Online Communities (UW COM481 Fall 2024)/Wikipedia Advising Report

Like many others, member of the Wikipedia community and the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) are interested in brainstorming a set of approaches for the usef of generative AI and large language models in Wikipedia. There is already a page on Wikipedia that might be useful to get a sense of things people are considering.

For the purposes of this assignment, I want you to imagine that the WMF staff has contacted you seeking recommendations for advice on managing the impact of these tools. For context, the WMF's mission is:

"The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally."

For the purpose of this assignment, it's important to understand this contains both a desire to produce high-quality education quality and a goal to engage people in its production. For WMF, it's important not only to create exellent education content that is factually accurate, and so on, but also to engage individuals in not only "consume" knowledge but to also produe it.

Your job is to produce a short report (maximum 1000 words) drawing on materials from this class to advise these leaders about how they ought to understand this challenge (generative AI) and how they might make progress towards overcoming it. The best insights will draw on intelligent reflections on the themes and materials of this course to make more concrete, specific, and sophisticated recommendations that carefully consider potential drawbacks and unintended consequences. You are welcome to evaluate the specific suggestions in the brainstorming or to suggest new approaches.

Please note: You do not need to draw on resources beyond the course materials (readings, lectures, assignments, sections, etc.) in producing your report. However, you may feel free to do so.

Your report should provide advice to the Wikimedia Foundation and/or the Wikipedia community on the a challenge that I identify. Details on the challenge are still [To Be Decided] and [Forthcoming]. See the assessment section of this page for details on what I will be grading for.

Turn your report as a subpage of your userpage. For example, I would create mine with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Benjamin_Mako_Hill/Report as the URL. Of course, you should replace "Benjamin_Mako_Hill" with your Wikipedia username. You can also just go to your userpage by clicking on your username on Wikipedia and then adding "/Report" at the end of the URL. When you go that page, it will say Wikipedia does not have a user page with this exact name. You can create the new page by just clicking the "Create" tab on that page. When you're done, you can paste the URL into Canvas.