What happened

Beginning around 2012, the Swedish-developed bot Lsjbot began mass-producing articles for Wikipedia editions in smaller languages such as Cebuano and Waray-Waray (Philippines) and later contributed to Swedish Wikipedia. 

These bots automatically generated short encyclopedia entries, often on geographic or biological topics, using data scraped from public databases. 

More recently, AI translation tools and large language models have produced similarly flawed content in low-resource languages such as Greenlandic, Yoruba, and Swahili, where linguistic complexity and lack of training data cause frequent factual and grammatical errors. 

The result has been millions of stilted, error-prone articles, some of which contain mistranslations or factual distortions, creating misleading records and crowding out human-authored, culturally informed material. 

Why it happened

This occurred because Wikipedia’s open editing model and enthusiasm for rapid content growth created an incentive to automate article creation, especially for languages with few human editors. 

Bots and AI systems were deployed without robust community oversight or linguistic quality control. Transparency about the extent and nature of bot-generated content has been limited, and accountability mechanisms within Wikipedia’s decentralised governance have been weak. 

Additionally, AI companies and Wikipedia maintainers have not adequately disclosed model limitations or biases, allowing poorly trained systems to produce large volumes of low-quality text in languages they do not “understand.”