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Death by AI: Will large language models diminish Wikipedia?
Open accessAbstract
We argue that advances in large language models (LLMs) and generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) will diminish the value of Wikipedia, due to a withdrawal by human content producers, who will withhold their efforts, perceiving less need for their efforts and increased “AI competition.” We believe the greatest threat to Wikipedia stems from the fact that Wikipedia is a user‐generated product, relying on the “selfish altruism” of its human contributors. Contributors who reduce their contribution efforts as AI pervades the platform, will thus leave Wikipedia increasingly dependent on additional AI activity. This, combined with a dynamic where readership creates authorship and readers being disintermediated, will inevitably cause a vicious cycle leading to a staling of the content and diminishing value of this venerable knowledge resource.
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“Current benchmarks fail in three ways: paragraph-level evaluation masks claimlevel errors [12, 13], Wikipedia datasets suffer LLM contamination [14, 15], and metrics ignore epistemic safety [16].”
From Abstention vs. Hallucination: Benchmarking LLM Source Attribution for Scientific Citations (2024) · cites this paper as [15]
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References 35 · Cited by 13
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Metadata
- Authors
- Wagner, C., & Jiang, L.
- Affiliations
- City University of Hong Kong (HK)
- York University (CA)
- Corresponding author
- Jiang, Ling
- Venue
- Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 2025-01-03
- Volume
- 76
- Issue
- 5
- Pages
- 743-751
- ISSN
- 2330-1635 (ISSN-L)
- 2330-1643
- OpenAlex
- W4406051438
- Cited by
- 13
- References
- 35
- Citations by year
- 2026: 8 · 2025: 5
- FWCI
- 24.63
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- CityU Scholars (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- Funders
- City University of Hong Kong (9610535)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Communication › Wikis in Education and Collaboration
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Expert finding and Q&A systems
- Keywords
- Wikipedia, large language models, generative AI, user-generated content, altruism, disintermediation, knowledge resources, AI competition
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