Generating Stub Articles about Women in Religion: An Experiment in Retrieval Augmented Generation and Fine-Tuning LLMs

This paper describes an experiment to generate stub articles about women religious leaders using a purpose-built artificial intelligence system as a means to address gender imbalances on Wikipedia. The Women in Religion User Group is an officially recognized Wikimedia Movement Affiliate that “seeks to create, update, and improve Wikipedia articles pertaining to the lives of cis and transgender women scholars, activists, and practitioners in the world's religious, spiritual, and wisdom traditions.” (Women in Religion 2025) In the early stages of the project, we explored the use of retrieval augmented generation (RAG) to improve the veracity of the stubs that the LLM generated. In the current phase of the project, we are fine-tuning an open-source large language model to improve its ability to create Wikipedia stubs. After reviewing these techniques, we discuss their effectiveness while also raising ethical questions about releasing our project in open source.