Tag Archives: wikipedia

Wikipedia volunteers spent years cataloging AI tells. Now there’s a plugin to avoid them.

To work around those rules, the Humanizer skill tells Claude to replace inflated language with plain facts and offers this example transformation: Before: “The Statistical Institute of Catalonia was officially established in 1989, marking a pivotal moment in the evolution of regional statistics in Spain.” After: “The Statistical Institute of Catalonia was established in 1989… Read More »

Wikipedia will share content with AI firms in new licensing deals

The cost of “free” knowledge The push for paid licensing follows years of rising infrastructure costs as AI companies scraped Wikipedia content at an industrial scale. In April 2025, the foundation reported that bandwidth used for downloading multimedia content had grown 50 percent since January 2024, with bots accounting for 65 percent of the most… Read More »

AI bots strain Wikimedia as bandwidth surges 50%

Crawlers that evade detection Making the situation more difficult, many AI-focused crawlers do not play by established rules. Some ignore robots.txt directives. Others spoof browser user agents to disguise themselves as human visitors. Some even rotate through residential IP addresses to avoid blocking, tactics that have become common enough to force individual developers like Xe… Read More »

AI-generated articles prompt Wikipedia to downgrade CNET’s reliability rating

reader comments 67 Wikipedia has downgraded tech website CNET’s reliability rating following extensive discussions among its editors regarding the impact of AI-generated content on the site’s trustworthiness, as noted in a detailed report from Futurism. The decision reflects concerns over the reliability of articles found on the tech news outlet after it began publishing AI-generated… Read More »

Wikipedia + AI = truth? DuckDuckGo hopes so with new answerbot

Enlarge / An AI-generated image of a cyborg duck. Ars Technica reader comments 46 with Share this story Not to be left out of the rush to integrate generative AI into search, on Wednesday DuckDuckGo announced DuckAssist, an AI-powered factual summary service powered by technology from Anthropic and OpenAI. It is available for free today… Read More »