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In the media

AI ban, newspapers disrupt archiving; and antisemitism complaints

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By Bluerasberry, Bri, Mitchsavl, HaeB, and Smallbones

New guideline prohibits AI in article content, press applauds

404 Media and several other sources noted the Request for comment that decided that AI generated content would be prohibited in articles with only two small exceptions, an editor copy editing their own text, and for help translating an article from a non-English language Wikipedia into English.

404 Media talked with User:Chaotic Enby, who proposed the guideline with help from WikiProject AI Cleanup. They said that it seemed unlikely an earlier guideline would last because previously the editor community has been divided on the issue. But "the mood was shifting, with holdouts of cautious optimism turning to genuine worry."

Digital Journal was ebullient in Op-Ed: Wikipedia bans AI content—Might also solve the slop problem for everyone. They opine that "AI has become a huge global error factory", linking to a Google News search for "AI content errors". After reviewing why Wikipedia should be the leader in combatting slop, they conclude, "Wikipedia may have just found the way out of this black hole of utter AI crap."

PC World emphasized the importance of enforcing the new guideline. Search Engine Journal explored the reasoning behind the guideline—that AI content often violates core Wikipedia policies such as No original research and Verifiability.

Newspapers block Internet Archive over AI concerns

5 Internet server racks in a small modest room
These server racks in the Internet Archive headquarters are fundamental to fact-checking the Internet.

The Wikimedia Foundation's Global Advocacy team recently called to "Protect our archives!", drawing attention to an article on Techdirt by Mark Graham, director of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. In it, Graham reacted to

Recent reporting by Nieman Lab [that] describes how some major news organizations—including The Guardian, The New York Times, and Reddit—are limiting or blocking access to their content in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. As stated in the article, these organizations are blocking access largely out of concern that generative AI companies are using the Wayback Machine as a backdoor for large-scale scraping.

These concerns are understandable, but unfounded. The Wayback Machine is not intended to be a backdoor for large-scale commercial scraping and, like others on the web today, we expend significant time and effort working to prevent such abuse [...]

The Electronic Frontier Foundation criticized The New York Times' decision as well: "Blocking the Internet Archive Won't Stop AI, But It Will Erase the Web's Historical Record". The EFF highlighted Wikipedia as an example of collateral damage: "According to Archive staff, Wikipedia alone links to more than 2.6 million news articles preserved at the Archive, spanning 249 languages." It also noted that the Internet Archive has been preserving newspaper stories since it was founded in the mid-1990s, making it the digital equivalent of the paper copies often found in the basements of libraries. EFF argues that holding and organizing the newspapers into a searchable form serves a transformative purpose, thus is a fair use under US copyright law.

The aforementioned Nieman Lab article details the point of view of the news companies, e.g. The Guardian:

The publisher decided to limit the Internet Archive’s access to published articles, minimizing the chance that AI companies might scrape its content via the nonprofit’s repository of over one trillion webpage snapshots.

The New York Times and The Guardian are trying to retain control of their intellectual property as well as minimize the disruption from the Internet Archive's scrapers. As noted by the EFF, all this happens against the backdrop of larger legal fights:

Publishers seek control over how their work is used, and several—including the Times—are now suing AI companies over whether training models on copyrighted material violates the law. There’s a strong case that such training is fair use.
Whatever the outcome of those lawsuits, blocking nonprofit archivists is the wrong response.

Similarly, Nieman Lab quoted computer scientist (and web archiving expert) Michael Nelson as saying, "Common Crawl and Internet Archive are widely considered to be the 'good guys' and are used by 'the bad guys' like OpenAI, in everyone’s aversion to not be controlled by LLMs, I think the good guys are collateral damage." The Guardian and the Internet Archive are working together to try to design and implement the needed changes.

This complex situation may be exacerbated by the problems at archive.today reported in the 10 March 2026 issue of The Signpost.

Readers are encouraged to use the Comments section below to give their views on this dynamic situation. – BR, Sb, H

"No purpose except to underscore otherness"

Mel Brooks in suit, smiling, in a crowd, age 85
The Wikipedia biography for Mel Brooks contains a section on Jewish identity.

Using Mel Brooks' early life and education as an example, The American Prospect discussed the special treatment that some biographies of Jews receive:

In general, Wikipedia listings don't identify the religions of most people, though they do often have brief references to ethnicity. But Jews get more detail. Wikipedia doesn't care whether a person is observant or whether they note Jewish identity in their own biographies. As in the Nuremberg laws, once a Jew, always a Jew. In some cases, Wikipedia even includes the Yiddish version of surnames, which seems to have no purpose except to underscore otherness.

– B

The human rights façade

original graphic image with stylized letter W
Logo of the Wiki Rights project

Israeli media advocacy group HonestReporting recently released an article about WikiRights, a Euro-Med HRM project, where it refers to the organization as a "radical antisemitic NGO", and describes the impact this has on the information landscape. The article is critical of the program, especially about their training of activists and university students on how to edit Wikipedia and their focus on the Gaza war, accusing Euro-Med of having "strikingly nefarious" aims, while also claiming that the organization is "deeply embedded in the international campaign to portray Israel as committing genocide and other atrocity crimes".


According to the Euro-Med website, the goals of WikiRights are to enrich and promote human rights content on Wikipedia, create new human rights content and update existing content, create teams interested in participating in their goals on Wikipedia, and "Strengthening the narrative of victims of violations and highlighting them to the other side's story." – M

Pick your cards

TKTK
The booster pack

Wikipedia has been turned into a gacha style card collecting game, with articles turned into their card form. Boing Boing has reported that the game appears to be vibe coded (generated by AI), and uses ads as opposed to microtransactions. The game uses data from Wikirank.net, a site for "Quality and popularity assessment of Wikipedia" to determine the rarity of a card, and combines this with page views and article size for the attack and defense values.

The site has been covered by several technology focused outlets, largely praising it for gamifying education, including Rock Paper Shotgun [1], PC Gamer [2], Nerdist, a Forbes contributor [3], and mandatory.com [4]. – M

What's even real anymore?

SimWikiMap is a simulated Electronic flight bag moving map with Wikipedia articles of interest pertaining to virtual aircraft's virtual location for Microsoft Flight Simulator to give cultural/geographic context to the virtual flight experience over virtual terrain. At least it's a real encyclopedia (as real as online can be)... (via NewsBreak [5]) – B

Epstein reputation management team attempted to hack Wikipedia administrators' accounts, claims The New York Times

After he left jail in 2009, Mr. Epstein hired a host of people to make him look better on Google, Wikipedia and many other places on the web...Many of the attempts to launder Mr. Epstein’s web presence, including changes to his Wikipedia page, often overstepped normally accepted lines. Team members created networks of fake Wikipedia editing accounts, sometimes known as sock puppets, to sneak changes past administrators, whose accounts they also tried to disrupt by hacking.
— "Inside Jeffrey Epstein’s Push to Cleanse His Past Online, The New York Times

As part of the evidence of sockpuppetry and hacking, the Times story links to a 2020 "In focus" piece authored by Smallbones that was carried in The Signpost.

Some readers may be fascinated by the incredibly bold claim about an attempted hacking of administrator accounts, but unfortunately, the article provides no further details or evidence regarding this. Given that it seems to conflate administrators with normal editors, and given how often these spammers' own claims to have "hacked" Wikipedia (by editing it) have been reported in news outlets as fact, it remains to be seen whether this actually happened. — B, J

In brief

TKTK
Dllu's "Mount Rainier from the south": it's a wonder
TKTK
Kit culture appreciates Wikipedia



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31 March 2026 (all comments)
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    These comments are automatically transcluded from this article's talk page. To follow comments, add the page to your watchlist. If your comment has not appeared here, you can try purging the cache.
    • Re The Prospect, there does seem to be an obsession with making sure people of Jewish ancestry are identified as such in bios. It seems so much less common for, say, Christians: only if the person has themselves spoken about their Christianity. Lots of athletes and conservative politicians. My first instinct is that it's a dogwhistle, but maybe sometimes it's Jewish pride? Valereee (talk) 10:47, 31 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
      We speculated some on that at Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)/Archive_223#Should_we_have_an_essay_or_something_on_"Jew_tagging"?. With an edit like [8], motivation is not obvious. An edit like [9] is perhaps less opaque. Is the Noah Schnapp article WP-good on his Jewishness? Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 11:44, 31 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
      @Valereee: I personally wonder if it has to do with another way Wikipedia might reflect what reliable sources "notice" and comment on in considerable detail, especially since that article mentions the cases of where it wasn't that important to someone. But I do think there might be some sense of people bring it up more because they're proud/it "othered" them/it had a formative experience on their life. Whether journalists bring it up is another matter. I've mentioned my Jehovah's Witness childhood plenty of times and no one has commented on it yet. No one has commented on my athiesm, either. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 12:33, 31 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
      Another example I can think of is that multiple sources mention that our articles on women tend to have more detailed personal life sections than men. Is it because journalists are more likely to mention such details for women (almost definitely and I can provide examples), men are less likely to find such details relevant and just don't provide them (decent chance), or because women tend to do more childcare than their husbands and thus see this as a more important part of their identity (decent chance)? I think it's probably a combination of all of that. So we probably have different people with different motivations in this situation, too. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 13:38, 31 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
      I offer as an example, James B. Conant, who didn't think his wife rated a mention in his 744-page autobiography. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 02:04, 1 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
      It was also interesting in that article that "The ADL, it turns out, has a whole unit devoted to Wikipedia. ... But the unit couldn’t care less about whether Wikipedia’s entries on American Jews might be antisemitic." Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 12:39, 31 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
      Superfluous identification of Jewish ancestry is very common in Hebrew Wikipedia, so I'm guessing that Jewish pride is a big part of it. Streded (talk) 13:02, 31 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
      Being Jewish is also not considered "normal" (that is you are neither a Christian or non-religious) in the Anglosphere as the United States' Jewish population (which is the largest outside of Israel) only comprises 2% of the population. This means that it is somewhat notable for a person to be Jewish in the eyes of the average Anglophone. I imagine for the same reason, Asian Americans, African Americans, et cetera are identified way more frequently than White or European Americans. ✶Quxyz✶ (talk) 11:00, 1 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
    • We're fortunate to not have Wayback Machine as the only option after archive.today's faux pas. Bless Ghostarchive's maintainer. sapphaline (talk) 10:50, 31 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
    • >>"As in the Nuremberg laws, once a Jew, always a Jew." — And once a Finn, always a Finn. Once a Hungarian, always a Hungarian. Once a Scot, always a Scot. Once a Mexican, always a Mexican. Once an Egyptian, always an Egyptian. Once a Bengal, always a Bengal. Once French, always French. Once an Italian, always Italian. And so on. And so on. And so on. This is a non-issue. Mel Brooks, of all people, is problematic to someone for being identified as a Jew?!? LINK Jesus fucking christ, pardon the expression... Carrite (talk) 11:53, 31 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
    Well, Mel Brooks is discussed in the article because of what the author considers the unusual use of Yiddish there, presumably an extension of what may be a Jew-tagging phenomena taken steps further, to "other". Also, I suppose in your formulation 'once an American, always an American', or perhaps not, but I think considering the American might point to it being somewhat more complicated for any given person. Will someone whose grandparents were all Finns, necessarily call themselves a Finn? Must they? Are they required to? -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 13:51, 4 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
    In a North American context, people often obsess over where you're "from", so maybe? I've had more than one person ask me about my ancestry and they get visibly frustrated whenever I say "Canadian" because that's not what they want to know. But I have to go really far back for a direct ancestor to have been from anywhere else. My understanding is that when North American tourists go to wherever their great-grandparents lived and claim to be that nationality that that tends to be poorly received, though. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 14:05, 4 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
    Maybe they are required to? I don't think so. Alanscottwalker (talk) 14:07, 4 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
    Oh, I very much agree that it isn't required, but sometimes people act like it is. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 14:10, 4 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
    Sometimes, some people might, but that's the problem with "always". -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 14:48, 4 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
    In a North American context, people often obsess over where you're "from" There was a huge discussion about this topic on Reddit many years ago. The conclusion that I recall was that this was a regional difference unique to homogeneous small towns that plays out in many different ways. In the American South, for example, it would emerge in the form of a question that asked "what church do you attend?" But, in Hawaii, it took the form of "which high school did you attend?" Apparently, each region has a different form of this question. I suspect that in the Northeast it comes down to "which university did you attend?" Viriditas (talk) 02:02, 5 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
    • The use of Early Life sections for antisemitic purposes is not a new discovery. Know Your Meme has examples going back to at least 2014. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 15:00, 31 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
    • See User:Acroterion/Jew-tagging and the more recent discussion than what Gråbergs linked, which Kuttner seems to have possibly read. Andre🚐 00:20, 1 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
      I'm glad @Acroterion developed that essay. Twenty years ago this all would have seemed absurd to me, just random weirdos spouting clearly fringe stuff. Even the Unite the Right rally, while appalling and terrifying, seemed that way. But now these ideas have entered mainstream conservative commentary, with commenters issuing coded language that is clearly understood by white supremacists as explicitly acknowledging a conspiracy benefitting Jews. I'm almost wondering if we do actually need policy around tagging -- American Jews, Indian Muslims, whatever? I know everyone hates WP:CREEP, but this is so frequently a BLP issue. Valereee (talk) 13:09, 1 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
      @Valereee a bit off topic, but you might be interested in WP:GENOCIDE. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 13:26, 1 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
      I'm afraid we live in a time where there is left and right antisemitism. I personally do not think "ethnicity tagging" should be an official policy or guideline. As the discussion and essay point out, there are also situations where this must not extend to active removal of appropriate, sourced focus on notable ethnic and religious affiliations. Removal or denial of Jewish history and culture is in some ways a mirror of Jew-tagging, and at least as pernicious. Occasionally, editors who have attempted to emphasize Jewish achievements may view the removal or editing of benign tagging as an attempt at erasure. Andre🚐 13:34, 1 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
      I just ran across this discussion when I was pinged. I agree with Andre that we shouldn't promulgate a detailed guideline for something like this, and in any case, this is covered by the MoS to a large extent. What I was aiming to do was to provide a little context for why it's problematic to tag people for their religion or ethnicity. This applies on a much broader scale in principle, it's just that the compulsion to focus on ethnoreligious identity is more widespread and well-discussed outside Wikipedia for Jews. Acroterion (talk) 15:34, 1 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
      I'm glad you wrote the essay the way you wrote it as I told you, and I think it's fine to be in WP space, but I agree this is already covered in the MoS. I just hope everyone reads it in full. Andre🚐 21:16, 1 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
      My experience has been that some people just ignore the MoS as a rationale and assert special pleading of some kind. The essay is meant to head that kind of argument off and to provide support to the MoS, rather than just telling people to go look at the MoS. The whole idea of a manual of style, much less a Wikipedia manual of style, is a foreign concept for many people. Acroterion (talk) 21:24, 1 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
      Which it does - provide support for and is firmly anchored in the MoS, and carefully threads the needle. And as you said people often ignore guidelines, which is tolerated and even encouraged at times. But that's also why making a new guideline is fraught. Andre🚐 21:38, 1 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
      I would be opposed to a prescriptive approach via guidelines. I think the MoS in its essence is enough, and it's a guideline. Like IAR, departures from the MoS are sometimes warranted, but like IAR, they should be infrequent and easily justifiable. We have plenty of rules, we don't need to add any in this case. Acroterion (talk) 23:06, 1 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
    • Re The Prospect, I think that's a reflect of editors' tendency to obsess over ethnic backgrounds in general. But I agree that ethnicity tends to be noted for Jewish subjects more than others, so the Prospect article is correct in its observations. I agree that it needs to be addressed. Coretheapple (talk) 13:29, 4 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
    • Antisemitism and Israel: Wikipedia is but what sources reflect (also being Jewish, an ethnoreligious identity, isn't aptly comparable to a Christian one). I personally haven't come across any article which appeared to be a case of "Jew-tagging" which from what I've usually seen is nothing more than a case of amplification of minority identities by sources (you are unlikely to find for instance Jewish assertions in many a Israeli bios which would read similar to Christian bios in the US). At the end of the day this identity is important for many people in the US, no more different than what you would find for say Mormon personalities (BYU runs an entire database for Mormon writers and the like). The Yiddish/Hebrew name thing is in many a case just Israeli editors adding that stuff, take for instance the case of Ralph Bakshi which I had to cleanup sometime ago. Considering any of this as antisemitism appears to be stretching that definition beyond its limits, and with the ever expanding definition of it by political actors (e.g. Gaza protests at unis) I will reserve judgment against this. And look no further than the Honest Reporting case above, a classic example of conflating voices critical of Israel/Israeli policies as antisemitism. Gotitbro (talk) 15:51, 11 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
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