Wikipedia has paused a trial that involved using AI to summarise articles following severe criticism from the site’s editors.
It had started showing summarised articles on phones and tablets to about 10 per cent of users who have the Wikipedia browser extension installed.
These summaries were marked with a yellow ‘unverified’ label ( 1 in our screenshot). Tapping the summary showed the full article below 2 .
The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, began the test on 2 June, intending to run it for two weeks. It hoped the “machine-generated” summaries would “take existing Wikipedia text, and simplify it for interested readers” (www.snipca. com/55172).