Editing Eurovision Wiki:WikiProject AI Cleanup/Noticeboard (section)

== Signpost Article ==

Just wanted to draw attention to [[Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2026-03-10/Op-ed|this]] recent ''Signpost'' article about AI possibly inserting citations to medical papers in inappropriate articles. For example, in [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Great_Leap_Forward&oldid=1227011484#cite_ref-15 this edit] to the article on the [[Great Leap Forward]], a user added a citation to a paper about methanol poisoning. And in [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Arctic_char&oldid=990405365 this edit] to the article on [[Arctic char]], another user added a paper about [[lorazepam]] to the sentence, “The first migration of Arctic char has been found to occur between 4 and 13 years of age.”  [[User:BusterTheMighty|BusterTheMighty]] ([[User talk:BusterTheMighty|talk]]) 01:10, 12 March 2026 (UTC)

:Obviously this is a problem, but is it a different problem than the already-known issue of editors (not all of whom used an LLM) inserting a random source so the content has a source? I.e. is this a new problem that we need to look out for and figure out the appropriate resolution to (which may or may not be something we're already doing) or is it just a specific example of an something we're already dealing with? If the latter, it may be useful as a way of finding instances of this specific problem (how useful will depend on what the signal to noise ratio is, something the article doesn't mention). 
:We know that LLMs do this because they don't understand ''why'' Wikipedia articles have sources, they just know they do and this is almost certainly true of some humans too. I would guess that editors intending to deceive would be more likely to use a source that would at least plausibly verify the content from a superficial look, so using a pubmed source for a non-medical article feels less likely to be bad faith than either a lack of understanding or of simply not checking the sources the LLM found (which may of course be due to that same lack of knowledge). It is also possible (although unlikely) that a medical paper does actually verify some non-medical claim (I can't remember any examples but I know I've cited things to academic papers that on the surface had little relation to the article subject). [[User:Thryduulf|Thryduulf]] ([[User talk:Thryduulf|talk]]) 02:24, 12 March 2026 (UTC)
:Uhhhh.....
:* The first example, "a study on rat livers appears in List of Disney television films," was the case [[Special:PermanentLink/1077128813|in 2022]], so it is almost definitely not AI's fault.
:* Same for [[Special:PermanentLink/1088306703|the second example]].
:* [[Special:PermanentLink/1085241231|And the third]].
:I stopped here because... dude, you can't even do the most basic diligence possible, like what are you even doing here? (edit to clarify: talking about the author of the Signpost article here, not the thread)
:{{tq| I scraped the titles of PMIDs 1–1000, had some code search Wikipedia for articles containing those titles, and then asked Claude to filter out any articles where the PMID could somewhat plausibly be relevant. This is not a sophisticated approach. It is embarrassingly simple.}}
:Oh. [[User:Gnomingstuff|Gnomingstuff]] ([[User talk:Gnomingstuff|talk]]) 03:01, 12 March 2026 (UTC)
::i've heard of folks inserting their own articles into wikipedia articles supposedly to inflate some metric. (I'm not sure which metric and pretty sure no scholarly field cares if an article is used inside wikipedia, but I think MDPI tracks the citations of articles inside wikipedia?) [[User:Bluethricecreamman]] <span style="font-size: 85%;">([[User talk:Bluethricecreamman|Talk]]·[[Special:Contributions/Bluethricecreamman|Contribs]])</span> 03:13, 12 March 2026 (UTC)
:::According to the article comments this is apparently a [https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T198456 VisualEditor bug]. [[User:Gnomingstuff|Gnomingstuff]] ([[User talk:Gnomingstuff|talk]]) 03:15, 12 March 2026 (UTC)
::::oh my. nvm then. [[User:Bluethricecreamman]] <span style="font-size: 85%;">([[User talk:Bluethricecreamman|Talk]]·[[Special:Contributions/Bluethricecreamman|Contribs]])</span> 03:16, 12 March 2026 (UTC)