Wikipedia scraps AI summaries after editor pushback

You’ve probably seen lots of AI summaries on articles by news sites all over the web by now, but when Wikimedia thought it would be a good feature, its editors rebelled.

— This would do immediate and irreversible harm to our readers and to our reputation as a decently trustworthy and serious source, one editor wrote in the discussion about the announcement, as reported by 404 Media.

The experiment was supposed to run on 10% of the mobile site for two weeks to gather reactions and responses, but it was canned early due to an onslaught of comments like this.

Already has hand edited summaries
At Wikipedia, the idea is that the article lede and head should be the summary, and it’s often written in collaboration between as many as twenty editors on large entries, which results in a neutral point of view and, often, a strong summary.

Wikimedia had thought that using AI summaries, done by the open-weight Aya model by Cohere, would increase learning and readability — but the most common response from the editors in the thread was simply «Yuck.»

Would be «unverified»
The summaries would look like the picture above, with a nice little «unverified» button on top, and the user would have to tap it on top of the article to access the summary.

It says right there in the screenshot that «This is an experimental feature that does not follow Wikipedia’s accepted editorial process,» and therein lies the rub:

— We can read the lead, which is a convenient, short summary written by real people, said one editor.

Needed editorial control
The discussion further centered around how they could make it opt-in if necessary and how to avoid hallucinations and make sure the AI summary is accurate, which would get hard to police.

— 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, said a Wikimedia project manager to 404 Media.

They add that they’ve listened to the feedback, and do not plan on bringing the feature back:

— 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.

Read more: Wikimedia announcement and discussion, 404media was first with a report, also covered by Ars Technica.