It's damn near impossible to make any credible edits to any wikipedia page, anymore. I've just stopped all together.
this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2026
133 points (90.3% liked)
Technology
80330 readers
4011 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- 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.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I tried making a simple edit, and after creating my account I was told it was not happening because my IP was geo blocked.
Tried from office, same thing.
Well, keep your secrets then.
That's a real issue, but the article uses it as a jumping of point to get for AI slop.
AI could help editors translate from other languages, but beyond that, it's an inefficient mess that Wikipedia doesn't need, plus given how much of AI is just regurgitating Wikipedia, It'll give itself mad ~~cow~~ AI disease.
Wake up Lemmy, it's time for your daily, Wikipedia should have more AI slop article.
Let's make it 1400 words this time, and make sure to mention that younger generations watch Ticktok, but ignore that most TickTok slop is just people summerizing Wikipedia articles.
Yes.
Yet behind the celebrations, a troubling pattern has developed: The volunteer community that built this encyclopedia has lately rejected a key innovation designed to serve readers.
But not that one, because rejecting AI 1) is not a generational rejection and 2) it is correct to reject it.
What I think is or will be the generational problem: the community that maintains it and decides what is being accepted or rejected is an "in group" that it is impossible to break into with conflicting ideas. For example, I do think the gaming, game mechanics and game development related pages can be vastly improved. But I don't think the people responsible for those pages are interested in the changes I would suggest.
All the wikis for different games could just be on wikipedia. But they're not, probably because they were rejected, because it's "not relevant". Well, some people decided they were relevant after all and they made their own wikis for those. The outcome is tribalism based fragmentation, because of differences in opinion of who values what and what should be preserved and what shouldn't.
I'm with you on rejecting AI being sane, but the idea that gaming wikis should be integrated into wikipedia is kinda nuts. If I search "Iron" on wikipedia I'm looking for facts, not a thousand item long disambiguation cluttered with every game that has iron as a resource. Conversely, on a game wiki my search for "Iron" has an entirely different context and I'm looking for different info.
Not to mention game wikis have way lower editorial standards, their own tone (e.g. making jokes), versioning concerns, their own new user friendly homepages etc.
Wikipedia could tuck this all into a separate namespace, sure, but that's effectively a separate wiki anyway and then it raises questions like "why is wikipedia hosting a mechanical guide for this porn game?" or "How long do we need to host the content for this game that peaked in 2012 and is now abandonware?" that are conveniently sidestepped by those communities supporting themselves.
If I search “Iron” on wikipedia I’m looking for facts
Not what I meant.
The point is: there is an established group of editors, with established rules and preconceptions, an established interpretation on what good sources are and what a neutral perspective is and isn't, and there is no chance of changing those and that is why I have no interest in interacting with wikipedia in any constructive way.
I could talk about politics too, I picked video games because I know those articles are also bad.
"designed to serve readers" [citation needed]
This was not, in fact designed to serve readers. No possible meaning of that is in anyway correct. It is "non-designed to serve non-readers"
The article is very biased - it basically suggests young people are unwilling to read, that AI is a good thing and that the wikipedia contributors are being unreasonable. It goes on to talk about how AI has "extracted value" from Wikipedia in an unquestioning way - no mention of compensation to the project, just talking about what a triumph Wikipedia is a source for AI to train on.
The "Simple Summaries" situation is less to do with the summaries and more to do with the risk of AI slop being introduced into Wikipedia unquestioned. The summaries were unchecked and unverified, which add a real chance that wikipedia started serving up inaccurate summaries and undermined it's own reputation.
In addition that idea that younger generations don't have the concentration span to "read a wall of text" is pernicious and patronising nonsense part of a general media bias against Gen Z and Gen Alpha. There seems to be this barely questioned narrative that they have short attention spans and are unwilling or even unable to read, just because they grew up in the era of social media like Instagram and latterly Tik Tok.
I'll give a better hypothesis for why younger generations spend less time on wikipedia: the big tech giants like Google have stolen all the information people have put on there and serve it up in their own summaries on the search engine (preventing click throughs) or through their own AI slop engines. They don't want people clicking through to Wikipedia, they want them clicking through to an ad. The problem is not Wikipedia, and the problem is not Gen Z or Gen Alpha; the problem - as is frequently the case - is the tech mega-corporations who steal everything (including wikipedia) and sell it back to us with ads or via AI slop.
Not reading allat 🥀🥀
Back in my day it was TL:DR! Get off my lawn!
They want to dumb down Wikipedia
Idk who "they" is. But from what I've seen, the administrators of Wikipedia tend to bias intake of new power-users and mods to people who have been with the project from inception (or, at least, the earlier the better). You get all sorts of justifications for why they've adopted this policy. But the bottom line is that Millennials and GenX make up the overwhelming majority of ranking users. And as they age out, they aren't being replaced with people who were their age when they started using the platform.
This traditionalist base has done a lot to calcify how Wikipedia functions, even as variant communities have improved on the model.
The AI-summary shit is just the tip of the iceberg on the system's problems. The website is filling up with dead links. The definition of a "trusted news source" is getting outrun by private sector buyouts of old media and unemployed journalists spinning up new media. A big chunk of the organizations' resources have to deal with fending off legal threats and attacks on system vulnerabilities. The centralized hosting model is expensive to maintain. The rush to be "first to post" creates unnecessary drama among power users in popular niche fields. International language support is... meh (one area where AI would be a huge benefit, as LLMs really shine in this field).
This goes a lot farther than "they want to hurt my Wiki". And if you bothered to read the whole article, you might see more of why. The Wiki Foundation has dragged its heels on automation and clustered around a handful of power-mods in a way that's undermined its Open Editor model. Fighting over Simple Article Summaries is just the latest fumble by the leadership, a sizable commitment of resources that's tossed in the dump almost as soon as its off the press.
Fighting over Simple Article Summaries is just the latest fumble by the leadership, a sizable commitment of resources that’s tossed in the dump almost as soon as its off the press.
It wasn't off the press, it was announced and in the works but still not close to shipping. Maybe Wikimedia could've talked about this great innovative project with the actual Wikipedia community before investing so much money into it.
International language support is… meh (one area where AI would be a huge benefit, as LLMs really shine in this field).
What would international language support entail? Translating articles into other languages?
How do I download the full Wikipedia again?
Check out Kiwix: https://kiwix.org/en/applications/ Here's their library of scrapped sites: https://library.kiwix.org/#lang=eng
Thank you!
The walls of text wouldn't be so impenetrable if literacy rates were higher.
Does someone understand the following sentence?
“then present that knowledge in ways that break the virtuous cycle Wikipedia depends on.”
Wikipedia's traditional self-sustaining model works like this: Volunteers (editors) write and improve articles for free, motivated by idealism and the desire to share knowledge. This high-quality content attracts a massive number of readers from search engines and direct visits. Among those millions of readers, a small percentage are inspired to become new volunteers/editors, replenishing the workforce. This cycle is "virtuous" because each part fuels the next: Great content leads to more readers which leads to more editors which leads to even better content. AI tools (like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, etc.) disrupt this cycle by intercepting the user before they reach Wikipedia.
Thank you. Totally misinterpreted the word present as in being present, causing me to think the sentence didn't make sense. I need to sleep.
Download your copies of Wikipedia before it’s too late
The problem being discussed here is not the availability of Wikipedia's data. It's about the ongoing maintenance and development of that data going forward, in the future. Having a static copy of Wikipedia gathering dust on various peoples' hard drives isn't going to help that.
If the AI slop infects Wikipedia to such an extent that it becomes unusable, then such dusty backups could be very valuable. I completely agree that the issue at hand will not be solved by a simple backup, but it won't hurt either.
Eventually somebody is going to use textbots to DDOS wikipedia with subtle propaganda (if they're not already doing that) and it will be impossible to protect without completely locking it down so that only established users can edit.
They already do that with a lot of hot topic articles. As is, there are a lot of protections in place and it’s very difficult for real vandalism or propaganda to stay on Wikipedia for long without someone noticing it and flagging/removing it.