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.
one hour later
“Okay, here’s another $200, but you’re not allowed to keep beating me in Smash.”