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.
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.
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:
The minutia is there if you want, but it’s not necessary if all you need is the summary.
That’s an encyclopedia’s job.
Let’s consult Wikipedia (emphasis mine) [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia#Four_major_elements
Historically, general encyclopedias were limited by the physical amount of space they took up. Wikipedia is not limited by the page and volume counts of physical media and we shouldn’t treat it as such.
While I can agree that domain-specific encyclopedias should continue to limit the scope of their information to relevant topics, I see no reason that Wikipedia should follow suit. Who truly benefits from reducing and editorializing information, especially when the fundamental principle is the free and open flow of knowledge? Could Wikipedia stand to have writing on complex topics that is friendlier to the average joe? Sure, but that should never come at the expense of restricting the sum total of knowledge stored in its servers.
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_English_Wikipedia
simple.wikipedia.org exists for anyone who wants easier to understand articles.
…which seems like a much better way to generate summaries, honestly. Pull in human-written ones, and expand the simple version as necessary.
Simple.wikipedia isn’t a summary of regular Wikpedia, it’s a whole separate thing. It’s intended to convey the same data, just in a simpler way.
Simple English is for people who would like a simpler language. I’m advocating for reduced scope – or at least better organization of detail. Move stuff that’s irrelevant in the great scheme of things to subpages or pages with narrower scope, instead of writing one single compendium on a topic.
I feel like the English Wikipedia is already better at this. In the German, on the other hand, the first sentence sometimes contains multiple lines of etymological derivations of the article’s title before it even mentions what it’s about (as soon as I stumble upon one of these monstrosities again, I’ll report the example here).
Then go make one.
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.
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.
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?
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 with 10k+ characters from top to bottom?
A week ago, at most.
I would argue that there should be a simplified section and a classic ALL THE THINGS version under a “Would you like to know more?” button. I cannot tell you the hours I’ve spent following wikipedia rabbit holes and how rewarding that has been to me.
That’s what the info boxes on the side of the article are for. They’re the simplified, just-the-facts version. If you want to know more, you read the whole article, or look for the section that contains the info you need.
I don’t see why you would want to hide the hoard of knowledge that is a good Wikipedia pare behind a button. There’s already a summary at the top of the page and a table of contents for when you want more on some topic.