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Wikipedia, one of the better things wrought by the internet, made a good decision this month after making a much more dubious one. Earlier this week, Wikimedia Commons, the organization behind Wikipedia, announced its plan to conduct a two-week trial of AI-generated summaries of articles at the top of the articles’ pages. In the announcement, the Web Team explained that the summaries would “take existing Wikipedia text, and simplify it for interested readers.” The plan was met with immediate backlash from the platform’s editors.
The backlash was significant enough that the experiment was paused within a day, reports 404 Media. The negative response is still documented on the original forum announcement, with the immediate first two responses simply reading “Yuck.” While the response was not universally negative, it’s fair to say most of it was. “I sincerely beg you not to test this, on mobile or anywhere else. This would do immediate and irreversible harm to our readers and to our reputation as a decently trustworthy and serious source,” reads one response to the post. Another pointed out that Wikipedia articles generally start with an introductory paragraph that already functions as a summary, while another questioned how an AI summary might function in contentious articles, like that of the Gaza genocide.
“The Wikimedia Foundation has been exploring ways to make Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects more accessible to readers globally,” a spokesperson told 404 in a statement after rolling back the experiment. The statement did not say they would not conduct further experiments in the future, however. A project manager said in a different (under)statement that “it’s clear we could have done a better job introducing this idea.” They added, “We do not have any plans for bringing a summary feature to the wikis without editor involvement.” If the experiment is still reliant upon the work of editors, with or without AI, some might ask: what’s wrong with people?
