• The good faith AI summaries that the WMF pondered putting at the top of every article, at least the ones I read, all violated MOS:OUR. WMF's AI missing such a MOS-foundational error in the test summaries could mean that maybe some of the people working there should take a course, or edit Wikipedia more, or something. Randy Kryn (talk) 03:19, 24 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • One of the primary reasons I still use Wikipedia is that the information is human-gathered and human-sourced, rather than risking being some kind of AI hallucination. Furthermore, using AI on Wikipedia feels... wrong. There's not really a good way for me to express it, it just doesn't seem right for AI to be implemented here of all places! XFalcon2004x (talk) 17:22, 25 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    • Of course, to me (full disclosure: I was in the focus groups discussing this at Wikimania last year) the issue is: now that we've put our foot down on this, what do we do if someone creates a third-party app that does this? And is successful. We couldn't exactly (I think) sue them for a use so parallel to our own, and if they do things like put ads in the content, something that people come to believe we do, what effect will that have on our donation drives? Daniel Case (talk) 02:42, 26 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

      We have never been able to stop forks by design, all our content is reusable. WMF could likely sue any app that imitates Wikipedia trademarks, if the concern is deception. However, I'm not seeing a scenario where this specific usage affects donation drives in a way that the very existence of publicly accessible llms in general does not. One can already ask an llm to summarise an article, and in a browser extension to boot. CMD (talk) 03:01, 26 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Don't know why someone would use a fork with ads when they have Wikipedia, because isn't a summary at the top of the page what we in the burbs used to call the "lead" paragraph? Whatever the name, such a fork would quickly become known as "AI Wikipedia", and might rival Wikipedia for awhile - until the mistakes multiply and differences become apparent (and, ads). But yes, the first real competitor to Wikipedia might use the AI plus fork approach, only to drift into advertising and major errors (the great ship Britannica comes to mind). Wikipedia seems here to stay, 25 years next year and it has outlasted vandals and should be able to survive being the human-written ad free encyclopedia. Randy Kryn (talk) 03:24, 26 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Except that it is not. Not anymore. Wikipedia editors are using LLMs to generate "content" for pages. For example Esculenta says they use a LLM to generate all the Litchens they add to Wikipedia including the Wikipedia:The World Destubathon. If you ever wondered why articles like Lichesterol have weird phrases like "proving that this unusual molecule can be synthesized artificially" or "and proving, for the first time, that it is feasible to synthesise this type of sterol".

I see more content generation like this on the horizon for Wikipedia. I don't want it to be, but this is what people apparently want. 🌿MtBotany (talk) 04:42, 29 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Thanks to the writers for putting these all together. I'm concerned we may need to work on a language for arrests that has a bit less jargon if this becomes an increasingly common occurrence, as this may be something we want external media to pick up on. CMD (talk) 03:28, 24 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Some additional context from this May 30 article in Nasha Niva (a newspaper that the May 26 Wikinews story summarized in this Signpost article draws from), Google translated:

The editor of the Belarusian Wikipedia says that the detention of two administrators has not led to “paralysis of the section’s work” and the page “continues to function as usual.” [...]

The situation looks different in the case of the Belarusian Wikipedia in "Tarashkivitsa".
"The detained administrator of that section, [...] had spent several years using insults, threats and blocking to push out almost everyone who wanted to write there. At some point, he became almost the only one creating content - a kind of one-man wiki.
[...]
Wikipedia and YouTube are two projects that cannot be simply blocked, because they are needed by absolutely everyone. [...]

The Wikimedia Foundation is well informed about the detentions in Belarus, the editor says.

Regarding the latter, it would be interesting to know if the Wikimedia Foundation has made any attempts to lobby the US government to intervene in support of the detained editors. Two days ago, the NYT reported:

President Trump sent a special envoy to Belarus for talks on Saturday with President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko [...] There was no immediate sign that Washington would ease sanctions on Belarus. But John Coale, Mr. Kellogg’s deputy, said the visit to Minsk had secured the release of 14 political prisoners from Belarusian jails. [...] The freed prisoners, who arrived in neighboring Lithuania by car on Saturday afternoon, included Sergei Tikhanovsky, a dissident and the husband of the exiled opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya.

Regards, HaeB (talk) 06:25, 24 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@HaeB: Can the WMF not appoint a steward in this case? Where then those rights may be furthered to the local bewiki community, as this crisis isn't resolving itself anytime soon. Gotitbro (talk) 11:18, 26 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I’m a little disappointed to hear that Bbb23 lost his admin tools, particularly since I do not recall ever seeing a notice about the recall petition or any ANI report inviting larger community input on such a matter. I have growing concerns that this process is being used as a back door to selectively harass admins by threatening them with recall petitions if the outcome of a given admin action was not to a specific account’s liking. I also find it odd that out of the entire myriad of tool sets it’s only admins that are specifically target by recall pages, not crats, not extend confirmed or auto patrolled accounts, just admins. It reads to me like a low level form of authorized harassment against the admin corps, which then puts the Foundation’s anti-harassment initiatives in an interesting place vis-a-vis needed admins to help on Wikipedia but throwing them under the proverbial bus if they do something people don’t like, which is all but guaranteed to happen sooner or later. I’d be the first to admit I’m no wait, and I’ve made some admin tool fuck ups myself, but I don’t want to have the bit stripped from me simply because I crossed wires or tried to help with a block or page protection. Maybe I’m just being paranoid again, but I feel like this process ought to be shut down or at least retooled some, I personally don’t like feeling that I can be singled out exclusively for prosecution in a kangaroo court for no reason other than being an admin. Anyone else kind of get that feeling out of the process too, or is it just me? TomStar81 (Talk) 23:22, 24 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@TomStar81: The admin recall procedure is an imperfect one and is being improved on with almost each recall initiated. FOr Bbb23, there was a long discussion on WP:AN, Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard#Admin_Bbb23, which led to a recall petition started with notice given on the same noticeboard, Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Archive371#An_administrator_recall_petition_has_been_initiated_for_Bbb23. The petition was certified within hours, Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard#Bbb23_recall_petition_certified.

The first petition was started without prior notification to the admin in question, but that admin eventually lost his RRfA anyway. The latest instructions now indicates that it is a best practice to start the a discussion with the admin first and upon exhuasting the discussion(s), start the recall. – robertsky (talk) 01:39, 25 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The administrators' noticeboard has long been a venue to discuss the removal of most permissions (it's mentioned at Wikipedia:Requests for permissions § Review and removal of permissions), and you only have to convince one administrator to proceed on their own initiative. isaacl (talk) 01:51, 25 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Tom, I might step back and reconsider this comment. For example, one of the requirements of being an administrator here is that they hold the trust of the English Wikipedia community. Extended-confirmed and autoconfirmed users get those userrights after some editing and some time. There's no comparison to be made. It may be worth having a look at Wikipedia talk:Administrator recall and Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/2024 review to see how hundreds(?) of users worked to get to the current process. Ed ^{[talk] [OMT]} 01:58, 25 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@The ed17: The lower end user rights, as you noted, are earned, but bureaucrats, arbcom officials, checkuser rights, etc (the "higher level rights", if you will) are exempt from this particular form of recall. Only the admin corps specifically is singled out, which is what bothers me here. Why us admins, and not a generic recall for the crats and arbcom members and so forth in that manner? For me, its in interesting question with no immediate answer. It may be that the admin corp is the most visible part of policy and guideline enforcement, it may be that the crats and the check users and such are not thought of as being subject to recall (or worse, are shielded from it by the foundation, preventing recall), it may be that no one has suggested it, or it just may be that the tasks they do are not thought of as important enough for the community to consider a formal recall process. I'm not going to pitch a fit or protest or so forth in that manner, it just strikes me as weird that at present the only group of those required to obtain community consensus for additional privileges that is subject to recall is the admin corps. TomStar81 (Talk) 17:13, 3 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@TomStar81: I'm still not sure you're looking at this fairly. Arbcom can be voted out and its members can be removed faster by a committee vote. Checkusers have their own, and quite serious, process. Bureaucrats, with respect to those in that role, have few discretionary powers these days. Ed ^{[talk] [OMT]} 19:39, 3 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Who cares about the victims? We need to make sure we don't hurt the perpetrator's feelings. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 🛸 15:34, 26 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Seriously though. What's with so many admins going "oh, that poor administrator", while blatantly ignoring the dozens of editors, both old and new, that were harassed and driven from the project by said admin. That's especially true for Bbb23, where the AN discussion had to overturn so many of his blocks even from just a cursory look, because they were so appallingly terrible. TomStar81, are you actually concerned about being called out for harassing newbie editors? Why exactly would that be something you, as an administrator, would be worried about? Silverseren^C 17:25, 3 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Adminship is a thankless task, I've had the bit for about 16 years now, been yelled out a lot, made a few mistakes - some of them dozzies - and have not, in all that time, managed to earn an admin's barnstar. I note that your privileges do not include the admin bit, but you have four of the big ones and I suspect have probably made mistakes too, yet there's no formal recall process for such as this for rollbackers, autoconfirmed users, extended confirm contributors, or pending changes reviewers. Not that the tools can't be revoked if you miss use them, but there is no established recall page for editors who mess up with your tool sets vs the admin recall page which is set up to deal specifically my toolset. You don't find that odd, or unusual, or peculiar? TomStar81 (Talk) 17:44, 3 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

For some of them, the damage they can do is limited. XCON users can only edit a few more articles (though more contentious) than an IP editor. Rollbacking really isn't something that an IP couldn't do, as it is simply reverting an article to a previous state which can be done through copy-pasting. Pending changes only affects a tiny portion of articles and a tiny portion of edits made to those articles. On top of all of that, all of them can simply be blocked by an admin if needed. I cannot comment of checkusers or other roles as I do not have those permissions and I am not well versed in those areas.

Admins on the other hand have blocking power which cannot be done by any other role to my knowledge. They can also delete and undelete articles. Both of those can be very serious if used incorrectly compared to something like rollbacking, which can be done by anyone in theory. They also cannot be combatted by anyone but admins. I also believe admins in particular are targeted as they are common enough to be often seen, unlike bureaucrats, but not so common that they are drowned out, like rollbackers. ✶Quxyz✶ 17:55, 3 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• This may be a very common opinion, though it still feels like one I must put into words here: This feels very revenge-motivated. As many of us remember, within the last year Elon Musk, head (? What does he actually do, let's be real) of Tesla among numerous other things, has had a very public feud with Wikipedia as well as the Foundation as a whole (resulting in a very successful donation run). I guess the real question is if there's any legal basis for the DMCA request or if it's just more Elon grumping about being shown up on the public stage, something we've seen very publicly within the last two weeks with the "Big Beautiful Break-Up". XFalcon2004x (talk) 17:22, 25 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  The Commons discussion seems to suggest there was some basis for 1 of the 4 files, and that there was a general issue (not specific to Tesla) of people misclaiming "own work". CMD (talk) 21:54, 25 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  I think I have seen multiple cases of archaic maps and satellite photos being claimed as own work. My favourite ones are the ones that have attribution in the caption but claim own work in the credits. ✶Quxyz✶ 16:16, 30 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• It's interesting to read the letter from Are not Fox. It makes "good faith" claims that no competent attorney should make. Of course this is a common ploy, and a key use of lawyer's letters, to achieve a goal that not only would not be achievable in an actual court, but is not actually supported by law. It's not one, however, that a reputable lawyer should ever be party to. All the best: Rich Farmbrough 15:36, 2 July 2025 (UTC).[reply]