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This is the traditional "innovators dillema" where a skilled profession facing an imperfect technological threat decides not to adopt it until it is too late.

AI generated articles are, on the balance, inferior, except for people that want simple, low quality content.

But LLMs are moving up the value chain with Deep Research. They can give explanations tuned to a reader's knowledge/viewpoints and provide interactive content Wikipedia doesn't support. That is a killer app for math/science topics.

Wikipedia will win against a generic corporate encyclopedia on neutrality/oversight, but it'll lose badly on UX, which is what matters.

I think the tipping point will be direct integration of academic sources into ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini and a "WikiLink" type way to discover interesting follow-up topics.

I can't trust AI answers for serious historical or social science topics because of the first. And generally my chat with AI ends once I get the answer I need because I can't get rabbitholed into other topics.

2 comments

It REALLY depends on how you're using the AI. I get the strong impression a lot of people are still at the "I'll write a few prompts and see what happens" stage, and hoping for an answer from the magical oracle; as opposed to really using the tool. This never fails to disappoint.

I might be slightly wrong, but probably not by a lot, yet. Sure there's an element of "holding-it-wrong-ism" in my position. But ... it does actually take practice to get it right, and best practices are badly documented!

That said the situation is changing rapidly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47547849 "AI bug reports went from junk to legit overnight, says Linux kernel czar"

Most Wikipedia work is taking paywalled academic content and summarizing it in an encyclopedic format.

For programming, agentic AI can find most of what it needs because everything is open access on Arxiv, blogs, or in the codebase itself. That's why it can "magical oracle" answer questions that were limited to good prompting.

For most other professional topics, citations are locked behind paywalls. Wikipedia editors get free access to academic libraries, but the readers don't. That's why consumer tools suck.

When the big AI companies integrate with proprietary databases in fields like history or social sciences is the time when Wikipedia dies for answering questions.

it’s not supposed to win on UX, it’s current UX is maybe too conservative sure

of course they banned ai they could barely allow css