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spectrum.ieee.org

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.

    • finalarbiter@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      8·
      18 hours ago

      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.