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.
Yes.
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.
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.
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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