Wikipedia Pauses AI-Generated Summaries After Editor Backlash

The Wikimedia Foundation halted an experiment that would have displayed AI-generated summaries atop Wikipedia articles after the platform's volunteer editor community delivered an overwhelmingly negative response to the proposal. The foundation announced the two-week mobile trial on June 2 and suspended it just one day later following dozens of critical comments from editors.

The experiment, called 'Simple Article Summaries,' would have used Cohere's open-weight Aya model to generate simplified versions of complex Wikipedia articles. The AI-generated summaries would have appeared at the top of articles with a yellow 'unverified' label, requiring users to click to expand and read them. Editors responded with comments including 'very bad idea,' 'strongest possible oppose,' and simply 'Yuck.'

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