I noticed something upsetting(?) in my search results yesterday. Search engine listings for a Wiktionary article had some weird text sort-of-summarizing the page. This text is *not* present in the page itself.

Is this from an LLM? If so, which party is generating the summary?

I don't *think* it's DDG, or Wiktionary. (More in thread.)

There *is* a way to set page descriptions in MediaWiki that isn't visible in the normal editing view. I don't know how it works, and couldn't find it. So I can't rule it out for sure.

It reads a little bit like the output of a cheeky editor going a little silly with metaphorical meanings of the word (all present in the quotation list in the page) But it reads more like an LLM's dumb-ass summary. Particularly that "learn how to"—very LLM-flavored.

I remember something about Wikimedia Foundation trying to push LLMs (for summaries), but I think that was nixed after, erm, strong community pushback.

Other search engine experiments:

- Kagi shows this weird shit too, as does Bing (though truncated).
- DDG shows a *normal* excerpt if I search for `fletcherize site:en.wiktionary.org`.
- Google shows a normal excerpt.

My best guess at some point is that one of the search engine sources that DDG and Kagi both use (perhaps Bing?) is LLM-summarizing crawl entries.

I'm not sure how to verify this. Any ideas?