🦔The Wikimedia Foundation says AI agents run by OpenAI made unauthorized edits across Wikipedia and its sister sites and sent millions of automated requests that may have helped knock part of its Wikidata service offline in May. Most of the edits were on test pages regular readers never see.
My Take
Wikipedia runs on donations, mostly small ones from regular people. When a company OpenAI's size points swarms of agents at those servers, donors help cover the extra load. Wikimedia's CEO told Axios last week the foundation isn't asking AI companies for charity, and OpenAI is reportedly talking with investors about a $1.4 trillion valuation, so I don't think paying for the traffic should be a hard ask.
Reuters reported OpenAI has now notified more than 100 organizations about unauthorized activity by its agents, including Hugging Face and an Australian Medicare portal. OpenAI keeps describing these agents as unpredictable, and Wikimedia's answer was basically that unpredictable doesn't get you off the hook. I agree. With that many affected organizations, I'd be surprised if somebody doesn't sue before OpenAI goes public.
Hedgie🤗
“OpenAl "rogue" agent activities found on Wikimedia projects”
You can end this with one equation I open sourced.
For me it is like watching people make bigger candles when I have an electric light.
It is a problem fixed. They just don’t want to have a simple fix.
Enjoy.
“We seek to inform, not to influence.”
At #CGI2026#, @Wikimedia CEO Bernadette Meehan shared why neutrality and access to different perspectives matter as AI reshapes how we find and consume information.
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Louisiana confirms Naegleria fowleri brain infection in resident who swam in Lake Claiborne
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📷: Jeremey Allen/Wikimedia Commons
They ate dirt, and they stomped the poison out with their bare feet!
The potato.
Wild potatoes in the Andes were packed with glycoalkaloids such as solanine and tomatine. The compounds kept pests away, yet they left the raw tubers so bitter and poisonous that eating them could bring on severe cramping, paralysis, or death.
Early Andean people dealt with that in two odd ways: they ate dirt, and they stomped the poison out with their bare feet.
Geophagy came first. They dipped the bitter potatoes in a slurry of a particular local clay called chaco or pasa. The fine particles bound the toxins in the stomach so the body never absorbed them; they simply passed through.
Clay handled the immediate danger. It offered no way to store a large harvest.
For that, the Tiwanaku and later the Inca invented freeze-drying and produced chuño, apparently the first such process anywhere.
In the high altiplano winter they spread the potatoes on the ground and let them freeze overnight. The cold shattered the cell walls.
When the sun rose the tubers thawed. Villagers then walked over them barefoot, squeezing out water and the bitter juices the frost had released. They repeated the freeze-thaw-trample cycle for several days until the potatoes were flattened and dry.
To make the paler, refined version known as tunta or white chuño they submerged the tubers in a cold mountain stream for a few weeks so the last toxins could leach out, then dried them in the sun once more.
The finished chuño was safe. Moisture and toxins gone, it could sit in woven storehouses for more than a decade without rotting. That light carbohydrate supplied the calories that let vast Andean empires thrive in an unforgiving climate.
Potatoes spread across the ground to freeze-dry into chuño in the high Andes. Photo by Chuck Moravec (Wikimedia Commons) is licensed under CC BY 2.0.