September Wikipedia Chaos Index
By Josh Greene, The Mather Group
The Chaos Index is our proprietary metric for measuring turbulence throughout Wikipedia and tracking the community’s current sentiment towards corporate-related pages. The index measures community actions such as editing frequency, content deletion, message board posts, and many other activities that contribute to unstable corporate page environments.
This month’s Chaos Metric Index sits at 58, technically, the lowest number in our proprietary metric’s history. However, this is mostly adjustments to our formula and impact measurements; this specific shift does not represent a major trend change for Wikipedia and its operations.
Wikipedia continues to be in a high period for newly created pages; however, Articles for Creation submission wait times remain steady.
A statistic reflective of the previous bullet point: pages nominated for deletion and not kept remain at their elevated levels as well.
As AI continues to dominate conversations across every industry, Wikipedia is determined to stay ahead of the curve (as it always has, despite appearances occasionally suggesting otherwise). Finding itself at the intersection of generative AI – as both a contributing source and user of the technology, as Wikipedia’s employed machine learning for various functions since 2002 – Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation’s approach to the latest wave of artificial intelligence technology has been rather cautious.
However, Wikipedia is not one to shy away from any emerging technology, and this is no exception: during an interview with Techwire Asia, Wikipedia Chief Product and Technology Officer Selena Deckelmann announced Wikipedia had submitted its first plugin to the OpenAI project. The plugin, which is available to ChatGPT Plus users, summarizes information from any general knowledge query, while attributing and sharing links to the Wikipedia articles from where the data is sourced.
Though the tentative peace between Wikipedia and AI may be temporary, Wikipedia’s new OpenAI plugin is a reminder of how prescient the platform strives to remain in the internet landscape in 2023, and how important an accurate, informative Wikipedia page is to any generation of new information technology.
The Mather Group, a Capitol Communicator sponsor, is a boutique digital marketing and online reputation agency that focuses on SEO, Wikipedia and effective marketing for businesses.
