Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia is written by humans, for humans

Thoughts on adding this to the essay?

Wikipedia is a crowd-sourced wiki, built on human-to-human collaboration within a goal-orientated community of altruistic volunteers, making it fundamentally social. Editors ultimately curate content directly for human consumption, consisting of many hours of labour-intensive work for no tangible gain, whether that is researching and writing content, clearing backlogs, or other administrative tasks, with the goal of making knowledge freely and easily available to the public. This builds strong solidarity and collegiality within the community, reinforced by the respect editors have for one another because of relative selflessness (though hanging around conduct noticeboards and WP:CTOPs may leave a different impression). Editing is also morally rewarding, as well as an opportunity to build skills and learn while perceiving oneself as a positive externality (often in a wider context of bleakness and limited opportunities).

The allowance of LLM-generated content would destroy this model and ethos: LLMs are able to rapidly output content at low effort and cost, breaking the crowd-sourced model. Interactions with them would be unstimulating and soulless, and even interactions with semi-automated editors would break the engine of collegiality which retains editors and builds social cohesiveness. Human editors would cease writing due to their displacement by a more efficient method (which would be self-perpetuating due to the death of social interaction). Though human-written content has its drawbacks, LLMs are ignorant of real-world context, and are unable to consider the reader when writing, including what one would infer or understand, harming the communication of meaning.

This damage to Wikipedia's ethos would cause widespread moral injury among editors and remove what little personal benefits editing gave, resulting a large exodus of editors who no longer see contributing as worth their often-limited spare time, and the disintegration of the community that maintains Wikipedia. The site would become maintained by a series of autonomous bots babysat by a tiny group of technically-minded volunteers and staff, and the broader Wikimedia movement would lose its main source of ideologically-aligned members, rendering it ineffective and without drive or direction, probably spelling its end. We may one day reach a point when LLMs can reliably write decent-quality articles, but, as discussed above, the permission and proliferation of LLM-generated content would make this site unrecognisable and be the death of Wikipedia, as well as the broader Wikimedia movement, as we know and love it.

Pinging Guninvalid as creator, and Thryduulf for their perspective (I've also linked this in the WP:AIC discord for more feedback) Kowal2701 (talk, contribs) 20:14, 10 June 2026 (UTC)

My first reaction is that it's hyperbolic, overdramatic and adds nothing of value to what the essay already says. Thryduulf (talk) 21:13, 10 June 2026 (UTC)

Can certainly be toned down Kowal2701 (talk, contribs) 21:20, 10 June 2026 (UTC)

Been a while but I'll clarify. While I am indeed the original author of this essay, I've relinquished control of this essay by publishing to Wikipedia space. Now normal Wikiessay edit guidelines apply. guninvalid (talk) 08:12, 29 June 2026 (UTC)