Wikipedia:Signs of AI writing/Style

This is an advice page from WikiProject AI Cleanup. This page is not an encyclopedia article or a Wikipedia policy, as it has not been reviewed by the community.

Shortcut WP:AISIGNS/SWP:AISIGNS/S

This is a list of style errors typical of AI chatbots, with real examples taken from various Wikipedia pages.

Title case

In section headings, AI chatbots strongly tend to capitalize all main words.

Examples

Impact of Technology and Digitalization

The advent of digital technology and the internet has revolutionized international economic law. [...]

Sustainable Development and Environmental Law

The integration of sustainable development goals into international economic law is increasingly important. [...]

Human Rights and Economic Law

The relationship between human rights and international economic law is a growing area of focus. [...]

— From this December 2023 revision to International economic law

Overuse of boldface

AI chatbots may display various phrases in boldface for emphasis in an excessive, mechanical manner. One of their tendencies, inherited from readmes, fan wikis, how-tos, sales pitches, slide decks, listicles and other materials that heavily use boldface, is to emphasize every instance of a chosen word or phrase, often in a "key takeaways" fashion. Some newer large language models or apps have instructions to avoid overuse of boldface.

Examples

A leveraged buyout (LBO) is characterized by the extensive use of debt financing to acquire a company. This financing structure enables private equity firms and financial sponsors to control businesses while investing a relatively small portion of their own equity. The acquired company’s assets and future cash flows serve as collateral for the debt, making lenders more willing to provide financing. — From this February 2025 revision to Leveraged buyout

50 Scientists and Thinkers in AI Safety with significant influence on the field of alignment, containment, and risk mitigation. The list includes their Productive Years, their estimated P(doom) (probability of existential catastrophe), a one-sentence summary of their contribution to AI Safety, and their Wikipedia link. — From this November 2025 revision to P(doom)

Inline-header vertical lists

AI chatbots output often includes vertical lists formatted in a specific way: an ordered or unordered list where the list marker (number, bullet, dash, etc.) is followed by an inline boldfaced header, separated with a colon from the remaining descriptive text.

Instead of proper wikitext, a bullet point in an unordered list may appear as a bullet character (•), hyphen (-), en dash (–), hash (#), emoji, or similar character. Ordered lists (i.e. numbered lists) may use explicit numbers (such as 1.) instead of standard wikitext. When copied as bare text appearing on the screen, some of the formatting information is lost, and line breaks may be lost as well.

Examples

Mass Content Removal: The user removed over 20,000 characters of reliably sourced content in a single edit, reducing the number of citations from 34 to 8, without any prior engagement on the Talk page.Disruptive Tagging: Despite the article being supported by 34 high-quality international secondary sources (Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Financial Times, etc.), the user implemented excessive "citation needed" tags as a form of visual vandalism to discredit the content.Refusal to engage (WP:BRD): The user was notified of WP:V and WP:DE policies on their talk page but has failed to justify these massive deletions, suggesting a coordinated attempt at de-legitimizing the subject.Context: Given the high-profile nature of the subject in global finance and mining (notably the AstraZeneca/EsoBiotec $1B M&A), the page is currently vulnerable to reputation-based sabotage.

— From this March 2026 revision to Wikipedia:Requests for page protection/Increase

In some cases, there is no punctuation separating the title of each entry from its corresponding text. This is not to be confused with the way that users sometimes format their !votes in XfD discussions, where words like Keep or Delete are typically written in boldface to set it apart from the arguments for the desired outcome.

Durability Unlike roasted meats, which become tough and dry, or boiled foods, which rot quickly, battered fish was stable. [...]

Portability and the "Pocket Meal" The structural integrity of the polme made the fish physically durable. [...]

Ruggedness It could be wrapped in a simple cloth or paper and stuffed into a satchel. [...]

One might wonder: if it’s a "travel food," why not just cook it on the ship?

The Fire Hazard Cooking with large quantities of boiling oil on a wooden ship was an invitation to disaster. Open flames were strictly regulated at sea.

The Solution Ships would stock up on large quantities of pre-fried battered fish just before departure. [...]

The Transition After those first 48 hours, the crew would switch to harder-to-prepare staples like dried salt cod (bacalhau) or sea biscuits.

The "Cold" Factor This is the most important part for a "travel-ready" food. [...]

The Dockside "Frying Warehouses" The docks of Lisbon, particularly in the Ribeira (riverside) district, were the epicenter of this technology. [...]

Outdoor Caldrons Professional fryers set up large, permanent iron caldrons over open coal or wood fires right on the quays. [...]

"Deep-Frying Mastery" Because the Portuguese already had the caldrons of hot olive oil ready for their fish, it was a natural technological step to drop potato slices into that same oil. [...]

Street Vendors and "Tabernas" In 16th-century Lisbon, many of the poorer urban residents lived in homes without dedicated kitchens. [...]

The Sephardic "Home Factory" While the docks were the commercial center, the Sephardic Jewish quarters (the Judiarias) were where the technology was refined for domestic safety and religious ritual. [...]

Portuguese Sailors as "Early Adopters" In the 1500s, Portuguese sailors were the most active in the North Atlantic cod trade. [...]

The Iberian Potato "Infrastructure" Potatoes reached the Iberian Peninsula (Lisbon and Seville) c. 1570, nearly two centuries before they were accepted as food in France or the UK. [...]

Linguistic Evidence of Global Export The global reach of Portuguese frying technology is evidenced by its impact on other cultures during the same period [...]

The "Sikbaj" and "Escabeche" Connection The Portuguese technique of Escabeche (which involves frying fish and then preserving it in vinegar) is the maritime "big brother" of the battered fish. [...]

Exports to London 16th-century records show that Portuguese ships weren't just carrying wine and salt; they were heavily laden with olive oil destined for the ports of London, Antwerp, and Amsterdam.

A Taste for the "Foreign" Because Portuguese merchants were so active in London’s docks, they created a local demand for olive oil. [...]

The Later Shift From Olive Oil to "Dripping" As the dish moved from the elite merchant/Jewish circles into the broader British working class during the Industrial Revolution, the oil changed due to cost: [...]

— From this December 2025 comment at Talk:Fish and chips

Heading errors

Emoji as formatting

AI chatbots have used emoji in the past. In particular, they sometimes decorated section headings or bullet points by placing emoji in front of them. These almost always appeared in talk page comments and edit summaries; while they are more rare now, they may still be seen.

Examples

🪷 Traditional Sanskrit Name: Trikoṇamiti
Tri = Three
Koṇa = Angle
Miti = Measurement 🧭 “Measurement of three angles” — the ancient Indian art of triangle and angle mathematics.
🕰️ 1. Vedic Era (c. 1200 BCE – 500 BCE)
[...]
🔭 2. Sine of the Bow: Sanskrit Terminology
[...]
🌕 3. Āryabhaṭa (476 CE)
[...]
🌀 4. Varāhamihira (6th Century CE)
[...]
🌠 5. Bhāskarācārya II (12th Century CE)
[...]
📤 Indian Legacy Spreads

— From this July 2025 revision to History of trigonometry

🌍 My Mission: To support the sharing of free, accurate, and reliable information with people around the world.

📚 My Interests: Learning new things, discovering useful information, and exploring topics that educate and inspire others.

🤝 My Goals on Wikipedia: To learn from experienced editors, improve my editing skills, contribute constructively to articles, and help make knowledge accessible to everyone.

— From this October 2026 revision to User:Cheptooh

Unusual use of tables

Some AIs create small, minimally formatted tables that could be better represented as prose or an infobox.

Examples

              —From this November 2025 revision to Draft:Biobanks in India

              —From this May 2026 revision to Draft:Pacific Mall

              —From these sections of a July 2026 revision to Xorai

Sometimes, AIs will attempt to insert markdown table formatting inside wikitables, which renders as an obvious garbled mess.

Curly quotation marks and apostrophes

ChatGPT and DeepSeek typically use curly quotation marks (“...” or ‘...’) instead of straight quotation marks ("..." or '...'). In some cases, AI chatbots inconsistently use pairs of curly and straight quotation marks in the same response. They also tend to use the curly apostrophe (’), the same character as the curly right single quotation mark, instead of the straight apostrophe ('), such as in contractions and possessive forms. They may also do this inconsistently.

Curly quotes alone do not prove LLM use. Directional quotation marks (curly or typographer) are often used in published works written and edited using the Chicago Manual of Style. Microsoft Word has a "smart quotes" feature that converts straight quotes to curly quotes. So does the default system-wide configuration on macOS and iOS devices, except on some applications (or if turned off, as may be necessary for programming). Grammar correcting tools such as LanguageTool may also have such a feature. Curly quotation marks and apostrophes are common in professionally typeset works such as major newspapers. Citation tools like Citer may repeat those that appear in the title of a web page: for example,

McClelland, Mac (2017-09-27). "When ‘Not Guilty’ Is a Life Sentence". The New York Times. Retrieved 2025-08-03.

Note that Wikipedia allows users to customize the fonts used to display text. Some fonts display matched curly apostrophes as straight, in which case the distinction is invisible to the user. Additionally, Gemini and Claude models typically do not use curly quotes.

See also

• Wikipedia:Signs of AI writing
  • Wikipedia:Signs of AI writing/Markup
  • Wikipedia:Signs of AI use in comments

References