Wikimedia Pulls Plug on AI-Generated Summaries Amid Backlash
The Wikimedia Foundation has stopped an experiment with AI-generated summaries for Wikipedia articles after massive criticism from the editor community. The project should make complex articles more accessible, but met with violent rejection.
Short Wikipedia experiment
The Wikimedia Foundation has stopped an experiment with AI-generated summaries for Wikipedia articles after only one day. The reason was a wave of violent criticism from the community of volunteers and editors. The “Simple Article summaries” project, ie “simple article summary”, should be tested on the mobile version of Wikipedia on June 2 for two weeks, but was already suspended after numerous negative reactions.
The planned AI summary should appear at the beginning of articles and “unadorned/not checked” label should appear at the beginning. Users should have clicked on the summary to read them completely. The “Open Weight” AYA AYA from Cohere should be used to generate the texts. The Wikimedia Foundation justified the project with the aim of making complex Wikipedia articles more accessible to people with different reading levels.
However, the reaction of the Wikipedia editors was devastating how 404 Media reported. “Very bad idea”, “the strongest possible rejection” and just “igitt” were some of the comments that could be found in the discussion. An editor urgently warned that you take an example to Google: “That would cause our readers and our reputation as a trustworthy and serious source of immediate and irreversible damage.”
Concern about Wikipedia’s integrity
The concerns of the community focused primarily on the integrity of the platform. Wikipedia has earned a call as a reliable source of information for years – especially in times when AI -generated content increasingly flood the Internet with misinformation. An editor summed it up:
Yes, human editors can have problems with reliability and a neutral point of view. But as a collective mass, it balances itself to a beautiful body. With the AI summary you would give a single editor with known reliability and neutrality problems in every article. Wikipedia editor
Wikipedia almost plays a special role on today’s Internet. Because while many platforms have overthrown AI technologies, the encyclopedia has so far successfully defended its quality standards. The Wikipedia community is also actively busy filtering AI-generated content.
Wikimedia Rowert back
The Wikimedia Foundation has now admitted that communication of the project was poor. “When reading the comments, it becomes clear that we would have presented this idea better and that the conversation should have opened in March,” said a project manager of the foundation. However, the organization emphasized that it was still interested in AI generated summaries, but only with a reasonable integration of the editor community.
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