The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization behind Wikipedia, announced a trial for a new AI-powered article summarization tool this week, only to be met with immediate and intense opposition from the site’s volunteer editor community. This swift backlash prompted the Foundation to quickly announce a “temporary pause” on the feature, highlighting the ongoing tension between AI integration and community-driven content platforms.
A spokesperson for the Foundation, which operates largely independently from the decentralized global community of editors who build and maintain Wikipedia, explained that the initiative aimed to make wikis “more accessible to readers globally through different projects around content discovery.” The plan involved testing “machine-generated, but editor moderated, simple summaries for readers.” However, similar to other organizations introducing automated features, Wikipedia’s dedicated contributors voiced strong disapproval of the experimental tool. The responses, publicly available on the Wikipedia Village Pump (technical) page, reveal the depth of editor concern.
“What the hell? No, absolutely not,” one editor stated unequivocally. “Not in any form or shape. Not on any device. Not on any version. I don’t even know where to begin with everything that is wrong with this mindless PR hype stunt.” Another editor warned, “This will destroy whatever reputation for accuracy we currently have. People aren’t going to read past the AI fluff to see what we really meant.”
The sentiment was widely shared, with another editor expressing even stronger opposition: “Keep AI out of Wikipedia. That is all. WMF staffers looking to pad their resumes with AI-related projects need to be looking for new employers.” One editor called it “A truly ghastly idea,” adding, “Since all WMF proposals steamroller on despite what the actual community says, I hope I will at least see the survey and that—unlike some WMF surveys—it includes one or more options to answer ‘NO’.”
Another editor questioned the Foundation’s motives: “Are y’all (by that, I mean WMF) trying to kill Wikipedia? Because this is a good step in that way. We’re trying to keep AI out of Wikipedia, not have the powers that be force it on us and tell us we like it.” The forum saw numerous similar negative responses, indicating a categorical rejection of the AI tool by the editor community.
Following the outcry, the organization paused the feature, as reported by 404 Media. A Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson told 404 Media, “The Wikimedia Foundation has been exploring ways to make Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects more accessible to readers globally. This two-week, opt-in experiment was focused on making complex Wikipedia articles more accessible to people with different reading levels.” The spokesperson further clarified, “For the purposes of this experiment, the summaries were generated by an open-weight Aya model by Cohere. It was meant to gauge interest in a feature like this, and to help us think about the right kind of community moderation systems to ensure humans remain central to deciding what information is shown on Wikipedia.”
The rapid reversal underscores the significant influence of Wikipedia’s volunteer editors and the challenges of implementing AI technologies in platforms built on human expertise and trust. The incident serves as a crucial case study on the importance of community consultation when introducing potentially disruptive technologies like AI into established collaborative projects.
