This policy has been shared a lot by the anti-AI crowd over the last week. They are celebrating it as a major site saying no to AI.
It seems a smaller "win" than most think. Just discourages wholesale rewriting and creation of new articles using AI. Assistance with editing is explicitly allowed.
They seemed open to giving it a try if they were actively involved in the experiment. Instead, it feels like a lot of people don’t really understand how Wikipedia is managed and thought that they could use it as a freeform place to get credibility or just test their pet projects.
Like, this attempt† where the bot then attempted to lecture users who were hostile towards it before it was eventually banned.
I’ve contributed a fair amount over the past few months of primarily AI generated content that I mainly just edit for the usual AI tropes and it’s pretty much all still up.
This is the traditional "innovators dillema" where a skilled profession facing an imperfect technological threat decides not to adopt it until it is too late.
AI generated articles are, on the balance, inferior, except for people that want simple, low quality content.
But LLMs are moving up the value chain with Deep Research. They can give explanations tuned to a reader's knowledge/viewpoints and provide interactive content Wikipedia doesn't support. That is a killer app for math/science topics.
Wikipedia will win against a generic corporate encyclopedia on neutrality/oversight, but it'll lose badly on UX, which is what matters.
I think the tipping point will be direct integration of academic sources into ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini and a "WikiLink" type way to discover interesting follow-up topics.
I can't trust AI answers for serious historical or social science topics because of the first. And generally my chat with AI ends once I get the answer I need because I can't get rabbitholed into other topics.
This is about as intelligent and practical as banning school kids in the 80s from using calculators, based the logic that "you won't always have one with you".
False equivalence. A more apt comparison would be with banning spell checkers (which are still allowed btw). AI isn't a dumb calculator, I feel like this should be obvious.
I've encountered AI contributions on Wikipedia, and, although I wonder how they'll enforce such a rule, I think this is the proper stance to take.
I think readers take for granted how concise Wikipedia's prose tends to be. AI, in comparison, seems built to ramble, being overly specific where it doesn't need to be and lacking specificity where it ought to have it.
When you think about it, "what should go on a thing's Wikipedia page?" is an interesting question; the answer certainly isn't "anything and everything." AI just doesn't have a good sense for what belongs, I feel.
I use the history function from time to time and sometimes catch AI bloat.
I don’t do this systematically, just sometimes out of curiosity.
But it is always the same pattern: bloat, bloat, bloat.
What I very critically witness is the so called gender neutrality movement where large bodies of text get rewritten to fulfill a political agenda.
This is a major loss of quality. Hundreds of years of using language and getting results by using it as a means and if you compare recent downfalls in connection with gender politics you should be very worried of not already.
Even if some admins drive such agendas, why not use a new mode like a new language for those who want it? This would have been the old skill Wikipedia way and the actual edit wars that aren’t sadly made Wikipedia lose massive credibility for me.
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[ 530 ms ] story [ 2449 ms ] threadCan't wait for the 80 page Talk threads.
It seems a smaller "win" than most think. Just discourages wholesale rewriting and creation of new articles using AI. Assistance with editing is explicitly allowed.
Like, this attempt† where the bot then attempted to lecture users who were hostile towards it before it was eventually banned.
† https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:TomWikiAssist
AI generated articles are, on the balance, inferior, except for people that want simple, low quality content.
But LLMs are moving up the value chain with Deep Research. They can give explanations tuned to a reader's knowledge/viewpoints and provide interactive content Wikipedia doesn't support. That is a killer app for math/science topics.
Wikipedia will win against a generic corporate encyclopedia on neutrality/oversight, but it'll lose badly on UX, which is what matters.
I think the tipping point will be direct integration of academic sources into ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini and a "WikiLink" type way to discover interesting follow-up topics.
I can't trust AI answers for serious historical or social science topics because of the first. And generally my chat with AI ends once I get the answer I need because I can't get rabbitholed into other topics.
I think readers take for granted how concise Wikipedia's prose tends to be. AI, in comparison, seems built to ramble, being overly specific where it doesn't need to be and lacking specificity where it ought to have it.
When you think about it, "what should go on a thing's Wikipedia page?" is an interesting question; the answer certainly isn't "anything and everything." AI just doesn't have a good sense for what belongs, I feel.
I don’t do this systematically, just sometimes out of curiosity.
But it is always the same pattern: bloat, bloat, bloat.
What I very critically witness is the so called gender neutrality movement where large bodies of text get rewritten to fulfill a political agenda.
This is a major loss of quality. Hundreds of years of using language and getting results by using it as a means and if you compare recent downfalls in connection with gender politics you should be very worried of not already.
Even if some admins drive such agendas, why not use a new mode like a new language for those who want it? This would have been the old skill Wikipedia way and the actual edit wars that aren’t sadly made Wikipedia lose massive credibility for me.