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AI Translations Are Adding ‘Hallucinations’ to Wikipedia Articles (www.404media.co)

submitted 11 hours ago by tonytins@pawb.social to c/technology@lemmy.world

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Wikipedia editors have implemented new policies and restricted a number of contributors who were paid to use AI to translate existing Wikipedia articles into other languages after they discovered these AI translations added AI “hallucinations,” or errors, to the resulting article.

The new restrictions show how Wikipedia editors continue to fight the flood of generative AI across the internet from diminishing the reliability of the world’s largest repository of knowledge. The incident also reveals how even well-intentioned efforts to expand Wikipedia are prone to errors when they rely on generative AI, and how they’re remedied by Wikipedia’s open governance model.

The issue in this case starts with an organization called the Open Knowledge Association (OKA), a non-profit organization dedicated to improving Wikipedia and other open platforms.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260307182752/https://www.404media.co/ai-translations-are-adding-hallucinations-to-wikipedia-articles/

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[–] TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 5 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

Upfront: Here's the Administrators' Noticeboard discussion.

Okay, this one apparently slipped under my radar, albeit it seems like they're pretty small and only started in 2022. Here's their 2025 report.

It seems like their limited focus is on using LLMs for interwiki translation; to what extent its paid editors are capable of that, I have no idea. We maintain a list of paid editing companies here (usually undisclosed against policy).

OKA asserts:

For example, articles in topics such as Science, technology, engineering, and Finance are lacking compared to topics such as History, Geography, and Humanities.

I have no idea how they reached this conclusion or how they think they're qualified to translate anything given the random "totally not a Central European language" capitalization of words like that.

Per 404:

A job posting for a “Wikipedia Translator” from OKA offers $397 a month for working up to 40 hours per week. The job listing says translators are expected to publish “5-20 articles per week (depending on size).”

20 for any reasonable-size article could not adequately be vetted by one person in an 84-hour work week, for context, and that's $9.90/hour at 40 hours. (edit: wait, sorry, I read that as $397 per week; $397 per month would be < $2.50/hour. What the fuck.)

Overall, before reading the discussion, the people at OKA seem like disruptive morons.

Edit: Into the discussion we go:

Cmon man, the training guide instructs translators to create multiple email accounts to get around LLM usage caps… — ExtantRotations

...yes, and? — 7804j [OKA founder]

Jesus christ. 🤦

Edit 2: 7804j just cannot stop themself from transparently using an LLM to participate in the discussion.

Edit 3: "we ensure they are above the minimum wage in the countries where the editors reside" oh my fucking god