agreed better guidelines were needed, but no rule was adopted then. Chaotic Enby's clarified proposal, submitted on March 15, 2026 and closed for voting on March 20, finally produced one. The enforcement work falls to WikiProject AI Cleanup, a group of editors founded in December 2023, before any guideline existed. Co-founder Elia LeBlanc said the project began after biased phrasing common in ChatGPT turned up widely on Wikipedia. Fake or misleading citations, which are increasing, are another signal. LeBlanc framed the stakes in terms of Wikipedia's identity as what many call "the last good place on the internet," and noted that even AI companies value a purely human-written corpus for training. The guideline's measurable effect is uncertain: the share of detected AI-generated new articles and drafts fell from about 20% at the end of 2025 to 15–16% in early 2026, but as of October 2026 it is unknown whether the rule or better model evasion explains the drop. A related effort is under way at the Wikimedia Foundation, which LeBlanc said is developing an attribution framework to give more information about articles cited by AI, such as last edit time and completeness.