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Wikipedia supports a plan to test AI articles summaries. Earlier this month, the platform announced its intention to test the functionality for around 10% of mobile web visitors. To say that they were not well received by the publishers would be an understatement. The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) then changed the plans and canceled the test.
AI summaries would have appeared at the top of the items for 10% of mobile users. Readers should have opted to see them. The summaries generated by the AI only appeared “on a set of articles” for the two -week trial period.
Editor comments in WMF announcement (via 404 media) Randée of “yuck” to “smiling horror”. An editor wrote: “It is not because Google has deployed its summaries in AI that we owe only one. I sincerely ask you not to test this, on mobile or elsewhere.
“Wikipedia has somehow become a word for sobriety, which is excellent,” continued the editor. “Let us not insult the intelligence of our readers and join the stampede to deploy Flashy AI summaries.”
The publishers of publishers were not limited to the idea. They also criticized the non -profit organization to exclude them from the planning phase. “You also say that it was” discussed “, which is completely laughable because the” discussion “to which you are linked exactly one participant, the original poster, who is another WMF employee,” wrote an editor.
A spokesperson for the Wikimedia Foundation shared the following declaration with Engadget:
“The Wikimedia Foundation has explored ways to carry out Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects more accessible to readers around the world. This two-week experience and Opt-in was focused on the Wikipedia complex items more accessible to people with different reading levels. For the purposes of this experience, the summaries were generated by an AYA model of open weight by Cohere. He had to assess the interest in such a characteristic and help us think about the right type of community moderation systems to ensure that humans are essential to decide which information is indicated on Wikipedia.
For these experiences, our usual process includes a discussion with volunteers (who create and organize all the information on Wikipedia) to make decisions about the question of whether and how to do with the building functionality. The discussion around this feature is an example of this process, where we have built a prototype of an idea and contacted the community of wikipedia volunteers for their thoughts.
It is common to receive a variety of comments from volunteers, and we incorporate it into our decisions, and sometimes to change course. We welcome such reflected comments – this is what continues to make Wikipedia a really collaborative platform for human knowledge.
As shared in Our last article On the community discussion page, we do not intend to continue the experience for the moment, while we continue to assess and discuss the comments we have already received from volunteers. “On the” discussion “page, the organization explained that it wanted to meet the needs of its audience.” Many readers need a simplified text in addition to the main content “, a WMF employee. wrote. “In previous research, we have heard that readers wanted to have an option to have a quick overview of a subject before moving on to reading the full article.”
The organization has not excluded future AI uses. But they said that the publishers would not be left in the dark next time. “Bringing a generative AI to the Wikipedia reading experience is a serious set of decisions, with important implications, and we intend to treat it as such,” said the spokesperson 404 media. “We have no plan to provide a summary functionality to the Wikis without involvement of the publisher.”
Update, June 13, 2025, 12:52 pm HE: This story has been corrected to note that Wikipedia has never started its AI summary test. The plan was announced, but canceled before it occurs. A declaration from the Wikimedia Foundation has also been added, and the title has also been updated.
