Wikipedia editors who expected AI to do the housekeeping banned it from writing by March 2026

Sometimes the residue of a prompt stayed in the text, and a page could open with a line such as "Here is your Wikipedia article" ^[3]. That is what users actually did. What the community told itself, by Wired's account, was that AI would come and go ^[12], and that in the meantime it would take over chores ^[1].

The Princeton figure needs a denominator. Five percent of nearly 3,000 new articles is roughly 150 pages ^[10]. That is a small count, drawn from one month on the English edition, and the excerpt does not report a later measurement. The ban came 19 months after that month ^[11].

The punctuation tells were weak evidence once a writer knew to look for them, since em dashes and curly quotation marks are quick to delete ^[4]. The harm the editors named sat in the content: write-ups praising a village's scenic countryside, and fake sources ^[5].

Katherine Maher, then head of the Wikimedia Foundation, had argued in a 2019 New York Times op-ed that artificial intelligence was too often presented as an all-powerful solution to problems and a scalable replacement for people ^[7]. The "Death of Wikipedia" essay described the version editors feared most: models composing the articles while humans were left with formatting and cleanup ^[9].

In our view, the line Wikipedia drew is a test any operator can run on their own tools. Translation and minor proofreading start from text a person already wrote ^[6]. Composition starts from nothing, so each claim in the output needs a source that a reviewer has to go and find.

Sort each AI-assisted task on two attributes: whether the output contains claims nobody supplied, and whether the pool of people able to check it is growing or shrinking. A task that adds no claims and keeps a steady or growing set of reviewers can go ahead. A task that adds claims while reviewers leave is where Wikipedia ended up with a ban. The two mixed cases are candidates for a pilot with a stated sampling rate. The cost of the line is whatever drafting speed a model would have supplied, and Wikipedia chose to pay it.