It’s funny how things have shifted from people complaining about citing Wikipedia to people citing AI. Now Wikipedia may as well be the gutenberg
I think part of that has been actual elevated standards on Wikipedia with a more robust culture for things like citations, but probably more importantly, it’s readers already being expected to understand that Wikipedia isn’t an inherently credible source and needs checking if you actually care.
Of course part of it now too, as you imply, is generative AI making it look more rigorous by comparison and lowering people’s standards.
Even Wikipedia is union-busting now.
Wikipedia and its contributors: Good.
Domain name owners and server hosters (Wikimedia Foundation): Bad.And I might get some hate for this but I think of Reddit the same way. I hate the platform and its owners but what’s ON the platform was posted by the community, for the community.
But a lot of redditors and the bots are garbage too. That place eis full of so much transphobia and racism these days. Not to say lemmy is perfect but I’ve certainly seen less of it here.
But a lot of redditors and the bots are garbage too. That place eis full of so much transphobia and racism these days.
I think that’s just general society right now
The Wikimedia Foundation has very little to do with what goes on on the English Wikipedia. It hosts the infrastructure, puts some legal policies in place, and really from there, the community-elected administrators (who are themselves active contributors) are the ones who handle enforcement, and the rules are discussed by the community.
Even the administrators don’t exercise all that much power. In ten years, I think I’ve seen the office have to step in exactly one time – for a possible libel issue when even the administrators couldn’t agree with each other.
Lesser of two evils, one can be better, one can only be worse.
I still have that Google newsfeed enabled on my phone, just trying to stay informed. The AI overview is actually hella useful, by summarising all the news reports and circumventing the trash clickbait
And lying at least 40% of the time
Wikipedia is suspect now too. They’ve sold the site to AI search. Hard to say that they had much of a choice, but the sure did it swiftly and gleefully.
Its all public anyways. Its more like they sold infrastructure access afaik. Which is a smart move. Money aside, unauthorized scraping is a much bigger PITA and can drain resources quickly, including financial resources. Selling access means you can regulate it and also make it go thru appropriate infra; plus it becomes an asset rather than a liability. Not a fan of the wikimedia org lately, but I don’t fault them for that one.
Exactly this. They are guaranteed to get scraped regardless. Ask any question of an AI model and the first ‘source’ it cites is almost always Wikipedia. (assuming it’s not like a super technical in-depth question)
Might as well save on server overhead costs and get paid while doing it instead of trying (and failing) to block every possible scraper.
It’s really unfortunate that Wikipedia has been somewhat supportive of AI lately, only a matter of time before it fully enshitifies.
somewhat supportive
Don’t know who told you that. Its usage is prohibited outside of basic copy–editing and translation, the latter of which has its own guidelines you must act within.
Oh, my apologies, I guess it’s fine as long as the sloppers follow the slop rules while pushing their slop to the wiki.
People choosing to post slop edits on Wikipedia means Wikipedia itself is supportive of AI?
Besides, I’ve regularly seen AI generated content get labeled as LLM-generated (and marked for cleanup/removal), removed AI content myself, and seen editors revert obvious AI slop content within a minute of the edit being made. AI is absolutely not something Wikipedia or most of its editors support.
Having guidelines on how to use AI is not enough to be ethical. It needs to be an immediately punishable offense.
Look at these fucking sloppers so proud about their “innovation.”
(From the Meta-wiki page on the topic)
“Our use of AI will allow editors to focus more on what they want to accomplish, not how to technically achieve it.”
“we cannot significantly support editors with AI for both content generation and content integrity at the same time. We made a decision to first prioritize using AI to support editors to assure content integrity.”
“generative AI in particular offers a promising solution for automated mentoring and guidance of newcomers”
“we should prioritize using AI to support knowledge integrity and increase the moderator’s capacity to maintain Wikipedia’s quality”
(From the most current page regarding AI use policy on Wikipedia and the LLM Writing Guide)
“the use of LLMs to generate or rewrite article content is prohibited”
This is categorically an outright refusal to allow LLMs as a method of simply generating content. The only exceptions are for language translation (with many caveats), and for minor grammar corrections.
i.e. the shit you could do with a tool like Google Translate or Grammarly/LanguageTool/Word Spellcheck/etc, just done via a different mechanism, with anything past that being outright prohibited.
Also, it is punished, via the same means any transgression on Wikipedia is. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Disruptive_editing#Persistent_LLM_use and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Disruptive_editing#Dealing_with_disruptive_editors
Do you even edit Wikipedia? Have you had to rewrite or remove LLM content and put warnings on people’s talk page? Have you reviewed the live changes feed to repeatedly see LLM-generated content getting removed? Or do you just want something to complain about while ignoring what actually happens on Wikipedia because you don’t seem to even have read a single meta or guidelines page on the topic?
Oh wow cool cool, but unlike you I don’t condone slop so maybe don’t die on the hill trying to defend it in my proximity it would make me feel a lot better, thanks.
And btw my link was also a direct link to Wikimedia, the nonprofit who owns Wikipedia.
unlike you I don’t condone slop
Quote where I condoned slop. Oh you can’t? That’s so crazy, it’s almost as if I didn’t.
maybe don’t die on the hill trying to defend it in my proximity
Sending you links to the actual policies instead of just relying on your made up assertions of what the policies are is dying on a hill? You’re the one dying on a hill you made up lol
And btw my link was also a direct link to Wikimedia, the nonprofit who owns Wikipedia.
You linked to a blog post by Wikimedia that’s over a year old. I linked to current Wikipedia policies.
Which do you think is more reflective of the organization’s current stance:
- A single blog post written by two people over a year ago
- Multiple guideline and meta consensus documents cooperatively developed by hundreds of editors, and currently enacted as policy across all of Wikipedia.
Dude just casually making shit up over here lol
