teens and twentysomethings today are of a very different demographic and have markedly different media consumption habits compared to Wikipedia’s forebears. Gen Z and Gen Alpha readers are accustomed to TikTok, YouTube, and mobile-first visual media. Their impatience for Wikipedia’s impenetrable walls of text, as any parent of kids of this age knows, arguably threatens the future of the internet’s collaborative knowledge clearinghouse.
The Wikimedia Foundation knows this, too. Research has shown that many readers today greatly value quick overviews of any article, before the reader considers whether to dive into the article’s full text.
So last June, the Foundation launched a modest experiment they called “Simple Article Summaries.” The summaries consisted of AI-generated, simplified text at the top of complex articles. Summaries were clearly labeled as machine-generated and unverified, and they were available only to mobile users who opted in.
Even after all these precautions, however, the volunteer editor community barely gave the experiment time to begin. Editors shut down Simple Article Summaries within a day of its launch.
The response was fierce. Editors called the experiment a “ghastly idea” and warned of “immediate and irreversible harm” to Wikipedia’s credibility.
Comments in the village pump (a community discussion page) ranged from blunt (“Yuck”) to alarmed, with contributors raising legitimate concerns about AI hallucinations and the erosion of editorial oversight.
Idk who “they” is. But from what I’ve seen, the administrators of Wikipedia tend to bias intake of new power-users and mods to people who have been with the project from inception (or, at least, the earlier the better). You get all sorts of justifications for why they’ve adopted this policy. But the bottom line is that Millennials and GenX make up the overwhelming majority of ranking users. And as they age out, they aren’t being replaced with people who were their age when they started using the platform.
This traditionalist base has done a lot to calcify how Wikipedia functions, even as variant communities have improved on the model.
The AI-summary shit is just the tip of the iceberg on the system’s problems. The website is filling up with dead links. The definition of a “trusted news source” is getting outrun by private sector buyouts of old media and unemployed journalists spinning up new media. A big chunk of the organizations’ resources have to deal with fending off legal threats and attacks on system vulnerabilities. The centralized hosting model is expensive to maintain. The rush to be “first to post” creates unnecessary drama among power users in popular niche fields. International language support is… meh (one area where AI would be a huge benefit, as LLMs really shine in this field).
This goes a lot farther than “they want to hurt my Wiki”. And if you bothered to read the whole article, you might see more of why. The Wiki Foundation has dragged its heels on automation and clustered around a handful of power-mods in a way that’s undermined its Open Editor model. Fighting over Simple Article Summaries is just the latest fumble by the leadership, a sizable commitment of resources that’s tossed in the dump almost as soon as its off the press.
It wasn’t off the press, it was announced and in the works but still not close to shipping. Maybe Wikimedia could’ve talked about this great innovative project with the actual Wikipedia community before investing so much money into it.
What would international language support entail? Translating articles into other languages?