Comment on Wikipedia Pauses AI-Generated Summaries After Editor Backlash

• TheTechnician27@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Fucking thank you. Yes, experienced editor to add to this: that’s called the lead, and that’s exactly what it exists to do. Readers are not even close to starved for summaries:

  • Every single article has one of these. It is at the very beginning, and at most around 600 words for very extensive, multifaceted subjects. 250 to 400 words is generally considered an excellent window to target.
  • Even then, the first sentence itself is almost always a definition of the subject, making it a summary unto itself.
  • And even then the first paragraph is also its own form of summary in a multi-paragraph lead.
  • And even then, the infobox to the right of 99% of articles gives you easily digestible data about the subject in case you only care about raw, important facts (e.g. when a politician was in office, what a country’s flag is, what systems a game was released for, etc.)
  • And even then, if you just want a specific subtopic, there’s a table of contents, and we generally try as much as possible (without harming the “linear” reading experience) to make it so that you can jump straight from the lead to a main section (level 2 header).
  • Even then, if you don’t want to click on an article and just instead hover over its wikilink, we provide a summary of fewer than 40 characters so that readers get a broad idea without having to click (e.g. Shoeless Joe Jackson’s is “American baseball player (1887–1951)”).

  What’s outrageous here isn’t wanting summaries; it’s that summaries already exist in so many ways, written by the human writers who write the contents of the articles. Not only that, but as a free, editable encyclopedia, these summaries can be changed at any time if editors feel like they no longer do their job somehow.

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