This fairly dumb article in a magazine of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers claims there's a "crisis" at Wikipedia because the editors rejected a push to have an AI summary on top of every Wikipedia article,
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RE: https://mastodon.social/@ieeespectrum/116059551433682789
This fairly dumb article in a magazine of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers claims there's a "crisis" at Wikipedia because the editors rejected a push to have an AI summary on top of every Wikipedia article,
A couple of reasons why the article is dumb:
• It doesn't give evidence that there's a "crisis". Where the article says "Research has shown that many readers today greatly value quick overviews of any article," the link leads to something completely different: an article titled "In the AI era, Wikipedia has never been more valuable", containing no such research.
• The article says "But the volunteer base is aging. A 2010 study found the average Wikipedia contributor was in their mid-twenties; today, many of those same editors are now in their forties or fifties."
So volunteers at Wikipedia are aging faster than other people, with some of *the same people* moving from their mid-twenties to their fifties in just 16 years?!? Maybe it just feels that way.
@johncarlosbaez @msbw I don't work for wikipedia (nor in tech anymore) and I'm pretty sure I aged 10 years over the last year so I can kinda relate
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I was talking primarily about readers, and I think the main point of the article was that it will become "irrelevant to younger generations of readers."
@maxpool @gethemudo - the article says:
"However, teens and twentysomethings today are of a very different demographic and have markedly different media consumption habits compared to Wikipedia’s forebears. Gen Z and Gen Alpha readers are accustomed to TikTok, YouTube, and mobile-first visual media. Their impatience for Wikipedia’s impenetrable walls of text, as any parent of kids of this age knows, arguably threatens the future of the internet’s collaborative knowledge clearinghouse."
It would be interesting to study this more carefully. If kids these days prefer TikTok, that may not be so bad: I imagine that in the 1930s dancing the Charleston was more popular among youths than reading encyclopedias. In fact I can imagine a "moral panic" back then, about how swing dancing was corrupting the youth, much as TikTok is now. But I have trouble imagining people back then saying that encyclopedias should change to compete with the Charleston.
