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.
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.
Not everything is black and white, you know. Just because they have this blunder, doesn’t mean they’re down for good. The fact they’re willing to listen to feedback, whatever their reason was, still shows some good sign.
Also keep in mind the organization than runs it has a lot of people, each with their own agenda, some with bad ones but extremely useful.
I mean yeah, sure, do ‘leave’ Wikipedia if you want. I’m curious to where you’d go.
Me saying “RIP” was an attempt at hyperbole. That being said, shoehorning AI into something for which a big selling point is that it’s user-made is a gigantic misstep - Maybe they’ll listen to everybody, but given that they tried it at all, I can’t see them properly backing down. Especially when it was worded as “pausing” the experiment.
Oh you have so much to learn about companies fucking their users over if you think this is the end of them trying to shove AI into Wikipedia
Then teach me daddy~