By Josh Greene, The Mather Group

The Chaos Index is The Mather Group’s 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. Here’s what the data shows:

• An uptick in sockpuppet investigations, along with a slight decrease in declared conflict of interest posts, is a trend worth noting, especially given the news around Adani Group’s recent activity on the platform (see the top headline below for more information).
• Fun fact: over 129,000 registered users performed an action on the English Wikipedia in the past 30 days.
• The number of new pages on Wikipedia decreased slightly month-to-month, indicative of a very slight decline in activity across the platform in February, which is typical.

2023 is quickly shaping up to be the beginning of the Generative AI Wars, with Google, Microsoft, and every other tech company (it seems) announcing acquisitions, partnerships, and implementation of AI (even Buzzfeed said they would start using AI to generate their iconic pop culture quizzes).

DuckDuckGo is one of those companies; and instead of utilizing a chatbot or automated content, they are partnering with OpenAI and Anthropic to enhance one of its existing features, called “Instant Answer”. To do so, the new DuckAssist tool will pull from Wikipedia to provide summarized answers to users in ‘natural language’.

Of course, given Wikipedia’s unwieldy nature, the feature (currently limited to its browser extension and app) is a growing model, with some guardrails limiting what information it will provide back to users (it also uses Encyclopedia Britannica in some instances for information). An interesting experiment, one that utilizes the largest modern collection of human knowledge – of course, only time will tell whether DuckAssist will begin to mimic some of the more egregious personality traits of infamous Wikipedia editors, or be able to figure out how to remain more neutral.

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.