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Citation Needed – Wikimedia Foundation's Experimental LLM/RAG Chrome Extension
- brokensegue 2y agoExperimental LLM powered RAG application for checking claims on the Internet against Wikipedia. You can read more about it at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Future_Audiences/Experiment:Citation_Needed https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Future_Audiences/Experiment:... Disclaimer: I worked on this.
- NegativeLatency 2y agoAny plans for a Safari extension?
- brokensegue 2y agowe've discussed expanding to other browsers. the plan is to evaluate the experiment soon and based on feedback decide whether to expand/change
- andybak 2y agoOr Firefox
- purple-leafy 2y agoHey matey, do you folks need any more devs to bring ideas or code? I’m heavily into browser extension development! I’ve done some insane things with them. I’ve built about 8 browser extensions in the last 6 months, most of them have thousands of users and one of them had half a million users Currently building an LLM powered design assistant extension. If you’d like to chat im reachable by email at “hello[at]papillonsoftware[dot]dev”
- squigz 2y ago> I’ve built about 8 browser extensions in the last 6 months, most of them have thousands of users and one of them had half a million users Do you have any concerns about your ability to properly maintain so many extensions?
- purple-leafy 2y agoNot really, most of them are “feature complete” as they target a very small surface area or feature. For instance, one of them reveals salaries on job seeker sites, and is feature complete as it does what it’s meant to do bug free and fast
- squigz 2y agoNo web extension is going to remain feature complete or bug free for very long. What happens when the job seeker sites change their HTML/CSS/JS?
- WanderingLurker 2y agoI would assume this is an easy update (possibly even doable by an LLM).
- purple-leafy 2y agoOkay mate you’re the expert clearly, you tell me
- card_zero 2y agoIt looks like this doesn't check whether the article itself cites a source for the claim. Is that why it's called "Citation Needed"? Because it doesn't actually cite anything?
- addandsubtract 2y agoTrust me bro™
- bitsinthesky 2y agoAnywhere that gets into technical details and design?
- input_sh 2y agoNot the person you've responded to, but I found this: https://gitlab.wikimedia.org/repos/future-audiences/citation-needed-api https://gitlab.wikimedia.org/repos/future-audiences/citation...
- aurareturn 2y agoThis is a great idea. Hopefully we also have LLMs fact checking and flagging Wikipedia articles.
- ysavir 2y agoWouldn't that just be checking wikipedia articles against the same wikipedia articles which the LLM originally trained on?
- relyks 2y agoNo, citations are supposed to be from reliable secondary sources or authoritative primary ones external to Wikipedia
- josefx 2y agoMany of those sources are not available online (books), point at paywals (research papers) or are dead . Unless you have an API that can bypass these issues reliable you are stuck with a tool that has already landed several lawyers in hot water for making up citations on the fly.
- falcor84 2y agoThe Wikipedia Library project [0] grants active editors access to a wide range of otherwise paywalled sources. I wonder if it could not be extended to this sort of bot. [0] https://diff.wikimedia.org/2022/01/19/the-wikipedia-library-accessing-free-reliable-sources-is-now-easier-than-ever/ https://diff.wikimedia.org/2022/01/19/the-wikipedia-library-...
- visarga 2y agoCouple this with a search based article generator so you have an article generator and an article checker, and then off you go to generating 1 trillion pages. Could be useful training content for LLMs but also used by people.
- bawolff 2y agoI wonder how this will go over politically with the wikipedia community. AI is such a hot button issue, and the risk of hallucinating and saying something wrong seems more pressing in this application then most.
- jszymborski 2y agoI haven't used this, but reading the description, it sounds like it's primarily a search engine for wiki articles related to selected text. If so, I imagine it wouldn't be super susceptible to hallucinations.
- Kwpolska 2y agoIt uses AI to parse the selected text to choose search keywords, and to parse the related Wikipedia article to decide if it agrees with the selected text. It obviously can bullshit in both cases.
- falcor84 2y agoSearching for keywords shouldn't be likely to hallucinate. And I would assume they would have a subsequent step to run a quick check to see they're really in the text. And if there is some issue, I suppose we can always fall back to something like TF-IDF. The second part does seem more problematic, but still, as essentially a yes/no question, it should be significantly less likely to hallucinate/confabulate than for other tasks.
- Kwpolska 2y agoThe extension appears to also produce an explanation of its decision, so there is potential to bullshit: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Future_Audiences/Experiment:Citation_Needed https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Future_Audiences/Experiment:... Also, if you look into their “wrong” example closer, it is a bit misleading, as both sources are correct. Joe Biden was 29 on election day, but 30 when he was sworn in. Understanding this requires more context than the LLM was apparently provided.
- qrian 2y agoAsking about itself returns this: > "Citation Needed is an experimental feature developed in 2024" - The provided passages do not contain any information about a feature called 'Citation Needed' being developed in 2024. - Wikipedia - Discouragement in education - not be relied I know I'm not using it for intended purposes but it seemed funny.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- mattyyeung 2y agoCan quotations be hallucinated? Or are you using something like "deterministic quoting"[1]? Disclosure: author on that work. [1] https://mattyyeung.github.io/deterministic-quoting https://mattyyeung.github.io/deterministic-quoting
- brokensegue 2y agothe quote cannot be hallucinated but we use a different approach. your work seems interesting though.
- mattyyeung 2y agoI would love to learn more, where would you recommend I look?
- keefle 2y agoThat's really cool, do you think this might be the basis for potential natural language navigation? (when going over a document, instead of having to search by keyword or regex, one can search for more complicated concepts using English) If not, what extra work is needed to bring it to that level?
- mattyyeung 2y agoI think you could get a pretty good solution for that using RAG and some tricks with prompt engineering and semantic chunking. With google's very-long-context models (Gemini) you may also have good results simply with some prompt engineering. Preprocessing steps like asking the LLM to summarise themes of each section can be helpful too (in RAG, this info would go in the 'metadata' stored with each chunk, presented to the LLM with each chunk). A key engineering challenge will be speed ... when you're navigating a document you want a fast response time.
- tuananh 2y agoNo firefox extension though.
- youssefabdelm 2y agoDoes this only work on Chrome? Can't seem to make it work on Arc.
- akbarnawawid 2y ago[flagged]
- Daub 2y ago> A chrome extension for finding citations in Wikipedia In academia, Wikepedia citations are generally a no no. One reason is their unrelaibity (the author is citing a source that they themselves can edit). More importantly, Wikepedia may be a good place to find primary sources, but in itself it is a secondary source.
- jfengel 2y agoWikipedia prefers to be a tertiary source. They want the references to be to secondary sources, rather than primary sources. "Wikipedia articles should be based on reliable, published secondary sources, and to a lesser extent, on tertiary sources and primary sources. Secondary or tertiary sources are needed to establish the topic's notability and avoid novel interpretations of primary sources." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research
- jimbobthrowawy 2y agoIt really shouldn't, considering they have a rule about not using primary sources.
- _notreallyme_ 2y agoYes, they explicitly classify wikipedia as a tertiary source [1]. Wikipedia is good for finding secondary source, and then primary sources by following the links. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Primary_Secondary_and_Tertiary_Sources#Definitions_of_primary,_secondary_and_tertiary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Primary_Secondary_an...
- boxed 2y agoThat justification seems a bit behind the times honestly. We've now seen actual academic fraud on a massive scale with extremely little in the way of a correction to fix this, while at the same time we've seen Wikipedia handle abuse extremely well. The academic fraud is a threat to Wikipedia, more than using wikipedia links is a threat to academia.
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- ruined 2y agowikimedia's git repo for this extension https://gitlab.wikimedia.org/repos/future-audiences/citation-needed-chrome-extension https://gitlab.wikimedia.org/repos/future-audiences/citation... edit: the readme build instructions are incomplete and i don't think hotreload works. use `npm run build-dev` to get a working build. it's not obvious to me what prevents this from being a firefox extension as well - it might be the sidebar/sidepanel api differences, but i haven't played with those much
- ale42 2y ago@wikimedia: Firefox version please