Posts about Wikipedia (RSS, JSON)

6PM — Is the Web Eating Itself? Ethan Zuckerman summarises a talk by Heather Ford asking “whether Wikimedia other projects can survive the rise of generative AI.”

1PM — Fascinating piece about the dependencies between Wikipedia and large-language AI models. LLMs scrape Wikipedia data and flood the internet with AI-generated, sometimes inaccurate and outdated content. This leads to less exposure of Wikipedia, fewer contributions, and potentially a decline of Wikipedia’s quality. But large-language models rely on Wikipedia for verification of facts and information on recent events. A healthy Wikipedia is crucial for companies running products on large-language models, at the same time they are working to diminish its relevance.

5PM — Alex Hollender, who led Wikipedia’s recent redesign, summarises the work, its context, approach and result.

7PM — Wikipedia is getting a design update. The changes focus on the reading experience and navigating around articles and the site. It’s no fundamental overhaul—Wikipedia will still look like Wikipedia.

11AM — “Wikimedia is adding features to make editing Wikipedia more fun.” When I first read the headline, I thought they were adding leaderboards, badges, and highlighting editing streaks. But these changes are thought-through, involve the community, and are tested with real users.