They formed a taskforce to combat unsourced, poorly-written AI-generated content in the online encyclopedia.

A group of editors caring for the popular website Wikipedia formed this month a taskforce called "WikiProject AI Cleanup," whose role is to stop the increasing sloppiness of contributors using artificial intelligence.

"A few of us had noticed the prevalence of unnatural writing that showed clear signs of being AI-generated, and we managed to replicate similar 'styles' using ChatGPT," Ilyas Lebleu, a WikiProject AI Cleanup founding member, told the publication 404media, adding that discovering some common AI catchphrases allowed the team to quickly spot some of the most egregious examples of generated articles.

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One example highlighted by Wikipedia was a well-written history of a fictional "timbery" Ottoman fortress Amberlihisar.

Though entirely fabricated, the text was convincing enough for ordinary readers who aren’t quite experts in the 13th-century Ottoman architecture.

While the ultimate goal isn’t banning AI content outright, the new team seeks to stop the degradation of Wikipedia’s reputation as a source of quality information by eradicating badly-sourced, unhelpful, irrelevant, false and hallucination-filled content that AI is so good at. Such content will be redacted or removed while hoax creators may be blocked.

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Last March, Wikipedia declared CNET.com an unreliable source of information because of numerous instances of misleading and false AI-generated content.

The under 100-strong Wikipedia taskforce has invited users to back up this effort by enrolling as participants in the project.

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