Could be an AI company (or several) poisoning the well. They know to remove this when training models but competitors don't. AI companies have an incentive to damage every source of data their competitors might use.

Phone companies and atlases used to do this all the time -- add fake data so that they can see when a competitor is copying them

Could also be an A.I. company trying to refine and perfect its bullshittery. We know how many BS wiki pages that have been found… but only BSAI would know how many they’ve seeded and for how long. Engines that make pages that last longer feed new iterations.

Or a state actor trying to undermine people's confidence in objective facts.

This is disgusting. Wikipedia is such an important public good. Spreading ignorance for profit is reprehensible

Kind of like a 21st century update to the old "phantom settlements" trick that mapmakers used to use.

O.F.F.S. 😞

Could be, could be just somebody's pet project getting themselves adept at using an LLM API. Use Wikipedia as a practice target as a proof of concept of something

Jesus Christ, that thought didn't even occur to me. I just assumed it's assholes doing vandalism for fun