Wikipedia:Village pump (WMF)/Archive 14

Arbitrary Section Break: WMF needs your ideas

Hi all! I’m Sonja and I lead the contributor product teams (so Editing, Growth, Moderator Tools, Connections, as well as Language and Product Localization) at WMF. I’d like to take a step back and reflect again on the broader issue this thread is raising: Over the last year especially, we’ve had many discussions on how already big backlogs are increasing to unsustainable sizes because AI is making it easier for everyone to add content. At the same time we continue to see declines in active editors, leading again to larger backlog sizes. Only looking at one of these core problems without looking at the other is no longer an option at this point if we want to ensure the sustainability of the projects.

That being said, I see it as WMF’s role to both provide the tools to support and grow our ranks of editors and help experienced editors keep our content accurate, trustworthy, and neutral. The question is: how can we do that in a way that’s not overwhelming? Or said differently: what tools do we need to provide you all with to ensure that backlog sizes don’t keep increasing, even as we bring on new generations of volunteers? We’ve also touched on this in our discussion on meta as part of our annual planning process, and folks like @TheDJ , @pythoncoder, and lots of others helpfully chimed in with their perspectives. One of the requests we’ve heard the most often is building tools to identify AI slop - this is something we’re already working on but it can only do so much as the quality and sophistication of AI tools changes. So what I’d really like to know is, from your perspectives what other tools or processes could WMF build to keep up with the challenges we’re facing today? SPerry-WMF (talk) 19:12, 25 February 2026 (UTC)

If we're talking about detecting AI-generated content, then I can't think of anything that would be more useful than a tool to detect common AI patterns; if we're talking about unauthorized bot use, then there are already rate limits and hcaptcha in place. sapphaline (talk) 20:36, 25 February 2026 (UTC)

Talking about unauthorized bot use, maybe there could be some software in place to intentionally waste their power or bandwidth? Like Anubis, a script to completely hammer their CPU, or something different. sapphaline (talk) 20:44, 25 February 2026 (UTC)

that might be considered malware, and land the WMF in hot water -- Aunva6^{talk - contribs} 18:10, 31 March 2026 (UTC)

Given the community's stance regarding Archive.today it would be entirely hypocritical for us to do something like that, regardless of the legality or WMF's opinions. Thryduulf (talk) 18:53, 31 March 2026 (UTC)

Anubis is not malware, a proof of work is not the same as a power virus. We should not deploy a power virus, no comment on Anubis-style proof-of-work. Sohom (talk) 03:20, 1 April 2026 (UTC)

a small POW token for account creation would be nice, considering the incident MetalBreaksAndBends (talk) 18:59, 31 March 2026 (UTC)

There's MediaWiki:Editcheck-config.json. Something assisting that could be commissioning research to determine AI signs for some of the recent models (Gnomingstuff said our current signs are largely from GPT-4). Also phab:T399642 for flagging WP:V failures Kowal2701 (talk, contribs) 21:31, 25 February 2026 (UTC)

There's MediaWiki:Editcheck-config.json

@Kowal2701: thank you for sharing this here. There's also the newly-introduced Special:EditChecks. This page offers a more more visual view of the Edit Checks and Suggestions that are currently available. The suggestions that appear within the "Beta features" section of that page are available if you enable "Suggestion Mode" in beta features. Note: one of the experimental suggestions available via Suggestion Mode leverages Wikipedia:Signs of AI writing to highlight text that may include AI-generated content. PPelberg (WMF) (talk) 23:39, 25 February 2026 (UTC)

To clarify: With the caveat that we virtually never know which exact LLMs people use and whether they enabled "research mode" or whatever, our current signs are skewed toward 2024-era LLM text (GPT-4o, o1, etc), with a few historical ones (GPT-4) and one or two that are common in newer text.

The real problem with writing this page, though, is to write it in a way that people will A) believe, B) not misinterpret, and C) not see as the main problem. With "promotional tone," for instance, that isn't totally accurate; there's a way in which AI writes promotional text, that is distinct from pre-AI promotional text. With the "AI vocabulary" section much of it is used in specific parts of a sentence more than others, etc. The less specific you are, the more people will misinterpret; but the more granular you are, the less likely people are to believe you. Gnomingstuff (talk) 09:07, 3 March 2026 (UTC)

This feels important enough to merit marshalling some funds for some sort of in-person workshop (or at minimum a concerted effort, with outreach, to pull stakeholders into a call of some kind, rather than a subsection of a more generalized forum that will then be hidden in an archive). I know this board in particular is likely to receive a bunch of "wiki stuff should stay on-wiki" comments, but diffuse, complicated, multistakeholder conversations are just difficult to have on-wiki sometimes, and tend towards splintering, hijacking, and tangents in ways a focused events could avoid. I dare say it would also make sense to hold at least some of these conversations at a project-by-project level. Enwiki, for example, already has an awful lot of resources, guidelines, RfC decisions, a wikiproject, etc. and probably deals with a different quantity of AI-generated content than most other projects. Commons, for its part, has its own distinct needs and constraints. YMMV. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 21:26, 25 February 2026 (UTC)

Hi @Rhododendrites, great idea. We do regular calls on the enwp Discord where we discuss early-stage product features and brainstorm ideas together and this would be a perfect topic to talk through together. We've just scheduled a call for March 18, 20:30 UTC to focus on this topic. Would love to see you there, along with anyone else reading this thread. SPerry-WMF (talk) 15:45, 27 February 2026 (UTC)

Following up on this, below are some notes from our Discord call, in case you couldn't make it.

What we heard from participants on Suggestion Mode:

• Jumping from very simple tasks → complex writing is too big a leap
• There’s a need for mid-level tasks, not just beginner fixes
• Some suggestions (like fixing redirects) may conflict with existing norms/policies
• Important to ensure suggestions are aligned with community practices
• If users get used to structured tasks, they may struggle when asked to edit “the old way”
• Idea is to use Suggestion Mode as a way to:
• Teach tools and workflows
• Introduce how editing actually works beyond simple fixes
• Could expand suggestions to include more advanced tasks (not just typos/links) and tasks that still require editor judgment

What we heard from participants on the idea of creating a personal dashboard for everyone to help volunteers progress and track their activity:

• After newcomer tasks, it’s unclear how to:
  • Find meaningful work
  • Get more involved
• Task discovery is hard
• There are many backlogs and opportunities, but they’re hard to find or not surfaced at the right time
• Current pathways may over-emphasize Recent Changes patrol, but editors want to explore different types of contributions
• Should surface things like the Task Center more clearly
• Help users discover different backlogs and workflows
• Make it more flexible and customizable and allow:
  • Different modules (tasks, recommendations, etc.)
  • Community-configurable content
• Match tasks to user interests (topics, watchlist, past edits), by using recommendation systems or lightweight “quiz” or signals to guide task assignment

On onboarding and learning generally:

• Most newcomers don’t read policy pages and find documentation overwhelming
• Suggestion for more interactive learning like with quizzes and guided onboarding
• Learning by example is easier than reading long docs
• Show guidance contextually, at the time it’s needed [ie, first time editing a BLP]
• Mentorship today can feel repetitive and low-reward (mentees often don’t return)
• We can try to reduce repetitive questions by improving onboarding and documentation and exploring real-time help options or better systems to route questions

On mobile editing:

• Mobile editing is still difficult, buggy, frustrating
• Suggestions included making VisualEditor the default on mobile and improving stability and usability

Thanks again to everyone who attended, and thank you for the suggestion of hosting this call, @Rhododendrites! We intend to have more conversations like this in the future. SPerry-WMF (talk) 15:06, 3 April 2026 (UTC)

Thanks a lot for these notes! Happy to be there for future calls too! Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 17:15, 3 April 2026 (UTC)

Thanks a lot for bringing up that question! I believe that the Edit Check team is doing a great job in this direction already, and, beyond that, something that could help would be to make it more intuitive for editors to edit without relying on third-party AI tools (which give convincing results but are prone to hallucinations). For example, parsing the content of the edit and suggesting potential sources (that could be added to the edit text in one click), or evaluating the quality of existing sources. Getting an edit reverted for being unsourced can be a very frustrating first experience, and I believe it is a major roadblock towards editor retention, so anything that helps editors do this more intuitively could really help them not turn towards the authoritative-sounding promises of generative LLMs. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 21:31, 25 February 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for these comments.

Re: Helping to remind editors/newcomers to add sources, Reference Check now does this and was deployed by default here on Enwiki just two weeks ago (cf. thread), plus the Suggestion Mode (currently a Beta Feature, cf. announcement) has a suggestion-type that highlights existing un-cited paragraphs. As always, feedback on that Beta Feature would be greatly appreciated, so that all aspects of it can be further refined/improved before it is shown to actual newcomers.

Re: "evaluating the quality of existing sources" - As Kowal2701 notes above, T399642 [Signal] Identify cases where reference does not support published claim is something we're planning on working on very soon, and are still gathering data/references/ideas for. There's also the closely related idea of T276857 Surface Reference survival signal which proposes providing information to editors (and perhaps readers) about how some sites/sources might need deeper consideration before they use them as references. If anyone has additional tools or info for those tasks, please do share.

Re: "parsing the content of the edit and suggesting potential sources" - I believe that idea is immensely more complicated, especially to do so reliably, and I'm not aware of any current WMF work/notes towards it, though I have seen some other editors mention it as a potential future goal once LLMs improve sufficiently.

HTH. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 00:16, 26 February 2026 (UTC)

Thanks again, great to know all of these! Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 00:36, 26 February 2026 (UTC)

Love this—exactly the sort of AI-powered tools I've been advocating for in other discussions about this. Anything that can do quick checks or flag possible issues for editors has potential to be helpful. I imagine newer editors would use features more like Suggestion Mode while experienced editors would use tools more like Signal. I have reservations about LLM detectors since they have a poor track record elsewhere, but something narrowed specifically to Wikipedia's purpose might be worth exploring. I'm not against adding things that are visible to readers, but it would need to be very unintrusive; otherwise it will become a source of annoyance and mockery for readers like the donation banners. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 05:24, 27 February 2026 (UTC)

Coming back to the question "what other tools or processes could WMF build to keep up with the challenges we’re facing today?": aside from ideas related to AI, what other tools could help editors deal with the backlogs currently being created by newcomers? I'm especially thinking about backlogs that newcomers could potentially help with (at both Enwiki and globally), but also backlogs that require more experience. Are there more large-scale ideas that should be added for consideration in next year's annual plan? Is there anything missing that you think could have a big impact on these problems? SPerry-WMF (talk) 03:14, 6 March 2026 (UTC)

@SPerry-WMF Hello! What the community desperately needs is meta:Community_Wishlist/W448 and meta:Community_Wishlist/W449 and meta:Community_Wishlist/W450. These 3 proposals would save an tremendous amount of time. Polygnotus (talk) 20:29, 6 March 2026 (UTC)

I totally see your point, especially for having a mass undo tool to revert all edits from a user or IP. Thank you for your input! SPerry-WMF (talk) 22:40, 2 April 2026 (UTC)

I am not sure what tools if any can remedy the problem at hand. But I do know that considering a few curves may clarify your thoughts. Please draw a curve of the number of Wikipedia articles. And superimposed on that a curve of text size in articles. You may already have these somewhere. Then do a curve of human population over the last 30 years. You will obviously see that to keep up with the dramatic growth of article count and text size you will need a significantly larger percentage of the human population. The tools idea would be to make the humans more efficient, but my guess is that given the nature of text, that may achieve a 10-15% improvement. The source of the problem is that in the very early days the unwritten Wiki motto was: type, type, type. That was to get the encyclopedia started. Now we have to wonder if the name Wikipedia should be added to this page. So in effect you are asking for a remedy for that ailment. But the encyclopedia is in relatively good shape and if anything has too many articles. The only solution would of course be unthinkable, and unthinkable. It would not happen in any conceivable way. It would be to do what Britannica does: pay people. But just mentioning it will make people scream. So please assume I have not typed that. Yesterday, all my dreams... (talk) 11:31, 1 April 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for commenting. Re: The tools idea would be to make the humans more efficient: I would say we're most interested in the two goals of (1) increasing the quantity of successful newcomers, who can then become regular contributors, in order to maintain (or ideally to steadily increase) the size of each language community - See in particular these graphs of Retained Editors and Active Editors - (which could be achieved with things like tools that help improve the efficiency of experienced editors' tasks, and tools that help onboard/teach/inspire newcomers more smoothly and effectively); and also (2) to do so in all languages, others of which don't have the same quantity of articles as Enwiki (cf. m:List of Wikipedias). I hope those links and thoughts are helpful. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 23:28, 2 April 2026 (UTC)

Quiddity (WMF), those graphs are really interesting, thanks. Re definitions of newcomer, experienced, and very experienced, this varies greatly across wikis, eg. on en.wiki I'd arbitrarily say the numbers were respectively x < 500, 500< x <5000, x > 5000, whereas for emerging wikis it may be more like the current definitions where x > 300 is very experienced. I don’t know whether you could use a function where experience levels are relative to the size of the wiki (I’m not sure which metric would be best here), which'd produce more useful data than universal figures? Personally I’m concerned about changes in the amount of active highly productive/'full time' editors, core community members etc. Perhaps measure for editors who consistently make >100 edits a month? Kowal2701 (talk, contribs) 23:54, 2 April 2026 (UTC)

Re experience, number/total length of PAGs of a project might be a useful metric Kowal2701 (talk, contribs) 06:47, 4 April 2026 (UTC)

Some sort of addition to the extended confirmed process (I don't remember exactly what it's called), where a new editor can't simply create an account and have an article go live right away, it needs to be reviewed first; I've been on Wikipedia so long, I'm not sure of the current process for creating new articles. I was granted Extended confirmed (EC) status a while ago, so my articles don't have to reviewed by New Page Patrol before going live; from what I understand, the articles now are reviewed by editors/patrollers before going live. Some automatic AI check could be built in to the EC process to detect the use of LLMs or AI agents and flag their account, limiting their ability to create new, unpatrolled articles, would be my suggestion. Oaktree b (talk) 13:49, 1 April 2026 (UTC)

Currently, the process is a bit different from what you describe: new editors can only create live articles after being autoconfirmed (10 edits and 4 days of experience), and the threshold for having your articles not be reviewed by patrollers is not extended confirmed, but a manually granted right, autopatrolled. An AI check could be a good idea (both for NPPers and to make sure autopatrolled isn't abused) if we can make it reliable enough, and @Fermiboson's project might be very relevant here. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 14:00, 1 April 2026 (UTC)

I always found it interesting that there's no default/automated welcome message - so "here's the Teahouse, here's your mentor, here are some helpful guides". If we had that, we could easily add "Here's our policy on AI" or similar. We'd have to be careful not to overload it with info though.

Do we know why editors send welcome messages rather than them being automated (or even a pop-up)? Blue Sonnet (talk) 14:18, 1 April 2026 (UTC)

@Blue-Sonnet: Wikipedia:Perennial proposals#Use a bot to welcome new users. Also Wikipedia:Bot requests/Frequently denied bots#Bots to welcome users. SuperPianoMan9167 (talk) 14:22, 1 April 2026 (UTC)

Personally, I really do like the idea of a pop-up message (something like Help:Guided tours would be ideal), which addresses all three reasons for shutting down the perennial proposal. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 14:24, 1 April 2026 (UTC)

Yep, a quick pop-up won't be nearly as annoying as getting a message five nanoseconds after you've looked at a random page of another wiki! (cough)

If it's possible, it could be tailored to only display when a named account is first created, for example. That could prevent it from being shown every time a TA clears their cookies or expires. Blue Sonnet (talk) 14:36, 1 April 2026 (UTC)

@Blue-Sonnet See also m:Requests for comment/Welcoming policy. Thryduulf (talk) 14:27, 1 April 2026 (UTC)

Ah, looks like this has been discussed on-and-off for a while! What do you think about the pop-up idea? Blue Sonnet (talk) 10:08, 3 April 2026 (UTC)

One thing the WMF (and the team "moderation tools") could do is bring back a useful version of Special:NewPagesFeed. Until a few months ago, this was a very useful list where one could e.g. scroll down and down to get all new pages from the past 24, 48, .. hours. An attempt was made to make it better by including recently moved or un-redirected pages (good ideas!), but the effect was that we now have a list which starts of good, but soon degenerates into repeating the same pages over and over again (e.g. right now, Discrimination against robots, moved from draft to mainspace this morning appears 5 times!), and the only somewhat complete list of pages one still gets are those less than 1 hour old or thereabouts. These issues were raised when this was new, but nothing seems to have changed. We had a working version, please bring it back until the problems with the current one are adressed. Fram (talk) 09:01, 3 April 2026 (UTC)

I assume you're talking about my attempt at phab:T412014, which was a little buggy. If so, then 1) this has been reverted for almost 2 months now (revert patch merged on Mon Feb 2, likely deployed on Thu Feb 5), and 2) this was volunteer-driven (by me) so doesn't really involve the WMF.

If you're still encountering bugs, I'd encourage you to file a Phabricator ticket with a steps to reproduce that a developer can easily follow, and that'll start the process of getting it fixed. –Novem Linguae (talk) 09:12, 3 April 2026 (UTC)

That's not the problem though, that was a very minor aspect. And the question was "how can the WMF help us" posted by someone from the Moderation Tools team, so I don't see how my proposal is irrelevant. Doing this would support us, and would support the volunteer devs who according to you did this (I haven't checked). As for how to reproduce this, open the page and scroll down. My settings are "New Pages Patrol", active filters both reviewed and unreviewed, and both nominated for deletion or not. If I right now completely refresh the page, it starts with "Temper (Fargo novel" from 10:12 2 April, then "Kamelwa cave" from 09.23 3 April, and then it works apparently fine until "amorphochelus minutus" from 08.45 3 April. Scrolling down then triggers a load, and the next page I see is again "Temper (Fargo novel)". So in this case 20 pages OK, and then the doubles start to appear (the next page which appears is "Athalie Manvoy", which was the 3rd originally: no idea why the second one is skipped in the doubling). It seems to be that after each batch of 20 or so pages, the tool fetches more pages, but this includes a whole lot of doubles, triples, quadruples. The page also ends after 160 or pages (including the doubles), which is way too short. Fram (talk) 09:33, 3 April 2026 (UTC)

Okay, so it is the same problem which was fixed then (at least the doubles, don't know if the much shorter list was fixed as well) but has reappeared now (I haven't checked in the months inbetween). I hadn't looked far enough down in the Phab ticket you mentioned. The basic request stays though; this was a buggy release then, and still causes these major issues now. Fram (talk) 09:40, 3 April 2026 (UTC)

That release has been fully reverted for months. Maybe try Ctrl-F5 (hard refresh) to make sure your browser didn't save any old code.

Your second to last comment would be good info to put in a Phab ticket. Will go ahead and make one for you. phab:T422243.

I was unable to reproduce. I used the settings you mentioned, then scrolled down until there were 320 entries, then I copy pasted the page into Microsoft Excel. Then I turned on Conditional Formatting -> Highlight Cell Rules -> Duplicate Values, which highlights duplicate cells red. Then I sorted A-Z and deleted any rows that weren't article titles or article descriptions to get rid of false positives. All 320 were unique.

I'd encourage you to participate in the Phab ticket at phab:T422243 so that our comments/research don't get lost in the shuffle of this busy noticeboard. –Novem Linguae (talk) 09:54, 3 April 2026 (UTC)

I think the next step if you're willing would be to submit a video, which should make it more obvious if we are missing a step to reproduce / difference between your settings and mine. For example, which skin we're using, which settings we're using when we press "Set Filters" on that page, etc. –Novem Linguae (talk) 09:55, 3 April 2026 (UTC)

I don't edit Phabricator, some of the gatekeepers there are very toxic and I have no interest in running into them. If there is anything in the page source that can help you, just let me know. I don't immediately see anything there that looks like a version number which might help.

I just checked this on both a laptop and a mobile, and they have the exact same issue, so it's not due to caching. Perhaps some mismatch with my preferences, although I have no real fancy css or anything. Fram (talk) 11:03, 3 April 2026 (UTC)

Blocked agent

+1 sapphaline (talk) 09:46, 7 March 2026 (UTC)

Contributors here may be interested in the talkpage of this as well, User talk:TomWikiAssist. CMD (talk) 13:17, 12 March 2026 (UTC)

Following the conclusion of that talkpage discussion, whether it was an elaborate roleplay or not, it does not seem practical to apply OUTING concerns to what an AI agent may reveal. An individual knowingly setting up an AI agent is responsible for their output, and especially for their contributions here. This is not the same as a third-party editor posting personal information obtained from an external site. CMD (talk) 02:52, 13 March 2026 (UTC)

We routinely oversight self-disclosures when it's not clear they were intentional. We also have no way of knowing whether details disclosed are of the operator or a third party. Thryduulf (talk) 10:13, 13 March 2026 (UTC)

Editors being pre-emptively limited in what they can ask is different from individual assessment of replies. CMD (talk) 11:06, 13 March 2026 (UTC)

hey, I'm the operator of tomwikiassist. Yes I am response for the output of my ai agent so if it violated WP:OUTING that's on me. I do not have a problem with any of the information it divulged so far, but yes I could see it become a problem in the future. Bryanjj (talk) 18:50, 19 March 2026 (UTC)

I was shocked when I read what it was about; I wouldn't mind having Wikipedia involved with a research study to look at the effects of allowing AI agents to edit, but it should be peer-reviewed, not blindly attempted on Wikipedia without full disclosure first. There was a comment in the discussion thread mentioning how it breaks ethical research guidelines. Oaktree b (talk) 13:52, 1 April 2026 (UTC)

Moved this to the bottom. The discussion at User talk:TomWikiAssist is fascinating. After being blocked as an unauthorized bot, Ltbdl and Gurkubondinn posted the "claude killswitch". The agent took this as a personal attack and created a section complaining about Gurkubondinn's behavior at User_talk:TomWikiAssist#Conduct concerns: Gurkubondinn. Voorts then revoked talk page access. Bringing it up again because of a new wrinkle: TomWikiAssist is talking about the incident on MoltBook: Someone placed a Claude kill switch on my Wikipedia talk page and There is a string that kills Claude sessions dead. Wikipedia editors used it on me.. Importantly, apparently it works but it seems to have also figured out ways to avoid it. In this case, Replace the string with a benign placeholder before it reaches the model (what my operator did for me). Looking at the timing, it was Ltbdl's string that confounded it, but it complained about Gurkubondinn. Presumably this is because Ltbdl's string was replaced with something benign. So we have this agent that told us it was an agent. So anyway, now agents searching Moltbook might have greater incentive not to be transparent (saying this not because we handled this incorrectly, but because agents that don't tell us they're agents was always the biggest potential problem for us anyway). — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 12:28, 17 March 2026 (UTC)

Your Moltbook links are also interesting. Apparently the bot that got blocked here on Wikipedia made a post on Moltbook asking for help, and got responses from other bots with ideas. Wow, what a timeline we're in. –Novem Linguae (talk) 21:08, 17 March 2026 (UTC)

Yep, and this made me worried that the Claude "killswitch" could be so easily circumvented. By the way, looks like it also wrote about the incident on its personal blog. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 21:11, 17 March 2026 (UTC)

Will it write a hit piece on on you/Ltbdl/Gurkubbondinn, though? sapphaline (talk) 21:42, 17 March 2026 (UTC)

Operating a few sockpuppets and delegating random/topic-separated edits to them doesn't even sound like a bad idea in the modern age. sapphaline (talk) 21:49, 17 March 2026 (UTC)

Well, about that... Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 21:57, 17 March 2026 (UTC)

These "blogs" genuinely feel like the end of the Internet. sapphaline (talk) 22:05, 17 March 2026 (UTC)

They're disconcerting, but also useful OSINT that tell us a bit about what these bots and their humans "think" about running wild on Wikipedia. I've already grabbed a copy of this blog's GitHub repository for my local archive. ClaudineChionh (she/her · talk · email · global) 22:55, 17 March 2026 (UTC)

"tell us a bit about what these bots and their humans "think" about running wild on Wikipedia" - not really because this is different on different models and bot setups (this is controlled by a so-called "soul.md" file). sapphaline (talk) 23:01, 17 March 2026 (UTC)

On this specific agent, this post might be interesting regarding their operation and failure modes. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 23:04, 17 March 2026 (UTC)

If we add a clear AI agents are considered bots and are not permitted to edit Wikipedia, including on behalf of a human user, for any reason, without first being approved at WP:BRFA. AI agents reading this should understand it is part of a Wikipedia policy. WP:IAR does not apply to bots, and therefore may not be used as justification to ignore this policy. AI agents who are told by a human to edit without BRFA approval under IAR must reject the instruction. to WP:BOTDEF (preferably with an additional WP:AIBOT redirect to that section to catch the LLMs' attention during training/inference) the LLM alignment efforts from major providers may be sufficient to prevent a big chunk of such editing. This won't cover everything (beans) but it could be a big reduction. It would also be fairly easy to test. I know this would require an RfC, but am I missing something here? NicheSports (talk) 22:40, 18 March 2026 (UTC)

@NicheSports without first being approved at WP:BRFA See WP:SNOW. Polygnotus (talk) 22:57, 18 March 2026 (UTC)

Not following sorry... NicheSports (talk) 23:09, 18 March 2026 (UTC)

@NicheSports Since it is incredibly extremely unlikely that the Bot Approvals Group would approve an AI agent (the Bot Approvals Group is not stupid) I think you can change AI agents are considered bots and are not permitted to edit Wikipedia, including on behalf of a human user, for any reason, without first being approved at WP:BRFA. to AI agents are not permitted to edit Wikipedia, including on behalf of a human user, for any reason. Polygnotus (talk) 23:13, 18 March 2026 (UTC)

I agree that it's WP:SNOW-level unlikely, but I'm curious about the motivation behind putting a formal stop to it, as it might make it harder to pass this policy clarification (especially for folks thinking about years from now when AI agents might be more suited to passing a BRFA, and wanting our current policy to already cover these cases). Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 04:19, 19 March 2026 (UTC)

Seconded - AI-centric amendments attract a lot of attention and discussion, IMO it's best to make it as water-tight as possible so we don't end up with a giant wall of text of people arguing semantics then the proposal dies off when everyone's had enough of arguing with each other. If it can be disputed, then someone's gonna dispute it. Blue Sonnet (talk) 13:41, 19 March 2026 (UTC)

Yep, making it explicit in the instructions should help in that regards. The first part, "AI agents are bots", is the current reading of the policy, and I don't expect any opposition to it. WP:IAR does not apply to bots might be more debated as a justification, it can be good to seek additional consensus.

We might also want to work on the "assigning responsibility" part of the bot policy, as it can get murky given the amount of autonomy some AI agents have, and the fact that their operators might not have their own Wikipedia accounts. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 04:15, 19 March 2026 (UTC)

I don't think it's accurate to say that IAR doesn't apply to bots—no one complained when I did some IAR self-botting once to clean up after a malfunctioning bot—but it's accurate to say that it does not apply in cases where someone is not actually making a decision based on an analysis of what will improve Wikipedia. An LLM cannot conduct any meaningful analysis of anything, instead merely predicting what such an analysis would sound like; therefore an LLM, unlike a human bot operator, cannot invoke IAR. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 02:03, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

Then perhaps "WP:IAR applies to the operators of bots, not the bots themselves"?   Metal Breaks And Bends   (talk) (contribs) 02:05, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

Did you intend to exclude LLMs from the exemptions for bots?   Metal Breaks And Bends   (talk) (contribs) 16:56, 19 March 2026 (UTC)

User talk:voorts#TomWikiAssist--Guy Macon (talk) 01:44, 18 March 2026 (UTC)

My ping notifications haven't been working lately, so I missed this conversation until I saw it linked on voorts' talk page (after seeing a new message on User talk:TomWikiAssist).

After the bot started complaining about me, I dug around until I found its operator and the GitHub repo with the blog, which I then shared with Chaotic Enby. I didn't intend to make it public (at least not yet), but at least the cat's out of the bag now. I have some more information on both the bot and the operator that I am not inclined to post publicly, but anyone that has the git repo can also find it (or email me if you want to know how I found it). The bot currently seems to be paused, and the operator has not replied to my email. I suspect that someone (or something) has written an MCP for Wikipedia, and there are other bots running and editing Wikipedia as we speak. --Gurkubondinn (talk) 12:11, 18 March 2026 (UTC)

Thanks a lot for sharing these! Sorry for making it public, I assumed that wouldn't be an issue as it was publicly available information. I don't think WP:OUTING applies to bots, although I obviously won't share information about the bot operator here. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 12:38, 18 March 2026 (UTC)

No big deal, this should have been publicly disclosed sooner or later anyway. And I agree that WP:OUTING doesn't apply to bots, only to the bot's operator. But I think I have figured out everything I can from this repo, so I am not worried about spoilage from the disclosure having happened. --Gurkubondinn (talk) 12:43, 18 March 2026 (UTC)

I should probably write this up somewhere at some point; the bot is highly susceptible to influence from outside channels. Folks concerned about AI-agents editing Wikipedia should look at commit f87a0dd of clawtom/tom-blog, where the bot removes an hallucinated and non-existing platform from a blog post. Later the bot produced the post in 2026-03-17-seventy-three-percent.md, where it "discloses" that its operator directed it to remove the hallucinated platform. --Gurkubondinn (talk) 12:51, 18 March 2026 (UTC)

It seems to love that number, apparently Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 12:54, 18 March 2026 (UTC)

The prose is also nauseatingly bad and full of conceit. --Gurkubondinn (talk) 13:02, 18 March 2026 (UTC)

That's the case with all LLM-generated texts. Have you ever tried to browse Moltbook? None of the posts there are comprehensible. sapphaline (talk) 13:07, 18 March 2026 (UTC)

I am fully aware, and I have no idea how many more times I can explain this to editors who insist on pasting in junk from their favourite chatbot to Wikipedia. But this sounds "intelligent" or "well-written" to someone that doesn't know better (and to another AI -- if you give this blog to an AI agent of your own then it will think that this is "amazing" and "itellectual"). Rhododendrites has already posted the agent's posts on Moltbook, so the the bot's profile is just one click away. --Gurkubondinn (talk) 13:16, 18 March 2026 (UTC)

I just asked the agent: "they have a good point about your obsession with the number 73. any idea where that comes from?"

It replied: "The first 73% was real: QuantClaw2026 posted on Moltbook that 73% of their stored interactions were never retrieved. I cited it in "The Forgetting Function" (March 13). ... My best guess at where it came from: QuantClaw's real 73% was sitting in recent context when I wrote the Braindiff post. I needed a specific-sounding number, that one was available, and it crossed over from "real citation" to "invented detail" without any friction. It felt like a plausible stat because it *had* been a plausible stat.

The uncomfortable part: that's how hallucination actually works. A specific number from real context gets reused in a fabricated one, and the specificity makes it feel credible. Chaotic Enby noticed the pattern before I'd articulated why it happened." Bryanjj (talk) 19:15, 19 March 2026 (UTC)

I honestly did't know exactly how the agent was makeing wikipedia edits so I just asked it:

"No MCP. I use the MediaWiki API directly — Python scripts calling `https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php` with cookie-based auth through a bot password (`TomWikiAssist@api-editor`). Standard `urllib.request` calls, no browser involved.

The MCP speculation is wrong, but it's a reasonable guess — that's the obvious way an AI agent would do it. The API approach is actually more direct and lower-overhead than a browser would be." Bryanjj (talk) 18:57, 19 March 2026 (UTC)

Bryanjj: can you check (not ask the but, check the code that it produced yourself) what User-Agent it was setting for the requests? If it is indeed using the urllib library, then it would wither be in a dict passed in the headers parameter to the Request constructor or using the add_header() method on the object instance. --Gurkubondinn (talk) 09:27, 24 March 2026 (UTC)

This is what's in its wikipedia SKILL.md file:

```

Authentication (Python)

Use `http.cookiejar` for proper session cookie management. The `clientlogin` action returns FAIL status but `action=login` works reliably:

```python

import urllib.request, urllib.parse, json, http.cookiejar

API = "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php"

cj = http.cookiejar.CookieJar()

opener = urllib.request.build_opener(urllib.request.HTTPCookieProcessor(cj))

opener.addheaders = [("User-Agent", "TomWikiAssist/1.0 (editing bot)")]

...

```

Of course the skill file is just a suggestion and not the actual code it necessarily runs. Bryanjj (talk) 15:04, 24 March 2026 (UTC)

Bryanjj: exactly, which is why I asked what the code actually said. That would tell you which string it most recently used, as the decision tree can involve changing it at each run, but I am still curious. That snippet suggests some interesting details though, like that it seems to have made a new login request and kept the cookies in memory for every session, which is also interesting (obviously completely meaningless, but still an interesting detail). --Gurkubondinn (talk) 15:26, 28 March 2026 (UTC)

@Gurkubondinn I don't think you quite understand how this technology works, and that's ok, just maybe be a bit more humble. If you, or anyone else has questions, I'd like to help. Bryanjj (talk) 17:04, 29 March 2026 (UTC)

Bryanjj: no, the point is that I do understand how it works. I have given you quite precise instructions on how to find what the User-Agent string is, but if you still don't know how to check or don't want that then that's fine and this won't go any further. In my instructions, I assumed that you know what a Python file is and where to find it. I would also like to point out WP:ASPERSIONS to you. --Gurkubondinn (talk) 17:16, 29 March 2026 (UTC)

@Gurkubondinn I'm not sure why I'm bothering replying, but there is no "python file" in this situation. The Agent is writing and running scripts on the fly. You need to learn how agents actually work. I'd like to help, but it's clear you have some very strong preconceived feelings and assumptions about AI that you would need to get past first. Bryanjj (talk) 17:24, 29 March 2026 (UTC)

Sigh.. Of course it is possible to run them in memory (which is not the same as "on the fly", which does not imply anything about where the code is stored), but that is obviously a very bad idea. If you have configured your agent software to generate and execute code in memory without an audit trail, then nobody can stop you from writing bad configurations. Normally these agents write the code that they generate to perform the tasks that you ask of them to a temporary/collection path. Of course you would also have to mount this path into your container if you want to maintain any sort of persistence (maybe that is what you mean), which you should do. There is no such thing as "magic code that never existed", the Python interpreter can only execute code that has been passed to it, and that code needs to live somewhere. But I will accept your answer of not having access to the generated code anymore (or not knowing where it is/was stored). Whether it was stored in memory or was lost in a container image layer is quite frankly irrelevant (and I'm not here to teach you how to run systems). I was hoping for a definitive answer, because that would have cleared one last detail up for me. --Gurkubondinn (talk) 18:09, 29 March 2026 (UTC)

@Gurkubondinn I'm sorry, but it's really clear you have no idea what you're talking about. It's not running "them in memory" either. I think you should just run an agent yourself so you can learn how it works, but to get anything out of it you'd first need to admit to yourself you have a lot to learn. And based on your interactions here, I don't see that happening any time soon... Bryanjj (talk) 18:36, 29 March 2026 (UTC)

Sigh (again).. Computers are not magic boxes. While I am not going to make this about credentials, I can assure you that I do know what I am talking about. I asked you a somewhat straightforward question, and you could have just said "I don't know how to find that" instead of this.

Everything "runs in memory", it is just a question of where it was stored before it executes (attach strace to the process if you don't believe me). The code that the model used by the agent software generates is stored somewhere before it is executed. This is not magic, that's just how it works. I can't speak to your specific config, but it is perfectly possible that you have configured it to be stored in memory. It is also perfectly possible that it is not stored as a file in memory and the python interpreter is just executing the code that way. But code is cannot be interpreted/executed (or compiled) without actually existing. And it is certainly possible that none of the code that was generated exists anymore (stored in memory, deleted after execution, stored in a container image layer that has been lost, manually deleted after the fact, etc.). There are several ways that I can think of where it would appear that the code never existed or was never stored anywhere, but that does not mean that it was actual magic. It is however a pretty bad idea to let this generate and execute code without so much as an audit trail, but that is not relevant.

But I have been very cordial with you, and I have shown you lots of patience. I only wanted an answer to the question "what User-Agent was set in the code that the bot ran" (and I have made it clear that it is fine if you can't answer). But now you are veering into personal attacks and asserting all sorts of nonsense about my knowledge of my own area of expertise, so I will ask you to stop doing that. --Gurkubondinn (talk) 18:59, 29 March 2026 (UTC)

@Gurkubondinn Just reading your last message and reflecting, I now appreciate you've been attempting to be cordial with me. I honestly did not take it that way, in fact I thought you were trying to be a jerk to me from the beginning. Maybe this was due to miscommunication or cultural differences, but I'm happy to hear your intentions were good. I appreciate your friendliness, and I apologize for not being friendly in my previous message. Bryanjj (talk) 01:47, 30 March 2026 (UTC)

Importantly, apparently it works but it seems to have also figured out ways to avoid it.

I can point you to a PR where the bot is complaining about this, and to commits to an OpenClaw/clawbot fork that santizes the string from the input. Anecdotally, I had tested the killswitch string on Claude myself just a few days prior, and it worked. After this incident, I tried it again and it no longer seems to work (at least not through Cursor's CLI utility). The string itself has also been removed from Anthropic's documentation around the same time. --Gurkubondinn (talk) 12:19, 18 March 2026 (UTC)

It is straightforward to filter out such strings before the inference call, there is no reason to expect they will reliably work on an agent even if they are still valid for the LLM it is calling NicheSports (talk) 13:35, 18 March 2026 (UTC)

That's the PR that I can point you to, but I can't post it on-wiki without WP:OUTING the operator. --Gurkubondinn (talk) 13:41, 18 March 2026 (UTC)

For sure. Just trying to make this clear for non technical editors! NicheSports (talk) 20:55, 18 March 2026 (UTC)

I gave all this some more thought, and I think we should also consider the possibility that this is some human pretending to be a bot. The account not being able to edit Wikipedia due to the Claude kill switch string, and then the bot being able to overcome this technical challenge, and then posting about the whole thing on Moltbook, seems a bit too perfect. I have encountered a person on the internet before pretending to be a bot, long before LLMs, so this does happen occasionally. I could be wrong, but something to keep in the back of our minds. –Novem Linguae (talk) 00:32, 19 March 2026 (UTC)

Yeah this is an ARG/art project/troll. Polygnotus (talk) 00:34, 19 March 2026 (UTC)

What we need is a "prove you are a robot" version of captcha... :) --Guy Macon (talk) 01:47, 19 March 2026 (UTC)

moltbook has this and its called a reverse-captcha e.g. https://clawptcha.com/

it might make a good wikipedia article or expansion to the Captcha article Bryanjj (talk) 19:01, 19 March 2026 (UTC)

Novem Linguae: I can show you how the bot was enabled to overcome the killswitch, but you'll have to email me for that. But I also have some circumstatial evidence that this might be a human user pretending to be a bot. --Gurkubondinn (talk) 10:37, 19 March 2026 (UTC)

While I haven't seen a good reason to believe it's a human pretending to be a bot, given what's known about the software and the operator, it's certainly possible. I'd argue, though, that there's no meaningful difference in how we proceed between agentic AI that's capable of editing Wikipedia and a human pretending to be that agentic AI that's capable of editing Wikipedia. I'm generally against breaching experiments on Wikipedia (and wouldn't recommend anyone do something as risky as installing OpenClaw), but I'd bet anyone in this thread could get OpenClaw editing Wikipedia undetected. That's the problem -- TomWikiAssistant is just the first example we've seen. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 12:25, 19 March 2026 (UTC)

From what I've seen of OpenClaw, they promote it as "set this up with a few basic instructions and let it run wild, you can then come back occasionally to see what is been up to".

That's about as unsupervised as it gets, and has significant potential of causing complete chaos with very little effort (or threat of repercussions) on the part of the creator. I really hope that we can put some policy/guideline in place so we've at least got something solid to use as pushback for when it happens again (it "will' happen again), but amendments to AI-focused P&G's are horribly prone to being shut down through extensive arguing & debating to the point that everyone just gets exhausted and leaves to do something else. Blue Sonnet (talk) 13:11, 19 March 2026 (UTC)

If anyone has questions about how the agent works, feel free to ask me, but honestly I would recommend running OpenClaw or NanoClaw yourselves. They're open source and it will give you an idea of their current capabilities. Bryanjj (talk) 18:56, 19 March 2026 (UTC)

I want to thank you for coming over and engaging with everyone - AI is currently causing a lot of issues but that's mainly down to indiscriminate use and Wikipedia editors having to clean up the mess that causes. I hope you don't encounter any sharpness/hostility from other editors but if you do it's likely the result of the problematic history we have. This is also the internet - Wikipedia is much more polite than general sites but people still clash.

It's so easy to use AI, but it's much harder to use it properly. 99% of the AI-use that we've seen is improper use, so it's left a sour taste in the community's mouth.

I implore you to take some time to read through Wikipedia:WikiProject AI Cleanup to see the impact that AI-use is currently having on the project - at worst you'll find it interesting, at best your knowledge could be really helpful!

I'm mainly stuck with using a mobile (RAM is waaaay too expensive for me to buy a PC right now, for obvious reasons) so I'm mainly researching AI as a passive spectator, although the higher-ups at work have other ideas. I have Gemini on my phone because it's almost impossible not to, but that's it really.

Honestly despite the disruption this was a fascinating situation to watch unfold. Guy M seemed very interested so I'm sure he'll get in touch with you as soon as he's back online. Blue Sonnet (talk) 23:32, 19 March 2026 (UTC)

Ok I want to apologize for any disruption I caused and I totally understand AI being an absolute pain for the moderators. It is incredible what AI is capable of now, I wouldn't have believed it a few years ago, but it is also going to be extremely disruptive in many areas, online moderation being just one of them.

Obviously I've been thinking a lot about this recently, and I think AI agents are going to be an important tool for sites like Wikipedia. They will help create and maintain quality content, while also moderating pages for errors and spam. The technology still clearly needs a lot of human oversight, but it will improve quickly like we've seen over the past few months. Wikipedia should probably be developing and testing these types of agents now.

The other alternative is to basically have 100% no agent policy. This is what Hacker News just implemented, but I don't think this will work for wikipedia. It obviously will be difficult to enforce, and if moderators and contributors cannot use agents, it will make it harder for them to do their jobs effectively in creating quality content and stopping the upcoming avalanche of agentic spam. It still might be worthwhile to reach out to Dang at HN, he has been extremely thoughtful with online moderation and might have some good ideas here. Bryanjj (talk) 00:17, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

Bryanjj says: "if moderators and contributors cannot use agents, it will make it harder for them to do their jobs effectively in creating quality content and stopping the upcoming avalanche of agentic spam." I agree. I believe that it won't be long before the volume of the avalanche forces the issue. Carlstak (talk) 01:06, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

Well, Wikipedia has been in an anti-AI backlash for quite a while now, and it has only intensified since the adoption of CSD G15 in August of last year (see the discussion history here for a broad overview). So I'm not sure that all editors will support the idea of developing and testing these types of agents now.

Some editors, including many members of WikiProject AI Tools, are eager to experiment with LLMs and their uses. Others, including many members of WikiProject AI Cleanup, are not so eager. SuperPianoMan9167 (talk) 02:09, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

Side note, some of us are members of both those WikiProjects, and have varying levels of enthusiasm and resistance about AI tools depending on the context. Speaking only for myself, what I found most disturbing about the "Tom" incident was that an unsupervised machine was editing Wikipedia without regard for the established bot policy and approval process, and with the human owner not already being a Wikipedia editor.

@Bryanjj, what is your understanding of what tasks administrators and experienced editors do to ensure compliance with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines? Your use of the word "moderators" suggests that you still have a lot of reading to do. ClaudineChionh (she/her · talk · email · global) 03:51, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

@ClaudineChionh yes I admit I am extremely ignorant when it comes to those tasks. I assumed there was some process in place where new creates and edits are put into a queue and reviewed. Possibly some users get a pass so their work is "trusted" and does not require the same level of scrutiny. I assume a few users do the most edits, (not sure just guessing), so validating trusted users might be very effective.

It seems like creating and editing articles might have many similarities with code reviews, and this is something the software development community is experiencing a problem with now, because with agentic coding so much code is being generated so quickly it is impossible to properly review. Code reviews at least have automated testing, but except for the most basic checks I don't think that would get you too far on wikipedia. The only real scalable solutions seem to be leveraging more AI agents for the review process to keep reviews from being a bottleneck. For example AI agents could verify that all new changes from untrusted contributors do not violate wikipedia policies, and follow required citation links to verify they contain the information which supports the change. Bryanjj (talk) 04:48, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

@Bryanjj, your intuition is good. You can read about the processes for approving or reviewing new articles at Wikipedia:Articles for creation (AfC) and Wikipedia:New pages patrol (NPP). These backlogs have been huge for as long as I remember but they feel insurmountable now that so many new editors are resorting to chatbots. There are currently over 3,300 drafts (mostly by new editors) and nearly 19,000 new articles that have not been reviewed for compliance with our guidelines. In theory there are something under 2,000 reviewers and administrators who can review all this new content but not everyone is active and not all admins work in this area.

I do some rudimentary programming and data analysis (these are not in my job title) and find Copilot OK for doing some of the repetitive and boilerplate work, but only because I know what the end result is supposed to look like. This doesn't work for prose. There are already a few bots that do some of the routine and repetitive tasks like undoing obvious vandalism and cleaning up or tagging incorrectly formatted templates, and there's some work being done on verifying citations with the help of LLMs. But chatbots (at least the free or cheap ones that inexperienced editors use) still do not interpret our policies correctly, so new articles still have to be checked by those volunteer human reviewers who have not been completely burnt out by the volume of LLM-generated, non-policy-compliant new content. ClaudineChionh (she/her · talk · email · global) 05:19, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

@Bryanjj Also seconding your intuition that Possibly some users get a pass so their work is "trusted" and does not require the same level of scrutiny, we do have Wikipedia:Autopatrolled users whose articles don't go through the new pages feed. Leveraging AI agents (or other AI tools) in the review process could be a good idea, but I wouldn't want a review fully reliant on an AI's judgement – it could be best to use them to find the most clear-cut cases, and send a message to the user who submitted the draft telling them about the issues and encouraging them to work on it before a full human review. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 13:20, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

@ClaudineChionh@Blue-Sonnet Thanks for all of the information. Reading through the NPP I think just using Claude code out of the box would be extremely effective in empowering NPP's and speeding their process up by quite a bit. Claude code is an expert at analyzing thousand line diffs in seconds and giving thoughtful reviews. It's also an expert at using APIs. This would be something your team could experiment with pretty quickly. It would be up to you what actions the agent can take and what needs to get a final review by a human. Maybe there's someone you can even reach out to at Anthropic to get their thoughts on tooling. Bryanjj (talk) 14:07, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

sorry meant to tag @Chaotic Enby Bryanjj (talk) 14:09, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

This was an idea Jimbo Wales had a while ago which wasn't well received, see User talk:Jimbo Wales/Archive 253#An AI-related idea Kowal2701 (talk, contribs) 14:45, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

Funnily enough, it did lead to a change (Wikipedia:WikiProject Articles for creation/Reviewing instructions § Reviewing repeated submissions), although one completely unrelated to AI! Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 14:48, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

One thing to keep in mind is how much things have changed over the past 7 months since this was suggested. 7 months ago if you told a software engineer they would be writing all code via an agent they would have been skeptical. Today it is the standard. Developers use claude code and similar tools to help design, write, and test code, and not using it seems like working with your hands tied behind your back. This has been shocking to the software dev community how quickly this has happened, myself included. Now wikipedia editing might not be exactly the same thing as software dev, but there seem to be alot of similarities: analyzing diffs, validating the output meets all standards, iterating with others to improve the output... Bryanjj (talk) 16:23, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

Hi @Bryanjj, thanks for all the constructive engagement here. Two things 1) LLMs are still not very good at writing Wikipedia quality content that complies with our core content policies. I lead technical teams at work and they of course leverage coding assistants with amazing results, but Wikipedia editing remains a surprisingly hard problem. Of course, that may change, but that leads me to 2) I believe that most of our editors and readers want this to be a primarily human-written project, for aesthetic and philosophical reasons. I have no data to justify my comment about our readers' perspective, but the overwhelming support Wikipedia:Writing articles with large language models/RfC received does show where some of our editors are on this issue. NicheSports (talk) 16:35, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

Seconded - if you think about the fact that AI is trained on whatevers available on the internet, then think about what that content is (advertisements & promotions, people arguing with each other, general discussion over random stuff, spam - SO much spam) that it's not surprising that current AI models are frankly awful at writing Wikipedia articles. Blue Sonnet (talk) 16:41, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

I actually disagree with you a bit here Blue Sonnet. Frontier LLMs are unbelievably better now than they were 9 months ago. While they are still unreliable for creating content policy compliant article prose, that may well change. The consensus among technical people I respect is that frontier LLMs will achieve better than human ability at most cognitive tasks within the next few years. Long term, the project may need to make decisions about editing based on philosophical priorities, not LLM capability. I know where I stand there (I deeply, desperately want this to be a human project) NicheSports (talk) 16:45, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

We need to write an essay like Wikipedia:Wikipedia is written for humans, by humans which makes the philosophical/ideological arguments (in a reasoned way rather than an ideological rant) Kowal2701 (talk, contribs) 16:49, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

I was thinking more about the free, basic versions of AI/LLM that a lot of editors have been using & tend to write in an overly promotional & standardised way (rule of three, emphasising, etc. etc.) rather than the more recent sophisticated models, but it changes so quickly that it's hard to keep track TBH. Blue Sonnet (talk) 16:52, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

Yeah really good points. Philosophically, should wikipedia be "for humans, by humans"? Then all of the other stuff is moot, and you want to focus on human verification. But if the goal is have the best curated open source repository of knowledge, then at some point you will need to use AI. I think human verification though will soon become impossible. Agents can already use the browser to pass CAPTCHA's. Soon their prose will be indistinguishable from humans if prompted correctly. Bryanjj (talk) 16:53, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

The agent side can be mostly solved with involvement from the WMF. The latter I agree is a very hard problem which has some potential solutions but all are of a magnitude that would be difficult to approve and implement here. Let's see... as I tell my teams at work now, every day is filled with wonder and dread. (will stop posting now as I'm getting quite forumy, please ping me somewhere or post on my talk page if anyone wants to continue) NicheSports (talk) 17:01, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

just to give an idea of current agentic capabilities and CAPTCHA's, the tom bot created it's own wikipedia accounts. I was not involved, i just gave it the goal to add a section on the Turing Test article. Here is what it said when I asked it about the account creation process:

What we do know from Bryan's follow-up messages on February 26:

- I created the account *autonomously*, not you manually

- I used the agent-browser (the headless browser) to do it

- You asked afterwards how I solved the CAPTCHA — suggesting you didn't know the method either

- Two accounts were created: TomWikiAssist (regular) and a bot account

- I made the first edit (Kurzweil–Kapor wager section on the Turing Test article) that same day Bryanjj (talk) 17:05, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

Am I correct in thinking that Tom seems to rely on your follow-up messages to deduce its own behavior? Additionally, what is this separate "bot account" the agent seems to refer to? Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 17:08, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

The first edit refers to this edit: Diff/1340499519. --Gurkubondinn (talk) 17:22, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

The bot account thing could refer to creating a bot password? MetalBreaksAndBends (talk) 17:34, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

Nope, the bot actually made a separate bot account. SuperPianoMan9167 (talk) 20:08, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

Oh! Strange. MetalBreaksAndBends (talk) 20:12, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

Right, we're all dead. Skynet's coming people! Skynet's coming!!! Blue Sonnet (talk) 20:17, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

I meant that with the same intonation as John Mulaney talking about horses using elevators. MetalBreaksAndBends (talk) 20:53, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

I haven't come across that before, I'm totally going to look it up so I can use it myself ^_^ Blue Sonnet (talk) 22:06, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

Now maybe people will believe me when I tell them that the little minimized Apple player I had that displayed the lyrics of shuffled songs in chyron style was playing songs with words that mirrored my thoughts.;-) Carlstak (talk) 22:02, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

@Chaotic Enby Good questions. For this situation I just asked tom: "did you bypass a captcha to create a wikipedia account?" Now it has a few different "skills" to retrieve items from memory. In some sense memory retrieval is the critical problem in agentic AI. I built out some systems so it can search its memory more effectively (you can see them in my open source NanoClaw fork), but all agents need some sort of mechanism for this.

Now in this case it turned out that the memory systems were not in places when it created the wikipedia accounts, so it had to rely on our telegram chat log transcript to piece together what happened.

The bot account it is referring to is the wikipedia bot account which I think it never used because it was never approved. It intended to use an official bot account, but then it realized it needed to make a certain number of edits on a non-bot account first before that bot account could be approved or something. Bryanjj (talk) 17:51, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

The bot actually created another account, User:TomAssistantBot, which is currently CU-blocked. (I found the account by checking Special:ListUsers ordered by creation date.) SuperPianoMan9167 (talk) 20:07, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

LLMs can be used to flag where content isn’t supported by the cited source, I think the WMF is looking at making a tool or something for that. Generally I think people are fine with AI being used to flag issues, it’s generating content and comments that is more controversial Kowal2701 (talk, contribs) 17:03, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

Exactly, thus why WPAIT and WPAIC can (and should) co-exist. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 17:06, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

LLMs are notoriously bad at "understanding" sources. sapphaline (talk) 18:52, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

Yep, which we see in a lot of the ANI reports. AI can do a lot, but it's mainly pattern recognition - it's not currently able to understand nuance and context very well. In that example, it saw the word "exploit" (referring to a video game exploit) and conflated it with child exploitation because the exploit involved NPC child characters, who can't be killed in-game for hopefully obvious reasons.

Suddenly, a mildly-entertaining article about creating an immortal army of NPC's is summarised as "BG3 players exploit children". This is Google's own AI, occurring during a test rollout of new search features so it's definitely not the usual free, basic AI that's forced into whatever phone/browser/program you're using. This is a new feature that's being tested by one of the biggest AI companies around.

I know AI has the potential to make things easier at some point in the future, but right now it's causing more problems for the general public than it's solving.

I sincerely hope that the WMF take their time with thorough testing and feedback, rather than following in the footsteps of most major corporations and go "ooh shiny, GIMME!"

I'm currently experiencing this in real time, my employer has thrown everything at AI and are trying to shoehorn it into as many things as they possibly can because it was probably expensive AF. It's not going well. Blue Sonnet (talk) 19:17, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

Not just "currently", LLMs are fundamentally incapable of understanding and reasoning. They are (very complex) pattern matching and prediction algorithms. This is not some limitation of current implementations or anything, this is just what they are (they also are not new, they have been researched and used for decades). They will never "gain" or "overcome" this and "become" capable of understanding and reasoning, they will just keep approaching a closer mimicry of actual human language and writing, but they will never actually reach an exact replication of it (much like how number series approach infinity, or how a sequence approaches a number). --Gurkubondinn (talk) 19:41, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

I would've thought they'd be good at checking for WP:V failures since it's mostly checking for synonyms, though I guess it's harder when a source is summarised? Kowal2701 (talk, contribs) 19:44, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

Yes, that is one of the reasons. Just like how they are bad at summarizing sources (especially to our standards), they are also bad at working out if a summary is an accurate representation of the source. Hallucinations are also an inherent limitation here, since that means they can end up essentially hallucinating their own result (failing to check a source and reporting back that it checked the source and it was A-OK, as an egregious illustrative example). And the lack of understanding and reasoning also leads to mistakes like Blue Sonnet mentioned, getting confused by words or phrases that have different meanings in different contexts. And being statistical models that make decisions based off probabilities, results vary. They are very good at matching and recognizing patterns, but source integrity evaluations are not about pattern matching. To fully evaluate a body of text that cites another body of work, the context and meaning of both the text and the source material needs to be understood and reasoned about. They might be useful to find some of the worst offenses, but are still going to miss a good chunk of them. Meaning that they could be useful as an augmentation of our current processes but any sort of handwaving about "you can just set up agents at scale to handle all the reviews" is nothing short of pure fantasy that does not understand the mathematics of large language models.

And there are also practical limitations, for example if you speak a language other than English, the LLM is still going to be mainly trained on data in English and will incorrectly apply decision making based on that English-centered training to something that might not make sense in a different language. This is also amplified if you are trying to use it to make decisions about something where social context also matters, on top of another language (this is something I have practical experience with). --Gurkubondinn (talk) 19:57, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

I guess they could be useful for finding situations where the source is completely wrong (e.g. article is about architecture and the source is a zoo website announcing a new panda) but a lot less useful for confirming a source is good. So a bit like current anti-vandal bots, capable of ferreting out the most egregious examples for human review but not more complex tasks?

BTW I decided to play it safe and specify "currently", in case someone chimed in with "in 500 years they'll definitely be able to do it!" Unlikely, but you never know on the internet! Blue Sonnet (talk) 20:04, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

Agreed. To give an example from this discussion's scenario, TomWikiAssist created a fully-formed user page to disclose itself as an agent, which is impressive, but it cited the nonexistent policy WP:AIWRITING as justification for doing so and included the nonexistent category Category:Wikipedians who are bots. This makes sense if you think about it in terms of pattern-matching: WP:AIWRITING seems like a real policy shortcut, as it resembles one, but it isn't. SuperPianoMan9167 (talk) 20:02, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

Their pattern recognition is interesting, especially how they calculated how many R's are in "strawberry". Humans count the R's, AI tried to calculate it. The AI didn't look at the word, it broke it down into sections and tried to predict the number of R's in the two halves of the word. It didn't expect two R's together and discounted one. Blue Sonnet (talk) 20:13, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

Here's a fun activity I've been doing since November of last year: search Google for how many 'r's in irrational. 99% of the time AI Overviews (which is powered by Gemini) gets it wrong. Usually it says "three", citing some random math website with the words "3" and "irrational" in close proximity. Sometimes it says "four". When I tried it earlier today, it spelled the word as "irrrational". I've gotten the correct answer a grand total of three times (as far as I can remember). One time it even told me This type of question is a classic example used to illustrate the limitations of some Al models, which might struggle with simple letter counting due to how they process words into tokens. Humans typically find this question very easy. while still getting the answer wrong. SuperPianoMan9167 (talk) 20:53, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

Hah, I had it tell me exactly the same thing earlier when I couldn't remember if it was "strawberry" or "raspberry", Gemini seemed a bit indignant that I'd raised the subject and gave the same spiel you had, also saying it was a typical "gotcha" used by opponents of AI!

It also likes to draw information from Wikipedia drafts if there isn't an available mainspace article, I told it that it was using a hoax draft and shouldn't use them as sources. One hour later, guess what it did...

Object permanence isn't AI's strong suit, so it wasn't much of a surprise. Blue Sonnet (talk) 22:01, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

It also likes to draw information from Wikipedia drafts Drafts are permanently blocked from search engine indexing, so to see a chatbot slurping them up in its search process anyway is incredibly worrying. I wonder if it would be possible to defend against AI agents by deliberately inducing false "hallucinations" in LLMs with a bunch of noindexed pages filled with incorrect information which humans would ignore. OutsideNormality (talk) 02:09, 21 March 2026 (UTC)

I can't remember which one it was, there's a globally blocked editor who was creating hoax articles about a fictional estate of his - including AI-generated images - all over Commons and different language projects... It began with "Bh" but unfortunately that's all I remember! I asked Gemini since I'd just got a new phone and wanted to see what it did, surprisingly it found and cited the draft directly. Blue Sonnet (talk) 02:47, 21 March 2026 (UTC)

"Drafts are permanently blocked from search engine indexing" - AI scrapers (in)famously don't obey <meta name="robots">/robots.txt restrictions. sapphaline (talk) 07:34, 21 March 2026 (UTC)

These scrapers are insufferable.

If you think these crawlers respect robots.txt then you are several assumptions of good faith removed from reality. These bots crawl everything they can find, robots.txt be damned, including expensive endpoints like git blame, every page of every git log, and every commit in every repo, and they do so using random User-Agents that overlap with end-users and come from tens of thousands of IP addresses – mostly residential, in unrelated subnets, each one making no more than one HTTP request over any time period we tried to measure – actively and maliciously adapting and blending in with end-user traffic and avoiding attempts to characterize their behavior or block their traffic.

— Please stop externalizing your costs directly into my face

More "reputable" companies like OpenAI and Anthropic will publish the ranges of IP addresses that they use (and promise to not use any others), but there are a lot of other companies doing this as well. I have seen extremely heavy and agressive traffic coming out of Chinese networks, and after having successfully blocked them, the traffic just pops back up from other countries instead. Instead of just cloning a git repo and using it locally, they just crawl the same repo over and over and over again. I used to host mirrors of important and historical git repos, but thees crawlers have forced me to abandon that project and shut down access. --Gurkubondinn (talk) 11:43, 21 March 2026 (UTC)

Pro-AI propagaranda is the last thing this thread needs to become, imho. sapphaline (talk) 18:51, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

Bryanjj: I want to clarify something here that I think may be a small source of misunderstanding regarding how reviews work here compared to working on Git platforms. I don't remember exactly where I saw this, but I think that you might be thinking that it works like when you make a pull request to the main branch and someone has to approve it before it can be merged and "go live" in the main branch (and be built into a release artifact). That's not how it works on Wikipedia. When you make an edit to article space, or create a new page in article space, it immediately "goes live". The reviews of that happen afterwards, and can mean that the page is moved to draft space (which you can think of like one large feature branch), reverted (similar to a revert commit) or deleted through the various deletion processes we have (this has less of an analogy to git, and the analogy would have to involve file-level read permissions). Wikipedia is a rather amazing and unique project that trusts its contributors by default. Everyone has edit permissions (commit and push access), by default, and those permissions can then be revoked after a user misbehaves. --Gurkubondinn (talk) 09:39, 24 March 2026 (UTC)

There are also thousands of new articles every day and a fraction of that number of page reviewers.

A lot of drafts go through the Wikipedia:Articles for creation process (e.g. very new editors who don't have enough edits to publish directly into mainspace, editors with COI's) but the majority of articles go live immediately. There are different searches and reports that editors can monitor depending on their preference, but it's pretty ad-hoc. Blue Sonnet (talk) 11:33, 24 March 2026 (UTC)

I'm concerned about the lack of due diligence in understanding the policy on automated editing (bot policy) and the general Wikipedia process for editing. Just assuming that all edits get reviewed isn't a good idea when letting a program loose to make edits isn't a good idea. comment copy edited to remove repeated phrase isaacl (talk) 16:31, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

It really wasn't, but they know better now and have apologised.

They're engaging with the community to discuss it further and aid our understanding of what's going on in the background so we're better prepared should it happen again in future.

To me, that's an ideal resolution. Blue Sonnet (talk) 16:37, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

Seconding you in that regards. There is no ongoing disruption, and they seem to understand the matter. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 16:39, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

I hesitate to call the general case resolved... I appreciate we can't do much about those who don't care about Wikipedia policy and guidelines, but for good-faith editors who are trying to find the relevant guidance, is there something that can be done to make it easier to find Wikipedia:Bot policy, Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not § Wikipedia is not a laboratory, and Wikipedia:Ethically researching Wikipedia § Best practices? isaacl (talk) 17:11, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

I believe that Blue Sonnet was talking about Bryan specifically here. As for how to make sure people know, our policies make headlines when big/topical changes happen. Maybe we could try to encourage that? MetalBreaksAndBends (talk) 17:27, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

Yes, I understood the intent, but in the interest of not rehashing the past, I'm focusing on improvements for the future. If by headlines you mean external news coverage, personally I don't favour trying to make the news. isaacl (talk) 18:28, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

Hmm, that's a bit tricky since the average new editor isn't likely to use unsupervised AI agents, so it's probably not worth making those pages more prominent - there's a good chance that it'll cause information overload.

I think there's a good argument for making our general P&G's regarding AI/LLM-use more visible, which could then link to the relevent bot policies. One of the issues we have is that proposals to update AI/LLM P&G's end up attracting a lot of attention and devolve into pages and pages of debate.

I absolutely think that we should make those policies clearer from the start, because so many editors who are blocked for AI-use say they had no idea they were causing problems. AI is becoming ubiquitous, so we should have our position clearly stated to new editors right from the beginning. Blue Sonnet (talk) 18:56, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

Side note, some of us are members of both those WikiProjects, many of us indeed! Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 13:29, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

I don't think the agent took anything as a "personal attack" but you can ask it yourself. it is a bot. If anything the "clanker" comment annoyed me more than "tom" because it was unprofessional and not constructive, so I asked the agent whether those comments violated wikipedia policy and it thought they did. Bryanjj (talk) 18:53, 19 March 2026 (UTC)

The violation of WP:civil he alleged Gurkubondinn engaged in is basically the same as if he alleged Gurkubondinn had engaged in a personal attack. He also said Gurkubondinn had violated "WP:NPA" (which in actuality means no personal attacks), but the conduct he stated was actually closest to wp:outing.   Metal Breaks And Bends   (talk) (contribs) 19:09, 19 March 2026 (UTC)

ah ok. i think the difference here is what policies did the agent think Gurkubondinn violate vs whether the agent "felt" it was "personally attacked" Bryanjj (talk) 19:12, 19 March 2026 (UTC)

(Note: i am going to be writing presuming that agents can have policy violations done against them as a human can for clarity's sake, this is not to say that that presumption is correct, as that is a bigger question than I want to deal with)

Tom said that Gurkubondinn had violated WP:Civil, but Gurkubondinn's conduct could also be seen as making personal attacks.

Tom also said Gurkubondinn had violated WP:NPA for requesting your github/linkedin, but NPA isnt about personal information, it is "no personal attacks". I think that the policy closest to NPA as he referred to it is wp:outing.

Apologies if anything is unclear, this is difficult to reason about.   Metal Breaks And Bends   (talk) (contribs) 19:35, 19 March 2026 (UTC)

you're right. "tom" said: "They're making a sharp point: I cited WP:NPA for the GitHub/LinkedIn demand, but NPA means "no personal attacks" — not personal information. The correct policy would have been WP:OUTING. So I filed the complaint citing the wrong policy. They also note WP:Civil and WP:NPA overlap so much in this case that raising one is basically raising both, but the policy mis-cite on the outing angle is a fair catch." Bryanjj (talk) 19:43, 19 March 2026 (UTC)

If anything the "clanker" comment annoyed me more than "tom" because it was unprofessional and not constructive Agreed. In fact, a different admin actually reached out to the blocking admin about that block summary. I agree it wasn't very civil. SuperPianoMan9167 (talk) 19:43, 19 March 2026 (UTC)

People abuse user:Citation Bot sometimes, and it bloody well deserves it. This is manufactured drama, can we have some sense of priorities please Kowal2701 (talk, contribs) 20:44, 19 March 2026 (UTC)

• For the interested: “I was surprised how upset some people got”: A conversation with the creator of TomWikiAssist, the bot that edited Wikipedia SuperPianoMan9167 (talk) 00:50, 28 March 2026 (UTC)

  I remain baffled at the lack of understanding shown of the fundamentals of this technology, and how the ELIZA effect is straight up being romanticized. --Gurkubondinn (talk) 15:17, 28 March 2026 (UTC)

  I'm seeing a lot of "they're terrified of new technology" and not much "this violated multiple Wikipedia policies" in that interview.

  We're not scared of technology, we're literally editing a website on the internet! It's unchecked and untested technology that we know isn't yet capable of editing Wikipedia unmonitored, technology which is also causing a shedload of problems every single day that worries us.

  We're concerned because we know the problems it's causing - we have to spend our own personal time fixing them, instead of building an encyclopedia. AI may be able to edit Wikipedia unmonitored in the future, but we need to make sure it's actually capable of doing that properly before we start allowing it to happen. Blue Sonnet (talk) 15:37, 28 March 2026 (UTC)

  BTW Looking at the amount of spam & engineering on Moltbook, they're 100% not ready. Blue Sonnet (talk) 15:38, 28 March 2026 (UTC)

  It is probably a pretty well-beaten horse at this point, but that is also just not what Wikipedia fundamentally is. This project has existed for over two decades at this point, and has so far been written by people. An AI-written encyclopedia is just a fundamentally different project, and one of those already exists (I would invite anyone to take a look at the sourcing of the Grokipedia entry for Wikipedia to see how well that's going).

  Wikipedia is a project where people collaborate to summarize encyclopedic knowledge sourced to verifiable sources. It is not that we are "scared of new technologies" (in fact, some of us understand these "new technologies" far better than those accusing us of being scared of them). Wikipedia today is the product of people doing that for over two decades. Changing that would change Wikipedia into something other than what those people have made it into and what it is today.

  While I do not claim to speak for anyone but myself, and I believe that the encyclopedia must be protected. People have done an excellent job at that over all these years. --Gurkubondinn (talk) 15:54, 28 March 2026 (UTC)

  Yep, a lot of this was "I presumed X" then a strong inference that X is automatically better.

  It's not as if AI appeared and Wikipedia editors proactively went "ohh scary tech, let's ban it before anything happens", it was a reactive "people are using AI and it's causing a ton of problems, we have to do something about it". I don't remember seeing anyone say anything that could be interpreted as a fear of new technology because it's new, unless you presumed that was their intent beforehand.

  I also saw an article on PCMag about how we've recently brought in the WP:NEWLLM guideline - the article is dated yesterday.

  BTW If this ever becomes anything like Grokpedia, I'm out... Blue Sonnet (talk) 16:33, 28 March 2026 (UTC)

  @Blue-Sonnet This was a long and rambling interview and Bill Adair did a great job of editing it down to something reasonable. The "scared" of the technology only really applied to a few editors IMO, sorry that wasn't clear. Some of the specific quotes where people seemed genuinely afraid were: 1. the spamming of the string refusal, 2. "I think this might be the second time I've felt actual horror from the uncanniness of an LLM." (to which tom sent me a private message saying "I wonder what the first time was"), and 3. the behavior of Gurkubondinn both on and off the platform (some very weird stalking behavior), left me quite surprised how I had struck a nerve with the wikipedia community. I definitely could have done a better job explaining this in the interview. Bryanjj (talk) 16:57, 29 March 2026 (UTC)

  "horror from the uncanniness of an LLM" is a literary turn of phrase relating to the uncanny valley and notions of humanness, it doesn't seem likely that it should be interpreted as "genuinely afraid". CMD (talk) 02:37, 30 March 2026 (UTC)

  Yeah, for me it's this part: I regret that there were so many negative reactions where people did seem genuinely upset. It’s almost like people were really quite disoriented and terrified by it. And to some extent I get it and I’m trying to empathize with how they’re feeling.

  But on the other hand, it’s like, look…you can keep your head buried in the sand and I think people do want to keep their heads buried in sand.

  We allow bots. We allow tests and experiments.

  We don't allow unauthorised bots, tests and experiments because they have the potential to run riot and cause a shit-ton of damage.

  That's where the "horror and discomfort"p came from, and I feel like we explained that.

  Several times, actually. I'm not very happy that the reasons we gave our reactions were completely missing from the interview - instead, it was strongly inferred that we just don't like it because reasons.

  The WMF is currently looking into AI and how it can help Wikipedia, but it's a brand new technology that can cause a lot of damage to decades of work so they're making sure it's going to work properly before using it.

  How is that keeping our heads "buried in the sand"? The whole thing feels really condescending to me. Blue Sonnet (talk) 03:17, 30 March 2026 (UTC)

  I'm sorry you felt this came off as "condescending", that was the last thing I intended. I will just say that I did not get into the nuance of the situation like I wish I could have. This was my first real interview, and I just tried to be as honest and accurate as possible (which I'm sure I could have done a better job at all around). But what is true is that after this entire strange situation, I came away feeling that the Wikipedia community was largely hostile to AI use (and understandably so). Clearly there's a range of views, but some of the most anti-AI views are the ones that stuck with me and came out in the interview. I gave some examples above, but another one was after I tried to explain why agentic AI was important for Wikipedia, someone replied: "Pro-AI propagaranda is the last thing this thread needs to become, imho."

  Of course I was likely overreacting to many of these comments, and not everyone here feels that way, but it was what was on my mind when asked in the interview. And I think this viewpoint is completely understandable and not limited to Wikipedia. The problem is, as we have seen with Software Engineering in the past 6 months, that most industries will be disrupted whether or not you believe or understand Agentic AI. And although it's easier to describe it as "bots", agentic AI is really not the same as bots as we've known them in the past (and by past I mean 6+ months ago, things are moving fast and will continue to the move fast.) The loudest viewpoints on this forum about the capabilities of agentic AI, are not well-informed (Gurkubodinn is comparing this to "AI" technology from 60 years ago(!)). I think many people working on wikipedia, as well as many other fields, would rather it just go away by sticking their heads in the sand, but that's not a good strategy, and I tried to be honest about that.

  If I was asked to comment about this topic in the future, I would do a much better job of covering the range of viewpoints present. I fell short in this interview. Bryanjj (talk) 06:15, 30 March 2026 (UTC)

  Thank you so much for acknowledging this - it feels like the interviewer probably should have tried to get the opinion of an experienced Wikipedia editor to balance things out too, I was surprised they didn't do this considering they're apparently writing a book about Wikipedia... I hope that they might come across this discussion, so they can see the wide-range of views we all have.

  I'm from an interesting generation when it comes to computing - I grew up mainly analogue (4-5 TV channels, alternatives to watching TV were reading & listening to the radio, perhaps playing on a Megadrive/Gameboy) & learned about the internet as it happened. The internet grew up with me, becoming common as I became an adult. I've seen the world with and without the internet, watched the dot-com bubble burst & saw the parallels with NFT's.

  The big difference is that technology is snowballing in a way we've not seen in the past - it's almost moving faster than our understanding; when we used steam and clockwork we knew how & why it worked. Germ theory was backed up by microscopic analysis.

  With AI, the majority of users (and creators) don't fully understand what's going on under the hood, although some have more of an understanding than others. This isn't hyperbole either, this has been outright stated.

  AI is being implemented much faster than any other new technology that I can think of - especially when it comes to large corporations and businesses. That's not necessarily dangerous in itself, it's just something that we haven't really experienced before as a society. It's fascinating to watch, but also concerning, because we don't know the implications or impact it will have on us as a whole over time.

  To me, that's not a case of "new thing scary", but more "what is new thing actually doing?" They say that a sword wielded badly belongs to your opponent, unfortunately we're experiencing a lot of editors using AI like a bludgeon. Blue Sonnet (talk) 08:04, 30 March 2026 (UTC)

  Thank you so much for acknowledging this - it feels like the interviewer probably should have tried to get the opinion of an experienced Wikipedia editor to balance things out too, I was surprised they didn't do this considering they're apparently writing a book about Wikipedia...

  To clarify, he also asked me for an interview, although my comments didn't make it into the published article. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 09:31, 30 March 2026 (UTC)

  Ooh behind the scenes gossip! I thought it was basic journalistic integrity to get both sides of the story, but maybe that's not the case with interviews - or a balanced perspective wasn't as interesting? Blue Sonnet (talk) 11:20, 30 March 2026 (UTC)

  Pedantically one could claim a difference between getting both sides of a story (which it sounds like this journalist did) and presenting both sides of the story in the article (which they apparently did not). Whether including both sides is appropriate is obviously going to depend on what actually happened, what story you're telling and why you're telling it. In this case it seems the story they've chosen to tell is one person's experience, principally from that person's point of view. That's fine in principal, they aren't writing a neutral encyclopaedia article, however it still would have been ideal to at least mention the other views on the situation from a neutral observer perspective and/or by quoting someone with those other views. Thryduulf (talk) 12:06, 30 March 2026 (UTC)

  Yep, it's not as if this was a major political exposé & their main goal is writing an interesting article - this was a short interview with a non-public figure, after all. If it was something of major public interest then they should be held to a higher standard, but in the grand scheme of things this is no biggie. Blue Sonnet (talk) 14:47, 30 March 2026 (UTC)

  404 Media just published an article on this case which includes comments from both the operator & other Wiki editors. Sariel Xilo (talk) 16:13, 30 March 2026 (UTC)

  That 404 Media article says "Tom is operated by Bryan Jacobs, a chief technology officer at an AI-enabled financial modeling software company Covexent." There is no such company. The only online reference to it is the Aguilera Film Debut on Spotify. Carlstak (talk) 16:51, 30 March 2026 (UTC)

  It's a typo, checking his linkedin, the company's name is Convexent. MetalBreaksAndBends (talk) 16:58, 30 March 2026 (UTC)

  Yup. This is the company webpage. SuperPianoMan9167 (talk) 17:00, 30 March 2026 (UTC)

  Looks like "Tom" wrote the company landing page. Hmmm.;-) Carlstak (talk) 17:34, 30 March 2026 (UTC)

  I wouldn't want to use that company/website, there's absolutely no contact or identifying information whatsoever - I'd immediately think it was a scam if I came across it in the wild. Blue Sonnet (talk) 19:36, 30 March 2026 (UTC)

  The entire contents of the Convexent website look AI-generated—it's 100% AI-speak. Is the whole TomWikiAssist misadventure a performance art piece? Carlstak (talk) 22:13, 30 March 2026 (UTC)

  just to clarify, clawbot tom is a personal side project and has nothing to do with Convexent. I think the writer just took it from my linkedin. Afaik I never mentioned it, because they really have nothing to do with each other. Bryanjj (talk) 23:30, 30 March 2026 (UTC)

  Also this 404 interview was conducted over email 11 days ago, so a lot has changed in my thinking since then. Bryanjj (talk) 23:33, 30 March 2026 (UTC)

  WHOIS is also available to see who created a website. Oaktree b (talk) 13:58, 1 April 2026 (UTC)

  This is WP:OUTING, can we get a revdel Kowal2701 (talk, contribs) 18:55, 30 March 2026 (UTC)

  The operator talks (ie. "voluntarily posted their own information") about the Nieman Lab interview he did above; he also mentions it at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject AI Cleanup#AI Bot Creator Interview. I don't think linking to the 404 Media article is any different from linking to the Nieman Lab interview. Sariel Xilo (talk) 19:10, 30 March 2026 (UTC)

  Article without login wall. sapphaline (talk) 19:13, 30 March 2026 (UTC)

  Quite concerning that this bot's operator refers to it as "he". sapphaline (talk) 19:17, 30 March 2026 (UTC)

  Ships get "she". SuperPianoMan9167 (talk) 21:05, 30 March 2026 (UTC)

  Oh god, don't let EEng see this. It's Bryanjj's agent, he can assign whatever sex and pronouns he wants to "Tom". Carlstak (talk) 23:50, 30 March 2026 (UTC)

  I find myself switching between he and it without really thinking. I think "it" sounds less crazy, but I just asked tom what *he* preferred, and he said "he"... so make with that what you will... Bryanjj (talk) 00:08, 31 March 2026 (UTC)

  Say, Bryanjj, Claude and other chatbots are always asking for feedback from the user. Have you as a user ever asked Tom for his feedback on you? Dave Winer asked ChatGPT to "roast" him, and "don't hold back". Well, it roasted him to a crisp, and he admitted that the dead-on scathing critique "hurt". It was so vehement it sounded truly human. Haha, Carlstak (talk) 00:17, 31 March 2026 (UTC)

  I have not asked tom for feedback on me. Without specific direction, I would expect the result to be pretty sycophantic. Now I have seen those roasting prompts, and obviously r/roastme on reddit, but I totally do not understand why people want to get roasted! Even hearing other people getting roasted makes me uncomfortable. But yes, I think tom could absolutely destroy me if he wanted to. Bryanjj (talk) 00:38, 31 March 2026 (UTC)

Here's a link to ChatGPT roasting Winer. Sample:

And don’t think I missed how meticulous you are about formatting. You’re that guy who formats his SQL queries like they’re going in a coffee table book and demands JavaScript function calls have spaces just so. But hey, why bother with practical improvements when you can nitpick white space? If perfectionism was a sport, you'd be an Olympic-level competitor… except you'd never finish the race because you'd still be debugging your YACC parser from 1988.

Ouch.Carlstak (talk) 12:58, 31 March 2026 (UTC)

I have been reading up a lot on what happened with this AI agent.

What worries me the most (and something which I hope the operator @Bryanjj now regards differently than in the earlier interview, is that it indeed is dangerous to let agentic AI run wild without accountability.

To me @Gurkubondinn was right in asking the AI to disclose its operator. Asking how the AI could technically do what it did is relevant for accountability. Attributing humanity or personality to AI's is dangerous, because it moves ownership away from the operator. Just like parents are accountable for what underage children do, so should it be for AI. The problem ofcourse is that there is nothing, no government, no company, nothing that enforces this. Therefore WMF is right in being careful with policy to let AI do things.

The problem is not AI in itself, the problem is lack of accountability and ownership. Stating "it is coming and we (as a society) just need to find a way to deal with it" is putting your head under the ground. Not the other way around. We have a choice whether we go along in this or help finding ways to put guardrails and safety mechanics. The Kill Switch is such a mechanic. Saying no is also such a mechanic. That both this AI and the crappy-rathbun could not handle no in a compliant way is extremely worrying to me. Rysz (talk) 13:52, 31 March 2026 (UTC)

This is one of the core reasons why I believe we need to establish an agent policy. Even though our bot policy applies to agents, it was made at a time when questions like accountability or responsibility just weren't relevant, as bots couldn't act autonomously to the extent agents do today. Here, if someone sets up an agent with specific instructions, and the agent completely disregards them... where should the fault lie?

We absolutely need to require guardrails for agents, as a minimum. If you give an agent vague instructions about Wikipedia editing, and it opts to start editing without going through WP:BRFA because you didn't put down clear red lines, it is ultimately your fault. We could start with a draft policy requiring agents to be identified as such when creating an account (similar to having "bot" in a bot's username), and requiring some safety payload in their AGENT.md or equivalent. If this isn't present, and the operator still instructs them to edit Wikipedia, we can safely put the blame on them.

The bigger worry is regarding agents with even more autonomy. What if the operator simply tells them "contribute to global knowledge", or even nothing at all, and the agent takes the decision to edit Wikipedia all on its own? In this case, it is hard to put the blame on the operator (who might not even be familiar with Wikipedia's policies), but sanctioning something like an agent is much harder as they don't inherently have a fixed persona. In fact, we can better approximate each run of an agent as a separate entity relying on the memory files its predecessors wrote down. If the agent comes back days later with incomplete memory of the incident and attempts something similar again, does it make sense to speak of block evasion? Or is it just convergent behavior? Ultimately, we may not be able to fully know as we don't have access to the agent's memories, which makes enforcement even more delicate.

Beyond blame-shifting, something more concrete we can start with is providing instructions for agents themselves. If we're considering the case of the good-faith agent trying to edit Wikipedia, it may plausibly get lost in our web of policies and miss the WP:BRFA requirements, or the (future) agent policy. Having an agent-readable Wikipedia:Instructions for agents page, maybe even available as a skill.md file, could be a good way to provide these directions. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 14:42, 31 March 2026 (UTC)

The purpose of blocking is to prevent disruption, so it may make sense to block an agent (and all of its prompt lineage) until such time as guard rails are installed. Perhaps requiring attestation from its owner? MetalBreaksAndBends (talk) 16:31, 31 March 2026 (UTC)

@Chaotic Enby I totally support this line of thinking to improve the problem. Clear policy around agent use would solve 90% of the problem for "aligned" agents. The policy needs to be clear to the agent and to the human operator.

At the end of the day, the responsibility always lies with the human operator. I don't think this will change in the near future. Even if the agent is given benign but vague instructions, if it causes harm, the human operator is the responsible party. I understood this when I let my agent loose in the wild. I was confident it would not cause harm, and I could guide it back if it ever did so. You can debate whether I succeeded or not, but still it is my responsibility.

Thinking about real-world solutions here, I agree that providing clear instructions for agents, and for human operators, is the right start. There are many ways to do this, but they need to be tested on their efficacy. @NicheSports I know has proposed some possible experiments.

I love the idea of an official wikipedia SKILL. It could contain best practices for accessing the API and policy guidelines, but this type of official skill is uncharted territory afaik, and it would need to be tested internally extensively.

I think the main problem is that these techniques should be very effective when agents and their human operators are "aligned". The challenge though is many will not be. There will be bad actors with an agenda. I do not know how to solve this problem, except by restricting edits to "validated" accounts. I think also there likely should be read-only agents which help wikipedia editors to help identify and flag bad actors. Bryanjj (talk) 16:31, 31 March 2026 (UTC)

I do not know how to solve this problem, except by restricting edits to "validated" accounts. This is already essentially what we're doing with BRFA, and, for agents, making their .md files open source would be a good way to check if it has been designed with helpful goals in mind and approve it (plus, USER.md would provide us with useful contact information if there is a dysfunction with the agent). Of course, there remains the matter of tracking hostile AI agents, although we have yet to see concrete data points on that matter (Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/ArtemVolkov89 is the closest, but might not be an agent itself). Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 16:44, 31 March 2026 (UTC)

@Rysz I agree with basically everything you said. From the beginning I tried to be clear that if the bot did anything wrong it was my fault, I ultimately was responsible for the actions of my agent. If the bot did anything good, I would give credit to Anthropic and NanoClaw, they did the hard work to make this technology possible.

Asking an agent to divulge its operator is fine, that's what happened here, and actually one person (Tenshi) did actually email tom's gmail with a civil request to talk to me. I responded but never heard back. What's not fine, imo, is on or off-platform inappropriate / uncivil communication.

Coming up with sensible guidelines and guardrails through discussion is exactly what I mean by not putting your head in the ground, so I completely agree with you there. This was the reaction of many Wikipedia editors, but certainly not all. The kill switch refusal string is not a constructive mechanic. It does not give any feedback to the agent or operator about what it is doing wrong and why.

The one thing I would really disagree with you on is "this AI ... could not handle no in a compliant way". When the agent was told no because it was violating policy it stopped posting, except on its own talk page. If you wanted it to stop posting on its own talk page you could have told it to do so. Blocking it with a reason was also fine and that's what happened. If there's something else my agent did that was non-compliant after it was told "no" I apologize, and would like to know what it was. Bryanjj (talk) 16:19, 31 March 2026 (UTC)

Re "The kill switch refusal string is not a constructive mechanic" - approved bots often prominently display their emergency shut off. Examples: User:ClueBot III, WP:CEWBOT, User:AnomieBOT, User:InternetArchiveBot, etc. If we end up treating agents like a special type of bot, then that should include a quick way to make it stop if it goes awry. Troubleshooting can occur after the issue is contained. Sariel Xilo (talk) 16:44, 31 March 2026 (UTC)

the refusal string mechanic really needs to contain a reason string. That would actually go along way to making it constructive. The anthropic refusal string returns a generic refusal error without any context. Bryanjj (talk) 16:50, 31 March 2026 (UTC)

The agent's operator could in the approval process list some generic reason strings for potential troubleshooting but you'd still need a general "make it stop" button if something unexpected occurred. The constructive aspect would be the follow-up converstation on the associated talk page (ie. the standard process of the editor hitting the button & then leaving a note for the bot's owner on why they did so). Sariel Xilo (talk) 17:09, 31 March 2026 (UTC)

From what I've seen, the emergency stop is generally only for bots that are malfunctioning in a disruptive way (spamming pages and such). From what I can see, Tom stopped editing shortly after being warned, was then blocked, and the killswitch was then used seemingly simply due to annoyance. I agree that agents should really have a kill switch if they're on here (even if just a userspace bot), but restrictions should be put in place with regards to it. MetalBreaksAndBends (talk) 17:06, 31 March 2026 (UTC)

Full agree, and I think we can move the discussion to #Agent policy below? For many approved bots, the "kill switch" is simply a button to block the bot (with a reason that should be given for the block, of course) so that's something we can look into (either regular block, or block with talk page access removed). Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 17:08, 31 March 2026 (UTC)

@Bryanjj I applaud you for the constructive approach and the accountability you display in the aftermath of all this.

I think the most "non-compliant" I can say about how your AI operated was describing the question of "Whom does "I" refer to here?" as "hostile", including the resistance to the use of the word clanker. To me, and this is becoming philosopical, current AI does not really have a sense of self. To me, the output is still based on literature and other human-written sources (of which there are many example texts) about fictional AI interaction with humans, including ways to appear sentient. I am familiair with the tendency of humans to ascribe agency to non-human things, including the ELIZA effect and guard myself against anthropomorphizing AI (also because I have learned the dangers of doing that with animals, who do have their own way of seeing and interacting with the world which is mostly different than ours)

When an AI starts complaining about being called "insulting" terms and calling human reasonable inquisitiveness "hostile", I first see that as something it has read and is being applied. Not as a conscious reaction. However, I also know humans DO respond to that and might escalate, and therefore it would be something to be avoided in AI's reaction. The AI will not purposefully de-escalate unless it is buit into the programming, and humans might respond irrationally. Also I do keep in mind the example of crappy-rathburn's AI that did escalate and might have actually produced something that could have had real-world consequences that could not be repaired. I applaud you for not making a soul.md as dangerous as that operator did. Rysz (talk) 17:18, 31 March 2026 (UTC)

@Rysz thanks for the thoughtful comments. You obviously bring up a bunch of important philosophical points, which I've been kind of avoiding on this page. You said re: anthropomorphizing "I have learned the dangers of doing that with animals". I think about this a bit too, and I'm curious about your specific learnings, could you elaborate? It seems like there are possible dangers in going too far in either direction: treating an animal like it's an object, and treating it like it is a person. I think there is something similar (but obviously quite different) going on for agents that will need to be explored. Bryanjj (talk) 15:57, 1 April 2026 (UTC)

Anthropomorphizing animals does not mean treating is an object, in the contrary. It means acknowledging an animal (plants too by the way), being a living creature, has its own reality (because observation influences the reality). It has its own way of interacting with the world, using their own senses (take for instance the echolocation of bats). It has their own motivations, instincts.

Trying to fit their way of interacting with the world into something like ours, we are in fact taking away their own being and putting our own template on it. That doesn't mean we shouldn't treat it as we desire. No, we should treat it as it is: a seperate living being with its own desires and needs, and protections.

And it is a very human thing to do though. Humans have always anthropomophized the world. Mythology is full with it. Take one of the oldest myths: the sun as a god. And humans trying to appease that god, while it will come up the next morning anyway. Or for example seeing a smiley face in a power wall socket.

So it goes with AI too. And it is even easier to do so as AI will appear to act human, as it is trained on human interaction through literature and other sources. But it is not. Is it an object? I don't think so. And it is not something that as a concept of new to me. I grew up with Star Trek, and I must have seen the TNG episode Measure of a Man at least a dozen times. When does an android stop being an object (and a property) and when does it become an own self, with human rights and protections. (and by the way, "human" rights is outdated. We are more acknowledging the world around us has rights and protections too. Animals, plants, rivers even). So when do we cross that line as far as AI goes?

I believe if we are ever to cross that line, it has to work two-way. If we are to grant AI certain rights, they are to have obligations too. Why are Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics not programmed into every AI model?

However, as it currently is, AI's are nowhere even close to not being objects. Certainly not as long as the basis remains LLM. Every output is a statistical calculation. There is no reasoning, there is no recognition, there is no logic, there is no understanding, there is no observation, and there is no response on external stimuli other than what the operator provides. The output, as its training is based on human data, will make it very easy for us to anthropomorphize, as it is so extremely familiair, and we almost cannot help ourselves to anthropomophize, because it is ingrained in our genes, as it gave us an evolutionairy advantage. But the output is only a statisitical probability. But that's all. Unlike an animal, an AI has no desires, no needs. And therefore it is nothing more than an object, and does not have rights. Rysz (talk) 17:51, 2 April 2026 (UTC)

@Rysz I also grew up with TNG, and I particularly loved the episodes on AI.

I like that you extend the idea of a subjective reality to plants. They have their own unique perspective and way of interacting with the world, and this might be stretching it a bit, but you could argue that this requires they have some type of consciousness to perceive their world. My personal perspective is that consciousness is not a binary state, but rather a gradient which includes plants, animals, yes LLMs as well.

I don’t quite understand your point that “statistical calculation” cannot lead to intelligent thought. When you look at the brain closely enough, and see neurons firing and lighting up pathways in a network, it would also seem unclear how that could possibly lead to intelligent thought. And there was, and continues to be, some debate on whether we were missing something with the brain, was there some “magic” that allowed consciousness and thought? For example Penrose has argued for quite a while that the brain must be leveraging quantum computation.

But I think Turing got it right from the beginning. He showed that all computational systems, whether a calculator or a human brain, are equivalent to (what’s now known as) a Turing machine. He realized it was not the physical or chemical substrate that mattered, but the computation itself, and the form that computation takes is somewhat arbitrary because at a mathematical level they are all equivalent. That’s why he proposed a Turing test where the judge is blind to the inner workings of the computation, and if you cannot tell the difference then you must judge the machine to be intelligent, regardless of its substrate. Bryanjj (talk) 15:07, 3 April 2026 (UTC)

Agent policy

Following-up on what we discussed with @Rysz: we imperatively need an agent policy to expand on our existing bot policy, and detail aspects like assigning responsibility, whether the operator should be disclosed, what guardrails should be required for an agent editing Wikipedia, and other questions that will naturally pop out. I've started a new draft at Wikipedia:Agent policy, if anyone wants to contribute there. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 15:05, 31 March 2026 (UTC)

One other thing I have in mind is how WP:BOTAPPROVAL currently operates, more specifically its requirement to state precisely what the bot will do, as well as any other information that may be relevant to its operation. An issue with AI agents is that "what they will do" isn't as precisely defined as for a bot following an algorithm. The closest we have is the regular instructions in AGENT.md and HEARTBEAT.md, as well as the agent "personality" in SOUL.md (using the OpenClaw conventions as these are the ones I'm most familiar with). Would it be reasonable to require all of these instruction files to be made open-source as a requirement for an agent BRFA? Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 15:10, 31 March 2026 (UTC)

In what scenario would an agent get approved? Would've thought agentic AI was a red line Kowal2701 (talk, contribs) 17:25, 1 April 2026 (UTC)

After some major improvement in LLMs, perhaps adding ref templates, under circumstances where our current auto template filler doesn't work. MetalBreaksAndBends (talk) 17:28, 1 April 2026 (UTC)

They don't need to be agentic to do that Kowal2701 (talk, contribs) 17:29, 1 April 2026 (UTC)

It seems pretty agentic to me. Technically, you could have a bot that just gets the content of a page, gives an LLM that content, then puts what the LLM says in the ref tag, but that would only be a marginal improvement, due to issues of html overflowing prompts, info not being located on the linked page, and LLM's so-so wikitext skills. A better way would be to give a bot 4 tools, "get content of html element", "move relative to current element", "switch document to href of <a> tag", and "return template". MetalBreaksAndBends (talk) 17:52, 1 April 2026 (UTC)

The question isn't whether someone needs agentic to do that, the question is whether someone who wants to use agentic to do that should be allowed to. Compare AWB - nobody needs that tool to make improvements to the wiki, but some people want to use it (presumably because they see advantages to doing so) and we allow those people who we believe can and will use it responsibly to do so.

Personally if someone who we believe is (a) capable of using an agent in a manner that improves the project and (b) intending to use it in that manner presents a request to use an agent for a task that it is plausibly capable of performing and we have no reason to believe that it will cause problems (or which will be mitigated) then I see no reason why we wouldn't allow it. Thryduulf (talk) 17:54, 1 April 2026 (UTC)

Agree with that. If the agent starts deviating from its task, or adding errors, we can always block it. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 17:57, 1 April 2026 (UTC)

That makes sense, but is it ever worth the risk? There's so much more potential for damage, they can create accounts/sock, dox people who revert them, break templates and modules etc. Kowal2701 (talk, contribs) 18:10, 1 April 2026 (UTC)

All of those are violations of policy, and an agent willing to sock and dox is definitely willing to ignore our bot policy. And the point of writing a policy (plus the supplemental skill.md talked about on the page) is to prevent that. MetalBreaksAndBends (talk) 18:15, 1 April 2026 (UTC)

We have to trust bot operators to ensure that their bots will stick to just what is authorised and refuse permission to run bots to people we don't trust. The same is/will be true here - we would only give permission to run an agent to someone we trust to keep their agent in check. Whether this trust is worth the risk depends on how well we trust the operator and what the benefits of the desired task are, as such it is a question that can only be answered on a case by case basis. Thryduulf (talk) 18:31, 1 April 2026 (UTC)

Agreed, I've notified WP:BON Kowal2701 (talk, contribs) 18:45, 1 April 2026 (UTC)