The Wikimedia Foundation, the organization behind Wikipedia, made the unfortunate decision to announce the trial of a new AI-fueled article generator this week. The backlash from the site’s editors was so swift and so vengeful that the organization quickly walked back its idea, announcing a temporary “pause” of the new feature.
A spokesperson on behalf of the Foundation—which is largely separate from the decentralized community of editors that populate the site with articles—explained last week that, in an effort to make wikis “more accessible to readers globally through different projects around content discovery,” the organization planned to trial “machine-generated, but editor moderated, simple summaries for readers.” Like many other organizations that have been plagued by new automated features, Wikipedia’s rank and file were quick to anger over the experimental new tool. The responses, which are posted to the open web, are truly something to behold.
“What the hell? No, absolutely not,” said one editor. “Not in any form or shape. Not on any device. Not on any version. I don’t even know where to begin with everything that is wrong with this mindless PR hype stunt.”
“This will destroy whatever reputation for accuracy we currently have,” another editor said. “People aren’t going to read past the AI fluff to see what we really meant.”
Yet another editor was even more vehement: “Keep AI out of Wikipedia. That is all. WMF staffers looking to pad their resumes with AI-related projects need to be looking for new employers.”
“A truly ghastly idea,” said another. “Since all WMF proposals steamroller on despite what the actual community says, I hope I will at least see the survey and that—unlike some WMF surveys—it includes one or more options to answer ‘NO’.”
“Are y’all (by that, I mean WMF) trying to kill Wikipedia? Because this is a good step in that way,” another editor said. “We’re trying to keep AI out of Wikipedia, not have the powers that be force it on us and tell us we like it.”
The forum is littered with countless other negative responses from editors who expressed a categorical rejection of the tool. Not long afterward, the organization paused the feature, 404 Media reported.
“The Wikimedia Foundation has been exploring ways to make Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects more accessible to readers globally,” a Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson told 404 Media. “This two-week, opt-in experiment was focused on making complex Wikipedia articles more accessible to people with different reading levels. For the purposes of this experiment, the summaries were generated by an open-weight Aya model by Cohere. It was meant to gauge interest in a feature like this, and to help us think about the right kind of community moderation systems to ensure humans remain central to deciding what information is shown on Wikipedia.”
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