Hey everyone, this is Olga, the product manager for the summary feature again. Thank you all for engaging so deeply with this discussion and sharing your thoughts so far.
Reading through the comments, it’s clear we could have done a better job introducing this idea and opening up the conversation here on VPT back in March. As internet usage changes over time, we are trying to discover new ways to help new generations learn from Wikipedia to sustain our movement into the future. In consequence, we need to figure out how we can experiment in safe ways that are appropriate for readers and the Wikimedia community. Looking back, we realize the next step with this message should have been to provide more of that context for you all and to make the space for folks to engage further. With that in mind, we’d like to take a step back so we have more time to talk through things properly. We’re still in the very early stages of thinking about a feature like this, so this is actually a really good time for us to discuss here.
A few important things to start with:
- Bringing generative AI into the Wikipedia reading experience is a serious set of decisions, with important implications, and we intend to treat it as such.
- We do not have any plans for bringing a summary feature to the wikis without editor involvement. An editor moderation workflow is required under any circumstances, both for this idea, as well as any future idea around AI summarized or adapted content.
- With all this in mind, we’ll pause the launch of the experiment so that we can focus on this discussion first and determine next steps together.
We’ve also started putting together some context around the main points brought up through the conversation so far, and will follow-up with that in separate messages so we can discuss further.
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These days, most companies that work with web based products are under pressure from upper management to “use AI”, as there’s a fear of missing out if they don’t. Now, management doesn’t necessarily have any idea what they should use it for, so they leave that to product managers and such. They don’t have any idea, either, and so they look at what features others have built and find a way to adapt one or more of those to fit their own products.
Slap on back, job well done, clueless upper management happy, even though money and time have been spent and the revenue remains the same.
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The sad truth is that AI empowers the malicious to create a bigger impact on workload and standards than is scalable with humans alone. An AI running triage on article changes that flags or reports changes which need more input would be ideal. But threat mitigation and integrity preservation don’t really seem to be high on their priorities.
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Articles already have a summary at the top due to the page format, why was AI shoved into the process?
Because AI
I passionately hate the corpo speech she’s using. This fake list of “things she’s done wrong but now she’ll do them right, pinky promise!!” whilst completely ignoring the actual reason for the pushback they’ve received (which boils down to “fuck your AI, keep it out”) is typical management behavior after they were caught trying to screw over the workers in some way.
We’re going to screw you over one way or the other, we just should have communicated it better!
Basically this.
I canceled my recurring over this about a week ago, explaining that this was the reason. One of their people sent me a lengthy response that I appreciated. Still going to wait a year before I reinstate it, hopefully they fully move on from this idea by then. It sounded a lot like this though, kinda wishy washy.
If they thought this would be well-received they wouldn’t have sprung it on people. The fact that they’re only “pausing the launch of the experiment” means they’re going to do it again once the backlash has subsided.
RIP Wikipedia, it was a fun 24 years.
Summarization is one of the things LLMs are pretty good at. Same for the other thing where Wikipedia talked about auto-generating the “simple article” variants that are normally managed by hand to dumb down content.
But if they’re pushing these tools, they need to be pushed as handy tools for editors to consider leveraging, not forced behavior for end users.
Summaries that look good are something LLMs can do, but not summaries that actually have a higher ratio of important/unimportant than the source, nor ones that keep things accurate. That last one is super mandatory on something like an encyclopedia.
