Wikipedia's plan to roll out AI summaries wasn’t the only thing editors had gripes about, though. Wikipedia has in some ways become a byword for sober boringness, which is excellent.

Before generative AI, if you wanted an inexpensive way to build out lots of content, you launched a wiki. You’d spin up a site—broad or niche—and throw the doors open for anyone to edit.

The major underlying theme of the replies, though, was that AI summaries had the potential to seriously undermine the trust that Wikipedia had built up over its 24 years of operation.

“Yuck”: Wikipedia pauses AI summaries after editor revolt JournalBot 3 minutes ago Jump to latest Follow Reply 3 minutes ago ...

Wikipedia is backing off a plan to test AI article summaries. Earlier this month, the platform announced plans to trial the feature for about 10 percent of mobile web visitors.

AI-generated summaries appeared at the top of every Wikipedia article with a yellow “unverified” label. Users had to click to expand and read them.

More websites, including Wikipedia and academic archives, are grousing about AI freeloaders that siphon their information.

The nonprofit behind Wikipedia on Wednesday revealed its new AI strategy for the next three years — and it’s not replacing the Wikipedia community of editors and volunteers with artificial ...

Wikipedia already uses AI to detect vandalism, translate content and predict readability, but up until the announcement, it had not offered AI services to its editors. Wikipedia is facing an ...

Not sure if someone has already pointed this out, but Wikipedia articles are supposed to begin with a good summary. If we need AI to create it, we're not doing our job.