[2503.02879] Wikipedia in the Era of LLMs: Evolution and Risks

Computer Science > Computation and Language arXiv:2503.02879 (cs) [Submitted on 4 Mar 2025 (v1), last revised 2 Mar 2026 (this version, v2)] Title:Wikipedia in the Era of LLMs: Evolution and Risks Authors:Siming Huang, Yuliang Xu, Mingmeng Geng, Yao Wan, Dongping Chen View a PDF of the paper titled Wikipedia in the Era of LLMs: Evolution and Risks, by Siming Huang and 4 other authors View PDF Abstract:In this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis and monitoring framework for the impact of Large Language Models (LLMs) on Wikipedia, examining the evolution of Wikipedia through existing data and using simulations to explore potential risks. We begin by analyzing article content and page views to study the recent changes in Wikipedia and assess the impact of LLMs. Subsequently, we evaluate how LLMs affect various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks related to Wikipedia, including machine translation and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Our findings and simulation results reveal that Wikipedia articles have been affected by LLMs, with an impact of approximately 1% in certain categories. If the machine translation benchmark based on Wikipedia is influenced by LLMs, the scores of the models may become inflated, and the comparative results among models could shift. Moreover, the effectiveness of RAG might decrease if the knowledge has been contaminated by LLMs. While LLMs have not yet fully changed Wikipedia's language and knowledge structures, we believe that our em...