Which isn’t a bad thing. Wikipedia has for the last 25 years aimed at providing you with every bit of knowledge there is on a topic. That simply is not what people want when they look for information. No-one wants to read a full library’s worth of text when they want to figure out what happened in WWII. But Wikipedia lists all the minutae of every battle on every part of land, sea and air, including all the acting people from generals down to the lowliest private.
Comment on Is Wikipedia's Volunteer Model Facing a Generational Crisis?
flango@lemmy.eco.br 3 months ago
They want to dumb down Wikipedia
bleistift2@sopuli.xyz 3 months ago
TheRealKuni@piefed.social 3 months ago
That’s an encyclopedia’s job.
bleistift2@sopuli.xyz 3 months ago
Let’s consult Wikipedia (emphasis mine) [1].
Works of encyclopedic scope aim to convey the important accumulated knowledge for their subject domain, such as an encyclopedia of medicine, philosophy or law. Works vary in the breadth of material and the depth of discussion, depending on the target audience.
finalarbiter@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 months ago
Historically, general encyclopedias were limited by the physical amount of space they took up. Wikipedia is not limited by the page and volume counts of physical media and we shouldn’t treat it as such.
While I can agree that domain-specific encyclopedias should continue to limit the scope of their information to relevant topics, I see no reason that Wikipedia should follow suit. Who truly benefits from reducing and editorializing information, especially when the fundamental principle is the free and open flow of knowledge? Could Wikipedia stand to have writing on complex topics that is friendlier to the average joe? Sure, but that should never come at the expense of restricting the sum total of knowledge stored in its servers.
Catoblepas@piefed.blahaj.zone 3 months ago
simple.wikipedia.org exists for anyone who wants easier to understand articles.
Satellaview@lemmy.zip 3 months ago
…which seems like a much better way to generate summaries, honestly. Pull in human-written ones, and expand the simple version as necessary.
FaceDeer@fedia.io 3 months ago
Simple.wikipedia isn't a summary of regular Wikpedia, it's a whole separate thing. It's intended to convey the same data, just in a simpler way.
bleistift2@sopuli.xyz 3 months ago
Simple English is for people who would like a simpler language. I’m advocating for reduced scope – or at least better organization of detail. Move stuff that’s irrelevant in the great scheme of things to subpages or pages with narrower scope, instead of writing one single compendium on a topic.
I feel like the English Wikipedia is already better at this. In the German, on the other hand, the first sentence sometimes contains multiple lines of etymological derivations of the article’s title before it even mentions what it’s about (as soon as I stumble upon one of these monstrosities again, I’ll report the example here).
PointyFluff@lemmy.ml 3 months ago
Then go make one.
ilinamorato@lemmy.world 3 months ago
I don’t disagree that some articles could use better information hierarchy. Headings could make that experience way better.
blueryth@lemmy.world 3 months ago
That simply is not what people want when they look for information.
Well, except for those who do. The problem is a use case mismatch. I’d argue, if anything, an encyclopedia should contain the minutiae. Unfortunately, there’s no huge compendium of brief but accurate and sourced synopsis of the same topics. To be fair, we’ve never really had one.
I agree with the editors that embedded AI summaries are not a good idea (at the moment, at least). Users can bring summarizers to the data set of that’s their want, or someone (maybe even wikimedia) will find a way to provide this in a way that preserves the underlying data’s validity. Stripping Wikipedia of its full context seems like a bad idea.
Widdershins@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Wikipedia already has a simplified version. Literally simple.wikipedia… etc. For example, the page on the Vietnam War can inform you with a few paragraphs on each of the key points of the war. Harold Holt’s page has 3 paragraphs and an info box. It isn’t thorough by any means. It does, however, give the reader a chance to learn about something real quick with lesser chances of getting stuck in the mud and falling down wikipedia rabbit holes.
Somebody just needs to inform the simpletons that there is an easier to digest format already. No need to shrink a well of knowledge when there is a drinking fountain next to it for those who didn’t bring a bucket and rope.
bleistift2@sopuli.xyz 3 months ago
in_my_honest_opinion@piefed.social 3 months ago
I would argue that there should be a simplified section and a classic ALL THE THINGS version under a “Would you like to know more?”. I cannot tell you the hours I’ve spent following wikipedia rabbit holes and how rewarding that has been to me.
ilinamorato@lemmy.world 3 months ago
That’s what the info boxes on the side of the article are for. They’re the simplified, just-the-facts version. If you want to know more, you read the whole article.
thebestaquaman@lemmy.world 3 months ago
I don’t see why you would want to hide the hoard of knowledge that is a good Wikipedia pare behind a button. There’s already a summary at the top of the page and a table of contents for when you want more on some topic.
thebestaquaman@lemmy.world 3 months ago
That simply is not what people want when they look for information.
What? Is there anyone out there that prefers to find small bits of information lying around various sources over a concise summary followed by a solid fleshing out, all in one place? I honestly cannot imagine a use case where I would prefer that a source omits a bunch of information rather than just structure the information so that I can find what I’m looking for. Wikipedia does that. That’s why you have dedicated articles for all those battles in WWII, with their own table of contents and summaries to help you digest them. There has literally never in human history existed any source of knowledge coming even close to structuring and summarising this amount of information as well as Wikipedia has, and you’re advocating that they should make it… not that?
acosmichippo@lemmy.world 3 months ago
This is crazy. Articles already start with perfectly good summaries. look at your example:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II
the very first paragraph is this:
World War II[b] or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a global conflict between two coalitions: the Alliesand the Axis powers. Nearly all of the world’s countries participated, with many nations mobilising their resources in pursuit of total war. Tanks and aircraft played major roles, enabling the strategic bombing of cities and delivery of the first and only nuclear weapons ever used in war. World War II is the deadliest conflict in history, causing the death of over 60 million people. Millions died in genocides, including the Holocaust, and by massacres, starvation, and disease. After the Allied victory, Germany, Austria, Japan, and Korea were occupied, and German and Japanese leaders were put on trial for war crimes.
The minutia is there if you want, but it’s not necessary if all you need is the summary.
antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 months ago
To all the people downvoting the above comment, when was the last time you’ve read a WP article with 10k+ characters from top to bottom?
thatonecoder@lemmy.ca 3 months ago
A week ago, at most.
PointyFluff@lemmy.ml 3 months ago
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 3 months ago
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.
antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 months ago
It wasn’t off the press, it was announced and in the works but still not close to shipping. Maybe Wikimedia could’ve talked about this great innovative project with the actual Wikipedia community before investing so much money into it.
What would international language support entail? Translating articles into other languages?