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.
Who do I donate money to then?
I want Wikipedia to battle misinformation, they are theoretically equipped to do that. I want a last bastion of pre social media pre enshitification Internet, if possible.
Your wiki is cool and all but not making a dent at the moment.
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
Well, if in the foundation you include the moderators/admins or whatever they call them on wikipedia, then I agree. But just like on reddit, the mods of wikipedia are also part of the issue (not all but most).
Wikipedia and its contributors: Good.
Not really.
Domain name owners and server hosters (Wikimedia Foundation): Bad.
Yes, the people who actually own the website are trash.
OK I’ll bite, what’s wrong with the legion of volunteers who have spent decades giving free information to the world?
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.
Voting for the lesser of two evils is how they led us into this mess.
Who, when and what
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
Wikipedia is by design not citable, unless you include the revision number, but it contains all the sources to cite.
are people actually citing AI? i wonder how that would look like, it certainly sounds like: “my mom said…”
tl;dr: i never saw a problem in using Wikipedia (even at it’s beginning), but it’s an awesome to to get started with a topic, same counts for AI I guess.
No encyclopedia is citable. They’re not primary or secondary sources.
You can’t use tertiary sources in academic research because they’re just aggregation of references. You need primary sources whenever possible, and secondary sources when primary sources are unavailable.
Which is where going down to the references and grabbing the primary sources there comes in handy, because you can cite those.
Thank you for being the one to say this; it’s usually me. I typically also address the idea, espoused by far too many teachers, that ‘you can’t cite Wikipedia because it’s an unreliable source’. Where that statement is obviously wrong as Wikipedia nor any encyclopedia is a source, rather it’s a resource, but also, Wikipedia is the most accurate encyclopedia to date due to its ability to be updated on a whim. Which serves to offset the ‘half-life of facts’ that understandably effects the accuracy of written encyclopedias.
Yeah that’s a big failing on the teachers, not explaining why you can’t cite Wikipedia. It’s not hard to explain “you can’t cite wikipedia directly because it isn’t a source. It’s just a collection of references, and you need to go cite the primary source, and here is where wikipedia lists their sources for each claim and how you can cite them”.
This is online discussions, people use links. Similarly copy and paste from AI output. Online isn’t as formal or regulated as published works.
with “online” you are referring to social media discussions?
Generally yes, FB, reddit, Lemmy and so on since these are now the locations where most social discourse happens.
According to APA guidelines, citing an AI is valid but the citation is just
“I used X Model for Y purpose.” And doesn’t require anything more lol
i mean using a model to obtain certain data is fine, we did that already twenty years ago. it would just not be called citing
I had a customer at the store I work at use GPT for info on what we sell. I’d rather he was referencing twitch chat when he told me chat told him we sold something.
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.
I’m lazy and have started treating wikipedia as a primary source. But if I’m quoting it to somebody else, I tend to look at the cited references to make sure I trust those.
🤓 Point of clarification: primary, secondary, and tertiary sources refer to the proximity to the original information, not to their reliability.
- A primary source would be something like a study on a drug.
- A secondary source would be something like a news article discussing the study or a meta-analysis collating a bunch of studies on that drug.
- A tertiary source would be something like a Wikipedia article or a section of a textbook discussing the drug as a whole.
Secondary and tertiary sources often comprise both the most reliable and unreliable sources. 🤓
(Ik what you meant by “primary” lol)
I meant it exactly as your definitions. Academically. My fuck up was saying “as” instead of “equal to” or “like.” Hence me admitting how utterly lazy that is. I should also add irresponsible.
Not anymore, shady leadership. Everything on the site is suspect as a result.
“Hey AI overview! Can you please AI overview this wikipedia article for me?”
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
You know, you’re getting downvoted for this, and I get why, but I also think you should’ve been offered a suggestion: RSS feeds. They let you get your news from good, reliable sources that aren’t The Daily Beast talking about “Elon Musk drops SHOCKING new post on X (did he shit his pants??)” Unironically, it’s the best way to keep up with the news bar none. I can even give you personalized suggestions if you’d like.
Your problem is real. Your problem is not your fault. Your solution is understandable. I just think it’s misguided.
Holy fuck is this healthy. Thank you sir for, well, existing. I salute this behavior!
I appreciate that. I feel like it’s all of our jobs to help each other in this information hurricane where we can; nobody deserves to be punished for not being a strong sailor.
And lying at least 40% of the time
April:
(Number’s a little better than before but very irresponsible)
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.
Selling access means
Selling access means the content is primarily available to the extremely privileged - huge “AI” grifts, etc.
plus it becomes an asset rather than a liability
For whom?
Primarily available to the extremely privileged
My local LLM narrowly fetching and caching a page or two isn’t what’s been hitting infra across the global and making indie sites blow up or die out. Doesn’t matter if the small players can’t buy the same access as the big players; they don’t need it and it’s not really for them.
(liability to asset) For whom?
The balance sheet. I didn’t mean it in the abstract.
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.
EDIT:
“We will use AI to build features that remove technical barriers to allow the humans at the core of Wikipedia to spend their valuable time on what they want to accomplish, and not on how to technically achieve it. Our investments will be focused on specific areas where generative AI excels, all in the service of creating unique opportunities that will boost Wikipedia’s volunteers:”
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.
Are you clinicly stupid?
Dude just casually making shit up over here lol
If you use the Voyager client, you can tag users who BS frequently.
Don’t even need Voyager. My instance has it on browser :)
