Wikipedia says it will use AI, but not to replace human volunteers

I was afraid that mentorship was the point where human-to-human interaction is needed most.

I suspect what you're getting at is that "mentorship" is really code for using AI to step in when people are making the wrong kind of changes to a Wikipedia page. (IE, introducing bias, promoting products, edit wars, ect.)

I'm curious to see how this plays out.

Automation is not AI and pre-LLM-era AI is not LLM AI. The arguments for why LLM AI will broadly worsen things are well known. You may not agree with them, but saying things won't change much is pretty empty.

Not saying they should, but as a PSA, if you’re anglophone and looking something up about a place in the non-Anglo world, it’s always worth switching to that area’s language and auto-translating. Even the images won’t be shared. Structure might be all different. Perspective may not be the same.

E.g. a city in France’s BRT system:

Contrast: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nantes_Busway

With: https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busway_de_Nantes

It would be fine as a translation option. For cases when the page is not found, or the local language is lacking so you want to translate from a different language.

It isn't a replacement for an expert writing the real page in the language though. But there are a lot of languages with very little content. German has less than half as many articles as English (Cebuano is number 2 by number of articles - but that seems fishy. German is number 3). At the bottom Cree has only 13 articles. There are also a small number of inactive wikipedias, some of which may want a translation option as better than nothing.

Agreed. The bullet point "Helping editors share local perspectives or context by automating the translation and adaptation of common topics" could be unfortunate if not carefully reviewed - and hopefully it will be.

Having recently spent some time doing translations with the current models, my experience is that their output quality can have a rather high variance. That, along with a tendency toward hallucination, often makes them a "fuzzy guess" at best. When I'm the user asking for that translation, I can factor that fuzziness into my understanding of the output. If its already translated for me, I'm depending on someone else to have done the work of making sure it is faithful to the original.

I actually like that some Wikipedia articles are smaller in my mother language than in English, it gets more straight to the point, so indeed replacing these with auto translations from English would be a loss

Could AI sift through removals and score as biased or vandalist?

And then what to do about "original research" that should've been moved to a different platform or better (also with community review) instead of being deleted?

Wikipedia:No_original_research: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research #Using_sources

> Wikipedia will probably pivot to building an AI research product which they can sell to universities/ b2c.

Why would they do this? All of wikipedia is publicly available for any use. They literally do not have a competitive advantage (and don't seem interested in it, either).

As a moderator, I wish StackOverflow would. I’m getting tired of manually marking answers that should be comments, I’m almost about to make a browser extension for it.

Maybe you have a reason to be so uncharitable here, but it's unclear what that reason is since "industry" is a broad term.