On Fri, Jan 9, 2026 at 3:41 PM Christophe Henner <[email protected]> wrote: > Here it is: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Schiste/what-now
Thanks for the thoughtful essay, Christophe, LLM-assisted or not :). You hint at improvements to the reader experience, and I think there's a ton of work in that category that could make Wikipedia truly a joy to use, without even wading into the contentious terrain of AI. Wikidata already contains a huge wealth of information that could be made more visible in Wikipedia. The external identifiers alone for any topic could give you a better "explore" page than Google's cluttered search result pages. A huge reason readers may prefer AI summaries, even if inaccurate, is to get to an answer more quickly (the same reason Wikipedia itself outperformed other information sources even when its quality was still very uneven.) But Wikimedia has a lot going for it: no ads, no weird AI hallucinations, no intentional clutter. Readers _want_ to like it. Consider the humble disambiguation page. Often, when readers look for something not covered by existing wayfinders, the best option is to scroll your way through a multi-page sectioned list of uses of the term. Could a data-informed design get the reader to the right selection much faster? Maps, media, and interactive learning materials have often been discussed on this list. Giving editors more powerful cross-media authoring tools will likely yield significant dividends. Regarding AI, I personally believe it can be the basis of powerful new research and authoring experiences. However, opinions on this topic are extremely polarized. Many reject generative AI, because they believe it cannot deliver on anything it promises, because of the harms it is causing (and there are undeniably many), or both. Wikimedia will likely be well-advised to keep the technology somewhat at arm's length, which I think is consistent with your essay: Wikimedia wikis as a trusted foundation. For folks who _are_ interested in experimenting with it as an authoring tool, I took the occasion of the 25th anniversary as a kick in the butt to get a small prototype up and running of an agentically edited wiki. It's currently at https://agpedia.org/ and it is a _very_ quick and dirty hack [1], but I'm going to keep at it to push my own thinking forward. :) The idea here is that advanced AI tools can, in principle, mediate authoring. "Research this topic, recommend some citations, check out this PDF, now create a first draft, etc." I believe that this needs to happen with humans firmly in the loop and accountable for edits they make with the help of these tools, as opposed to the Grokipedia approach, which is basically an ideologically poisoned accountability sink. I doubt Wikimedia will go down this road anytime soon (or ever), but if anyone reading this is interested in collaborating on this or similar ideas, feel free to give me a ping! Warmly, Erik [1] https://github.com/permacommons/agpwiki (again: prototype!) _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- [email protected], guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/[email protected]/message/JTX7QM3MD76G4EY6FLDWMCAMJBR7XVCT/ To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
