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.
Does someone understand the following sentence?
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.