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.
They want to dumb down Wikipedia
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?
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
Which isn’t a bad thing. Wikipedia has for the last 25 years aimed at providing you with every bit of knowledge there is on a topic. That simply is not what people want when they look for information. No-one wants to read a full library’s worth of text when they want to figure out what happened in WWII. But Wikipedia lists all the minutae of every battle on every part of land, sea and air, including all the acting people from generals down to the lowliest private.
Well, except for those who do. The problem is a use case mismatch. I’d argue, if anything, an encyclopedia should contain the minutiae. Unfortunately, there’s no huge compendium of brief but accurate and sourced synopsis of the same topics. To be fair, we’ve never really had one.
I agree with the editors that embedded AI summaries are not a good idea (at the moment, at least). Users can bring summarizers to the data set of that’s their want, or someone (maybe even wikimedia) will find a way to provide this in a way that preserves the underlying data’s validity. Stripping Wikipedia of its full context seems like a bad idea.
I don’t disagree that some articles could use better information hierarchy. Headings could make that experience way better. But to say that the info shouldn’t be there at all is short-sighted and ignores the point of an encyclopedia.
What? Is there anyone out there that prefers to find small bits of information lying around various sources over a concise summary followed by a solid fleshing out, all in one place? I honestly cannot imagine a use case where I would prefer that a source omits a bunch of information rather than just structure the information so that I can find what I’m looking for. Wikipedia does that. That’s why you have dedicated articles for all those battles in WWII, with their own table of contents and summaries to help you digest them. There has literally never in human history existed any source of knowledge coming even close to structuring and summarising this amount of information as well as Wikipedia has, and you’re advocating that they should make it… not that?
This is crazy. Articles already start with perfectly good summaries. look at your example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II
the very first paragraph is this:
Why do we need any more summaries than that?
Wikipedia already has a simplified version. Literally simple.wikipedia… etc. For example, the page on the Vietnam War can inform you with a few paragraphs on each of the key points of the war. Harold Holt’s page has 3 paragraphs and an info box. It isn’t thorough by any means. It does, however, give the reader a chance to learn about something real quick with lesser chances of getting stuck in the mud and falling down wikipedia rabbit holes.
Somebody just needs to inform the simpletons that there is an easier to digest format already. No need to shrink a well of knowledge when there is a drinking fountain next to it for those who didn’t bring a bucket and rope.
See https://sopuli.xyz/comment/21686277
To all the people downvoting the above comment, when was the last time you’ve read a WP article of 10k+ characters from top to bottom?
A week ago, at most.