TLDR : The Wikimedia Foundation's AI-generated Wikipedia article summaries project was halted due to contributor backlash.
With its simplified article summaries, the web team at the Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts and develops Wikipedia, aimed to provide its readers with an overview of articles written in more accessible language. Facing an outcry from encyclopedia contributors, they suspended the mobile test that began on June 2 and was halted the very next day.
This test was part of the "Simple Article Summaries" project, presented at Wikimania 2024. It aimed not only to make articles more understandable to a wider audience, to test display options before considering potential moderation methods, but also to evaluate the impact on reader engagement. The team chose Cohere's open-source model aya-expanse-32b, an enhanced version of the multilingual Aya-23 model, explicitly excluding proprietary models for governance, cost, and control reasons.
According to a usability test conducted by the project leaders on the summary of an English article about dopamine, reader reactions were generally positive.
Another experiment introduced these summaries in a browser extension. Results show that 8% of visitors clicked on the summary, and 75% of respondents found the option useful.
The paused pilot test was the next step of the project. It allowed 10% of mobile users to access AI-generated summaries if they wished through an opt-in feature, with a yellow banner indicating they were unverified. According to 404Media, contributors strongly contested the initiative, with some fearing it might compromise the online encyclopedia's editorial integrity. On Village Pump Technical, Wikipedia's technical forum, others criticized the lack of prior consultation, which the Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson acknowledged, announcing the immediate pause of the project, assuring:
"We welcome these thoughtful comments, as they continue to make Wikipedia a platform of collective human knowledge."