Wikipedia Pauses AI Rollout After Moderator Protest

Wikipedia will not be adding AI summaries to articles on its online encyclopedia for the time being. The Wikimedia Foundation decided this after protests from its many volunteers.

The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit behind the world’s most famous online encyclopedia. The group announced last week that it wanted to experiment with AI summaries for several articles, specifically on the mobile version of Wikipedia.

The organisation wanted to test whether there was an audience for such summaries, which you can already find in specific Google searches.

That plan is now not going ahead, writes 404 Media. The Wikimedia Foundation immediately received fierce criticism from many of its moderators, the volunteers who supplement and correct Wikipedia.

They are already concerned about the accuracy of automatically generated summaries and also about Wikipedia’s reputation. The Wikimedia Foundation has now paused the rollout and is examining ways to enhance the user experience of the site further.