If they add AI they better not ask me for any money ever again.
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Or moderators. Why would they need those people when the AI can fix everything for free and even improve articles?
Right! I can’t wait to hear about all the new historical events!
I wonder if anyone witnessed the burning of the Library of Alexandria and felt a similar sense of despair for the future of knowledge.
You can download a copy of Wikipedia in full today before they turn it to shit.
Unlike the people in Alexandria, you can spend less that $20 and 20 minutes to download the whole thing and preserve it yourself
Wikipedia articles already have lead in summaries.
Fuck right off with this
A future experiment will study ways of editing and adjusting this content.
A lot of them for the small articles and stubs are written very technically and don't provide an explanation for complex subjects if you aren't already familiar with it. Then you have to read 4 subjects down just to figure out the jargon for what they're saying
I agree, having experienced this especially on mathematics pages. But on the other hand, from my experience, the whole article is very technical in those cases : I'm not sure making a summary would help, and im not sure you can provide a summary both correct and easily understandable in those cases.
Math articles are the worst. They always jump right into calculus and stuff. I usually have to hope there's a simple English article for those!
This is one thing I can see an actual use case for (as an external tool, not as part of WP): Create a summary, not of the article itself, but of the prerequisite background knowledge. And tailored to the reader’s existing knowledge—like, “what do I need to know to understand this article assuming I already know X but not Y or Z”.
Et tu, Wikipedia?
My god, why does every damn piece of text suddenly need to be summarized by AI? It's completely insane to me. I want to read articles, not their summaries in 3 bullet points. I want to read books, not cliff notes, I want to read what people write to me in their emails instead of AI slop. Not everything needs to be a fucking summary!
It seriously feels like the whole damn world is going crazy, which means it's probably me... :(
It's not you.
"It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society." Krishnamurti
If people use AI to summarize passages of written words to be simpler for those with poor reading skills to be able to more easily comprehend the words, then how are those readers going to improve their poor reading skills?
Dumbing things down with AI isn't going to make people smarter I bet. This seems like accelerating into Idiocracy
[...] then how are those readers going to improve their poor reading skills?
By becoming interested in improving their poor reading skills. You won't make people become interested in that by having everything available only in complex language, it's just going to make them skip over your content. Otherwise there shouldn't be people with poor reading skills, since complex language is already everywhere in life.
Nope. Reading skills are improved by being challenged by complex language, and the effort required to learn new words to comprehend it. If the reader is interested in the content, they aren't going to skip it. Dumbing things down only leads to dumbing things down.
For example, look at all the iPad kids who can't use a computer for shit. Kids who grew up with computers HAD to learn the more complex interface of computers to be able to do the cool things they wanted to do on the computer. Now they don't because they don't have to. Therefore if you get everything dumbed down to 5th Grade reading level, that's where the common denominator will settle. Overcoming that apathy requires a challenge to be a barrier to entry.
If the reader is interested in the content, they aren't going to skip it.
But they aren't interested in the content because of the complexity. You may wish that humans work like you describe, but we literally see that they don't.
What you can do is provide a simplified summary to make people interested, so they're willing to engage with the more complex language to get deeper knowledge around the topic.
For example, look at all the iPad kids who can't use a computer for shit. Kids who grew up with computers HAD to learn the more complex interface of computers to be able to do the cool things they wanted to do on the computer.
You're underestimating how many people before the iPad generation also can't use computers because they never developed an interest to engage with the complexity.
Wikipedia articles are already quite simplified down overviews for most topics. I really don't like the direction of the world where people are reading summaries of summaries and mistaking that for knowledge. The only time I have ever found AI summaries useful is for complex legal documents and low-importance articles where it is clear the author's main goal was SEO rather than concise and clear information transfer.
These LLM-page-summaries need to be contained and linked, completely separately, in something like llm.wikipedia.org or ai.wikipedia.org.
In a possible future case, that a few LLM hallucinations have been uncovered in these summaries, it would cast doubts about the accuracy of all page content in the project.
Keep the generated-summaries visibly distinct from user created content.
Is this the same WiliMedia Foundation who was complaining about AI scrapers in April?
IIRC, they weren’t trying to stop them—they were trying to get the scrapers to pull the content in a more efficient format that would reduce the overhead on their web servers.
You can literally just download all of Wikipedia in one go from one URL. They would rather people just do that instead of crawling their entire website because that puts a huge load on their servers.
Ah, but the clueless code monkeys, script kiddies and C-levels who are responsible for writing the AI companies' processing code only know how to scrape from someone else's website. They can't even ask their (respective) company's AI for help because it hasn't been trained yet. (Not that Wikipedia's content will necessarily help).
They're not even capable of taking the ZIP file and hosting the contents on localhost to allow the scraper code they got working to operate on something it understands.
So hammer Wikipedia they must, because it's the limit of their competence.
TIL: Wikipedia uses complex language.
It might just be me, but I find articles written on Wikipedia much more easier to read than shit sometimes people write or speak to me. Sometimes it is incomprehensible garbage, or without much sense.
It really depends on what you're looking at. The history section of some random town? Absolutely bog-standard prose. I'm probably missing lots of implications as I'm no historian but at least I understand what's going on. The article on asymmetric relations? Good luck getting your mathematical literacy from wikipedia all the maths articles require you to already have it, and that's one of the easier ones. It's a fucking trivial concept, it has a glaringly obvious example... which is mentioned, even as first example, but by that time most people's eyes have glazed over. "Asymmetric relations are a generalisation of the idea that if a < b, then it is necessarily false that a > b: If it is true that Bob is taller than Tom, then it is false that Tom is taller than Bob." Put that in the header.
Or let's take Big O notation. Short overview, formal definition, examples... not practical, but theoretical, then infinitesimal asymptotics, which is deep into the weeds. You know what that article actually needs? After the short overview, have an intuitive/hand-wavy definition, then two well explained "find an entry in a telephone book", examples, two different algorithms: O(n) (naive) and O(log n) (divide and conquer), to demonstrate the kind of differences the notation is supposed to highlight. Then, with the basics out of the way, one to demonstrate that the notation doesn't care about multiplicative factors, what it (deliberately) sweeps under the rug. Short blurb about why that's warranted in practice. Then, directly afterwards, the "orders of common functions" table but make sure to have examples that people actually might be acquainted with. Then talk about amortisation, and how you don't always use hash tables "because they're O(1) and trees are not". Then get into the formal stuff, that is, the current article.
And, no, LLMs will be of absolutely no help doing that. What wikipedia needs is a didactics task force giving specialist editors a slap on the wrist because xkcd 2501.
Never thought I’d cancel my recurring donation for them, but just sent the email. I hope they change their mind on this, but as I told them, I will not support this.
This is not the medicine for curing what ails Wikipedia, but when all anyone is selling is a hammer....
Guess they're going to double down on the donation campaign considering the cost involved with ai
Hell nah, I am never donating to Wikipedia if they go AI.
"Most readers in the US can comfortably read at a grade 5 level,[CN]"
so where is the citation? did they just pull a number from their butt? hmm...
srsly, this is some bs.
It's actually true. 56% of Americans are "partially illiterate", which explains a lot about the state of affairs in that country.
In 2023, 28% of adults scored at or below Level 1, 29% at Level 2, and 44% at Level 3 or above. Anything below Level 3 is considered "partially illiterate"
frankly, I'm not quite surprised ._.
edit: upon reading the article, I now wonder if it's possible for your literacy to go down. I used to be such a bookworm in grade school, but now I have to reread stuff over and over in order to comprehend what's going on.
You might just be chronically tired or worn down from the stresses of life. It’s pretty common.
Another thing is as we get older a lot of people will choose more “challenging” adult books and then just be totally bored lol. I read young adult and kids books sometimes (how can I give a book to a child if I haven’t read it myself?) and it’s always surprising to me how they can be ripped through in no time at all.
But in general I think you’re probably right that literacy can decrease with disuse. It seems like most things about the mind and body trend that way
There's a core problem that many Wikipedia articles are hard for a layperson to read and understand. The statement about reading level is one way to express this.
The Simple version of articles shows humans can produce readable text. But there aren't enough Simple articles, and the Simple articles are often incomplete.
I don't think AI should be solely trusted with summarization/translation, but it might have a place in the editing cycle.
The big issue I see here isn't the proposed solution, it's the public image of doing something the tech bro billionaires are pushing hard right now.
It looks a bit like choosing the other side of the class war from their contributors.
Wikipedia, in particular, may not be able to afford that negatvie image, right now.
I could welcome this kind of tool later, but their timing sucks.
I do have concerns about this but it's really all about the usage, not the AI itself. Would the AI version be the only version allowed? Would the summaries get created on the fly for every visitor? Would edits to an AI summary be allowed? Would this get applied to and alter existing summaries?
I'm totally fine with LLMs and AI as a stop-gap for missing info or a way to coach or critique a human-written summary, but generally I haven't seen good results when AI is allowed to do its thing without a human reviewing or guiding the outputs.
Well, this inspired me to swing my monthly wikipedia donation over to a world book sub instead. It's bad enough that wikipedia was a very dubious source of info, but now this is just too much.
Thanks, I hate it.