AI translations introduce errors and missing sources in Wikipedia articles
Large language models used by the Open Knowledge Association to translate Wikipedia articles into other languages introduced factual errors, fabricated citations, and missing sources that were not present in the original articles. Wikipedia editors discovered the errors through routine reviews and implemented stricter policies and contributor restrictions in response.
What happened
The Open Knowledge Association (OKA), a nonprofit paying translators to convert Wikipedia articles into other languages, used large language models including Google Gemini and ChatGPT to automate translations. Wikipedia editors discovered that AI-translated articles contained factual errors, missing citations, swapped sources, and unsourced sentences that did not appear in the original articles.
A Wikipedia editor named Ilyas Lebleu (username Chaotic Enby) found that a draft translation of an article about the French royal La Bourdonnaye family cited a specific book page that did not discuss the family. Spot-checks of other OKA-translated articles revealed additional errors including swapped sources and paragraphs sourced from unrelated material. Wikipedia implemented new policies and restricted contributors after discovering these issues.
Reported impact
The errors diminished the reliability of Wikipedia articles in multiple languages. Incorrect citations and fabricated sourcing could mislead readers who rely on Wikipedia as a reference source.
Index analysis
The hallucinations stemmed from relying on large language models to perform translations without human review before publication. Wikipedia's broad policy against LLM-generated articles was not applied to OKA's translation program despite these well-documented failures.
Governance controls
Wikipedia editors implemented stricter review processes following discovery of the errors. Contributors were banned after five documented errors in their translations.
Classification
Sources and evidence
This record was researched and written by the Index, based on the following original reporting.