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.
There’s alrrady simple.wikipedia.org. Why alienate editors with AI-summaries? Add the summaries from there?
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It always seemed to me that Wikipedia had a great and vigilant team. It never occurred to me they may need help. Can an idiot like me be of any help? I love Wikipedia and I want it to survive into the distant future.
Yes, you can do chores: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Maintenance
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.
I’m in my mid 40s and this is true of me depending upon why I might be reading something. Sometimes, I want to do a deep dive; sometimes I just want to know roughly what
thingis.However, let me say: fuck AI summaries.
I feel like this will end up being a cycle. The AI companies are pushing for AI summaries, which then leads to younger Gen Z and the new Gen Alpha being familiar with and preferring AI summaries. This, in turn, leads to other companies implementing AI summaries because they see that’s what the new generations are using, which leads to the new generations being even more accustomed to those summaries, which leads to more companies implementing them, and it’s just an endless cycle.
am i crazy or don’t most articles already have perfectly good summaries? i dont even buy the premise here.
Not at all. I just got out of something like long-covid (quickly tired and complex stuff is hard) and can attest that reading Wikipedia summaries is hard vs. some random blogs quick summary.
Are you feeling better now? I hope you are.
Yeah, only something like it, thanks. ☺️
Really? I’ve always believed that it is an amazing way to learn basic concepts, because of how articles are linked to each other; furthermore, I have not had any issues with reading entire articles in one sitting. God, what has happened to this world???
I used to complain that regular people can’t write a single page of text. Regular people nowadays can’t read a single page of text… our society is devolving, fast.
I read lots of Wikipedia articles.
Sooooooo should we start creating an alternative to Wikipedia now ?
AI could help editors translate from other languages, but beyond that, it’s an inefficient mess that Wikipedia doesn’t need, plus given how much of AI is just regurgitating Wikipedia, It’ll give itself mad
cowAI disease.Wake up Lemmy, it’s time for your daily, Wikipedia should have more AI slop article.
Let’s make it 1400 words this time, and make sure to mention that younger generations watch Ticktok, but ignore that most TickTok slop is just people summerizing Wikipedia articles.
surely this article from a AI-pusher aligned with… checks notes …some eastern european business school with connections to MIT/Harvard, has the best interests of wikipedia/the public in mind. and isnt just using this in a thinly vieled attelpy at pushing the adoption of AIslop
It’s damn near impossible to make any credible edits to any wikipedia page, anymore. I’ve just stopped all together.
I tried making a simple edit, and after creating my account I was told it was not happening because my IP was geo blocked.
Tried from office, same thing.
Well, keep your secrets then.
Username is relevant?
Well I tried a serious one for Wikipedia lol
That’s a real issue, but the article uses it as a jumping of point to get for AI slop.
Yes.
Yet behind the celebrations, a troubling pattern has developed: The volunteer community that built this encyclopedia has lately rejected a key innovation designed to serve readers.
But not that one, because rejecting AI 1) is not a generational rejection and 2) it is correct to reject it.
What I think is or will be the generational problem: the community that maintains it and decides what is being accepted or rejected is an “in group” that it is impossible to break into with conflicting ideas. For example, I do think the gaming, game mechanics and game development related pages can be vastly improved. But I don’t think the people responsible for those pages are interested in the changes I would suggest.
All the wikis for different games could just be on wikipedia. But they’re not, probably because they were rejected, because it’s “not relevant”. Well, some people decided they were relevant after all and they made their own wikis for those. The outcome is tribalism based fragmentation, because of differences in opinion of who values what and what should be preserved and what shouldn’t.
“designed to serve readers” [citation needed]
This was not, in fact designed to serve readers. No possible meaning of that is in anyway correct. It is “non-designed to serve non-readers”
I’m with you on rejecting AI being sane, but the idea that gaming wikis should be integrated into wikipedia is kinda nuts. If I search “Iron” on wikipedia I’m looking for facts, not a thousand item long disambiguation cluttered with every game that has iron as a resource. Conversely, on a game wiki my search for “Iron” has an entirely different context and I’m looking for different info.
Not to mention game wikis have way lower editorial standards, their own tone (e.g. making jokes), versioning concerns, their own new user friendly homepages etc.
Wikipedia could tuck this all into a separate namespace, sure, but that’s effectively a separate wiki anyway and then it raises questions like “why is wikipedia hosting a mechanical guide for this porn game?” or “How long do we need to host the content for this game that peaked in 2012 and is now abandonware?” that are conveniently sidestepped by those communities supporting themselves.
If I search “Iron” on wikipedia I’m looking for facts
Not what I meant.
The point is: there is an established group of editors, with established rules and preconceptions, an established interpretation on what good sources are and what a neutral perspective is and isn’t, and there is no chance of changing those and that is why I have no interest in interacting with wikipedia in any constructive way.
I could talk about politics too, I picked video games because I know those articles are also bad.
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How do I download the full Wikipedia again?
Check out Kiwix: https://kiwix.org/en/applications/ Here’s their library of scrapped sites: https://library.kiwix.org/#lang=eng
Thank you!
Does someone understand the following sentence?
“then present that knowledge in ways that break the virtuous cycle Wikipedia depends on.”
Wikipedia’s traditional self-sustaining model works like this: Volunteers (editors) write and improve articles for free, motivated by idealism and the desire to share knowledge. This high-quality content attracts a massive number of readers from search engines and direct visits. Among those millions of readers, a small percentage are inspired to become new volunteers/editors, replenishing the workforce. This cycle is “virtuous” because each part fuels the next: Great content leads to more readers which leads to more editors which leads to even better content. AI tools (like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, etc.) disrupt this cycle by intercepting the user before they reach Wikipedia.
Thank you. Totally misinterpreted the word
presentas in being present, causing me to think the sentence didn’t make sense. I need to sleep.
Eventually somebody is going to use textbots to DDOS wikipedia with subtle propaganda (if they’re not already doing that) and it will be impossible to protect without completely locking it down so that only established users can edit.
They already do that with a lot of hot topic articles. As is, there are a lot of protections in place and it’s very difficult for real vandalism or propaganda to stay on Wikipedia for long without someone noticing it and flagging/removing it.
The article is very biased - it basically suggests young people are unwilling to read, that AI is a good thing and that the wikipedia contributors are being unreasonable. It goes on to talk about how AI has “extracted value” from Wikipedia in an unquestioning way - no mention of compensation to the project, just talking about what a triumph Wikipedia is a source for AI to train on.
The “Simple Summaries” situation is less to do with the summaries and more to do with the risk of AI slop being introduced into Wikipedia unquestioned. The summaries were unchecked and unverified, which add a real chance that wikipedia started serving up inaccurate summaries and undermined it’s own reputation.
In addition that idea that younger generations don’t have the concentration span to “read a wall of text” is pernicious and patronising nonsense part of a general media bias against Gen Z and Gen Alpha. There seems to be this barely questioned narrative that they have short attention spans and are unwilling or even unable to read, just because they grew up in the era of social media like Instagram and latterly Tik Tok.
I’ll give a better hypothesis for why younger generations spend less time on wikipedia: the big tech giants like Google have stolen all the information people have put on there and serve it up in their own summaries on the search engine (preventing click throughs) or through their own AI slop engines. They don’t want people clicking through to Wikipedia, they want them clicking through to an ad. The problem is not Wikipedia, and the problem is not Gen Z or Gen Alpha; the problem - as is frequently the case - is the tech mega-corporations who steal everything (including wikipedia) and sell it back to us with ads or via AI slop.
Not reading allat 🥀🥀
Back in my day it was TL:DR! Get off my lawn!
