June 12, 2025 Wikipedia has paused its experiment with AI-generated summaries after facing immediate and intense opposition from its editorial community. The Wikimedia Foundation had planned a two-week trial to display short machine-generated summaries at the top of select articles on mobile — but the backlash was swift and overwhelming.
The summaries were created using Cohere’s open-weight Aya model and were marked with a yellow “unverified” label. Still, many long-time Wikipedia editors saw the trial as a threat to the platform’s integrity.
“This would do immediate and irreversible harm to our readers and to our reputation as a decently trustworthy and serious source,” one editor wrote. Others dismissed the idea as “absolutely not” and “the strongest possible oppose.”
The initiative, called *Simple Article Summaries*, was introduced as a way to make Wikipedia more accessible for readers unfamiliar with dense or technical language. But critics argued it gave too much prominence to unvetted, single-model outputs — potentially undermining Wikipedia’s carefully maintained neutrality.
“Yes, human editors can introduce reliability and point-of-view issues,” another editor noted. “But as a collective mass, it evens out into a beautiful corpus. This would throw that away.”
The Wikimedia Foundation paused the rollout just one day after announcing the test. In a statement, a spokesperson said: “This two-week, opt-in experiment was focused on making complex Wikipedia articles more accessible… to help us think about the right kind of community moderation systems to ensure humans remain central.”
Project leaders admitted they mishandled communication with the community. “Looking back, we realize the next step with this message should have been to provide more of that context,” a Foundation project manager wrote.
They emphasized that no future AI summary feature would be implemented without editor involvement. “Bringing generative AI into the Wikipedia reading experience is a serious set of decisions, with important implications,” the project manager said.
The pause comes as other platforms, including Google, aggressively roll out AI-generated answers — often with disastrous results. In contrast, Wikipedia’s editor-driven model remains one of the last bastions of internet reliability, and its community appears determined to keep it that way.
