Latest Tech News

Stay updated with the latest in technology, AI, cybersecurity, and more

Filtered by: wikipedia Clear Filter

Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

WhenWhen armies invade, hurricanes form, or governments fall, a Wikipedia editor will typically update the relevant articles seconds after the news breaks. So quick are editors to change “is” to “was” in cases of notable deaths that they are said to have the fastest past tense in the West. So it was unusual, according to one longtime editor who was watching the page, that on the afternoon of January 20th, 2025, hours after Elon Musk made a gesture resembling a Nazi salute at a rally following Pr

How Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

WhenWhen armies invade, hurricanes form, or governments fall, a Wikipedia editor will typically update the relevant articles seconds after the news breaks. So quick are editors to change “is” to “was” in cases of notable deaths that they are said to have the fastest past tense in the West. So it was unusual, according to one longtime editor who was watching the page, that on the afternoon of January 20th, 2025, hours after Elon Musk made a gesture resembling a Nazi salute at a rally following Pr

Collecting All Causal Knowledge

CauseNet aims at creating a causal knowledge base that comprises all human causal knowledge and to separate it from mere causal beliefs, with the goal of enabling large-scale research into causal inference. CauseNet: Towards a Causality Graph Extracted from the Web Causal knowledge is seen as one of the key ingredients to advance artificial intelligence. Yet, few knowledge bases comprise causal knowledge to date, possibly due to significant efforts required for validation. Notwithstanding this

The Article in the Most Languages

The article in the most languages: Who is this guy? Note to readers: Some of the diffs in this article are dead links because of deletions made subsequent to writing. They have been retained to show diligence in the findings presented here. – Signpost editors In late 2024, something quite astonishing happened on Wikipedia that went by largely unnoticed. For the first time, the Wikipedia article with the greatest number of languages was not a country like the United States, nor even Wikipedia it

Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act verification rules 5 hours ago Share Save Chris Vallance Senior technology reporter Share Save Getty Images Wikipedia has lost a legal challenge to new Online Safety Act rules which it says could threaten the human rights and safety of its volunteer editors. The Wikimedia Foundation - the non-profit which supports the online encyclopaedia - wanted a judicial review of regulations which could mean Wikipedia has to verify the identities of its

Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act verification rules

Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act verification rules 2 hours ago Share Save Chris Vallance Senior technology reporter Share Save Getty Images Wikipedia has lost a legal challenge to new Online Safety Act rules which it says could threaten the human rights and safety of its volunteer editors. The Wikimedia Foundation - the non-profit which supports the online encyclopaedia - wanted a judicial review of regulations which could mean Wikipedia has to verify the identities of its

Wikipedia loses UK Safety Act challenge, worries it will have to verify user IDs

Wikipedia's parent organization lost a challenge to the UK Online Safety Act but can bring another case if the government tries to force it to verify the identity of Wikipedia users. The High Court of Justice in London dismissed claims from the Wikimedia Foundation, which challenged the lawfulness of the categorization system used to determine which sites must comply with obligations. But Justice Jeremy Johnson stressed "that this does not give Ofcom and the Secretary of State a green light to

Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act verification rules

Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act verification rules 25 minutes ago Share Save Chris Vallance Senior technology reporter Share Save Getty Images Wikipedia has lost a legal challenge to new Online Safety Act rules which it says could threaten the human rights and safety of its volunteer editors. The Wikimedia Foundation - the non-profit which supports the online encyclopaedia - wanted a judicial review of regulations which could mean Wikipedia has to verify the identities of

How Wikipedia is fighting AI slop content

is a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. With the rise of AI writing tools, Wikipedia editors have had to deal with an onslaught of AI-generated content filled with false information and phony citations. Already, the community of Wikipedia volunteers has mobilized to fight back against AI slop, somethi

Wikimedia Foundation Challenges UK Online Safety Act Regulations

17 July 2025 — Next week, on 22 and 23 July 2025, the High Court of Justice in London will hear the Wikimedia Foundation’s legal challenge to the Categorisation Regulations of the United Kingdom (UK)’s Online Safety Act (OSA). The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that operates Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, announced its legal challenge earlier this year, arguing that the regulations endanger Wikipedia and the global community of volunteer contributors who create the information on

Local LLMs versus offline Wikipedia

Two days ago, MIT Technology review published “How to run an LLM on your laptop”. It opens with an anecdote about using offline LLMs in an apocalypse scenario. “‘It’s like having a weird, condensed, faulty version of Wikipedia, so I can help reboot society with the help of my little USB stick,’ [Simon Willison] says.” This made me wonder: how do the sizes of local LLMs compare to the size of offline Wikipedia downloads? I compared some models from the Ollama library to various downloads on Kiw

Wikipedia cancels plan to test AI summaries after editors skewer the idea

Wikipedia is backing off a plan to test AI article summaries. Earlier this month, the platform announced plans to trial the feature for about 10 percent of mobile web visitors. To say they weren't well-received by editors would be an understatement. The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) then changed plans and cancelled the test. The AI summaries would have appeared at the top of articles for 10 percent of mobile users. Readers would have had to opt in to see them. The AI-generated summaries only appea

Wikipedia Tries to Calm Fury Over New AI-Generated Summaries Proposal

The denizens of the open web don't want anything to do with AI. The Wikimedia Foundation, the organization behind Wikipedia, made the unfortunate decision to announce the trial of a new AI-fueled article generator this week. The backlash from the site’s editors was so swift and so vengeful that the organization quickly walked back its idea, announcing a temporary “pause” of the new feature. A spokesperson on behalf of the Foundation—which is largely separate from the decentralized community of

“Yuck”: Wikipedia pauses AI summaries after editor revolt

Generative AI is permeating the Internet, with chatbots and AI summaries popping up faster than we can keep track. Even Wikipedia, the vast repository of knowledge famously maintained by an army of volunteer human editors, is looking to add robots to the mix. The site began testing AI summaries in some articles over the past week, but the project has been frozen after editors voiced their opinions. And that opinion is: "yuck." The seeds of this project were planted at Wikimedia's 2024 conferenc

Wikipedia pauses AI-generated summaries pilot after editors protest

In Brief Wikipedia has reportedly paused an experiment that used AI to summarize articles on its platform after editors pushed back. Wikipedia announced earlier this month it was going to run the experiment for users who have the Wikipedia browser extension installed and chose to opt in, according to 404 Media. AI-generated summaries appeared at the top of every Wikipedia article with a yellow “unverified” label. Users had to click to expand and read them. Editors almost immediately criticize