this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2025
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To be fair in June they tried to introduce AI-generated "simple summaries" to articles, but the editor community was so vehemently against it, that in the end they shelved the idea.
Fair enough. I missed this push amidst every other AI related enshittification tactict at the time I guess. That said, this is how it should work. An organization proposes a change and the change is withdrawn or halted after the userbase is able to weigh in. I'm pleased that they didn't barrel ahead with it despite the outcry.
I feel for the Wikimedia foundation right now. They're under mounting pressure to compete with corporations that hold a monopoly on how people access their sites and subsequently the information on them. The goal is to provide open information, but that information is no less open to the AI that aims to scrape, rehost, and re-use the work of individuals who have volunteered their time to it.
I think it would have been easy for them to effectively do what Reddit did, and lock down the access to the site and its content in order to develop their own AI tools to perform similar tasks trained on their dataset exclusively. Instead, they've listened and I hope they continue to listen to their dedicated members who believe in the foundation's original goals.
Agreed, despite its faults, Wikipedia/Wikimedia is one of the most ethical organisations I know of, to a large degree because of how much average users can take part in its various decision-making processes. Most of its bureaucratic processes happen in the open - I sometimes enjoy reading through 15-years-old discussions about why/if a certain page should be deleted or a certain user banned.