this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2026
127 points (89.9% liked)

Technology

80267 readers
4006 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
L3s@lemmy.world
enu@lemmy.world
technopagan@lemmy.world
L4s@lemmy.world
L3s@hackingne.ws
127
Is Wikipedia's Volunteer Model Facing a Generational Crisis? (spectrum.ieee.org)
submitted 9 hours ago by flango@lemmy.eco.br to c/technology@lemmy.world
45 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

teens and twentysomethings today are of a very different demographic and have markedly different media consumption habits compared to Wikipedia’s forebears. Gen Z and Gen Alpha readers are accustomed to TikTok, YouTube, and mobile-first visual media. Their impatience for Wikipedia’s impenetrable walls of text, as any parent of kids of this age knows, arguably threatens the future of the internet’s collaborative knowledge clearinghouse.

The Wikimedia Foundation knows this, too. Research has shown that many readers today greatly value quick overviews of any article, before the reader considers whether to dive into the article’s full text.

So last June, the Foundation launched a modest experiment they called “Simple Article Summaries.” The summaries consisted of AI-generated, simplified text at the top of complex articles. Summaries were clearly labeled as machine-generated and unverified, and they were available only to mobile users who opted in.

Even after all these precautions, however, the volunteer editor community barely gave the experiment time to begin. Editors shut down Simple Article Summaries within a day of its launch.

The response was fierce. Editors called the experiment a “ghastly idea” and warned of “immediate and irreversible harm” to Wikipedia’s credibility.

Comments in the village pump (a community discussion page) ranged from blunt (“Yuck”) to alarmed, with contributors raising legitimate concerns about AI hallucinations and the erosion of editorial oversight.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] bleistift2@sopuli.xyz 0 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Simple English is for people who would like a simpler language. I’m advocating for reduced scope – or at least better organization of detail. Move stuff that’s irrelevant in the great scheme of things to subpages or pages with narrower scope, instead of writing one single compendium on a topic.

I feel like the English Wikipedia is already better at this. In the German, on the other hand, the first sentence sometimes contains multiple lines of etymological derivations of the article’s title before it even mentions what it’s about (as soon as I stumble upon one of these monstrosities again, I’ll report the example here).

[–] PointyFluff@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 hours ago

Then go make one.