Two years ago I asked ChatGPT of my father. The reply was mostly
utterly nonsens and some hallucinations. He had then no Wikipedia entry
and was active in government in 1950 and 1960 and even if notable, on a
low level. I then created an entry, with five sources and 3500 character
in size and after this the reply from att AI bots are quite good, as
they all reuse the data entered in Wikipedia/. /
So I see no real benefit for an AI-bot for Wikipedia. I also see that I
increased human knowledge of my father by my Wikipedia entry even if it
is accessed from other UIs
Anders
Den 2026-01-18 kl. 07:55, skrev Leinonen Teemu via Wikimedia-l:
I really enjoy this discussion.
As it is the latency between human curiosity and insight(s), Wikipedia
is losing out to AI chatbots.
The key in the AI chatbots is the UI, which feeds your curiosity by
imitating human-to-human dialogue.
Would it be possible to build something like this to Wikipedia, too? I
would love to have ”chat” with Wikipedia.
*
Teemu
*Lähettäjä: *Ori Livneh <[email protected]>
*Päivämäärä: *sunnuntaina, 18. tammikuuta 2026 klo 0.21
*Vastaanottaja: *Wikimedia Mailing List <[email protected]>
*Aihe: *[Wikimedia-l] Re: Wikipedia at 25: A Wake-Up Call (essay)
On Fri, Jan 16, 2026 at 1:35 AM Erik Moeller <[email protected]> wrote:
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.)
Yes. It's latency. It was always latency. "Wiki" means quick.
Wikipedia made the sum of human knowledge (or its arithmetic mean,
anyway) accessible near you: in your home, in your backpack, in your
pocket, on your person. It shortened the distance from question to
answer by abstracting the trip to the library or bookshelf, the time
spent poring over the table of contents, and the wait for the
newspaper to arrive, for a new textbook edition, or for the
translation to appear in your language.
For performance engineers like me, Wikipedia's "end-to-end latency" is
the time between a reader clicking a link and the article fully
rendering on their device. For many years, I believed the key to
Wikipedia's continued relevance was shaving milliseconds off this
number by tuning Wikimedia's code and infrastructure.
But /true/ end-to-end latency is not measured between server and
browser, but between curiosity and insight. And it turns out that
network and code latency contribute only modestly to that number. The
milliseconds it takes for Wikimedia's servers to transmit an article
to your device are dwarfed by the time you need to wrack your brain
for the right terms to query, locate the relevant section of the
article, interpret its meaning, and relate it to your question.
Wikipedia improved on Britannica's end-to-end latency by several
orders of magnitude. Modern AI is now doing the same to Wikipedia. I
can describe to Gemini what I want to know using vague, imprecise, or
even incorrect terms, and it tells me what I might be thinking of,
using my language: not merely the language listed in my Babel userbox,
but terms I understand that relate to concepts I already know and are
appropriate to my level of understanding.
At its worst, AI generates hallucinated, sycophantic slop. But at its
best, it is an interface to human knowledge that is not merely
incrementally faster than browsing Wikipedia, but categorically faster.
I think the key to ensuring the future knowledge infrastructure
remains free and open is to once again beat closed, commercial
platforms on latency, ideally by an order of magnitude or more. This
is possible, if you again consider true end-to-end latency and the
invisible factors that contribute to it, like the time it takes to
distinguish truth from falsehood, and information from manipulation.
I'm not sure Wikimedia should lead the charge. Even if their relevance
is fading somewhat, the projects are an immense trove of value for
humanity. Any rash effort to remake them from within is likely to
destroy more value than it creates. But there is plenty of room out
there for new things.
I'm glad to see you experimenting in this space, Eric.
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