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Former Wikia engineer, here. I left right around when they changed their name to Fandom and kind of saw the writing on the wall. Despite the tremendous amount o

Former Wikia engineer, here. I left right around when they changed their name to Fandom and kind of saw the writing on the wall. Despite the tremendous amount of information they have at their disposal, they never really saw themselves (or positioned themselves) as more than a low market cap media company. I spent a lot of time in the mid-teens trying to encourage them to be early on AI/NLP kind of stuff and use that to drive new product development. Needless to say, it didn't work out. Imagine the data moat they could have built and monetized, and all without needing to degrade the customer experience.

rideontime 2y ago
I didn't think I could Fandom being worse than it already is, but imagining it stuffed with AI-generated slop...
- languagehacker 2y ago
  Sure, but think about something as low stakes as, "Does such-and-such a character from my favorite TV show have any siblings" vs. "Is it safe to consume XYZ" Even with the great structured and semi-structured data that Wikis can provide with this like infoboxes and other sort of templates, there were definitely limitations to the tech nearly ten years ago. My experience back then is one of the reasons I'm super skeptical of the long-term value of the AI / LLM trend we're going through right now.
  - sushid 2y ago
    Aren't those types of prompts the MOST likely to generate hallucinations?
    - Sebguer 2y ago
      Not in the contexts that the author is talking about, when you have the canonical answers in your data set and know roughly where to look for them.
- snowwrestler 2y ago
  It’s worth remembering that there was AI before generative AI, and there are applications of AI that don’t produce slop, like knowledge graphs and natural language search. Some of that might be called just “machine learning” now.
  - wpietri 2y ago
    Yeah, it seems like "AI" has mostly become a marketing term for generative large models. For the people doing the stuff that is often called "machine learning", I see two reactions. Those seeking hype will call it "AI" anyhow, and a bunch of those that don't are firmly sticking with "machine learning" to avoid the rising backlash. I'm very curious to hear how others are seeing the terms used, though.
- pwdisswordfishz 2y ago
  Imagining? https://about.fandom.com/news/fandom-launches-new-creator-tools-using-gen-ai-2 https://about.fandom.com/news/fandom-launches-new-creator-to... https://old.reddit.com/r/TwoBestFriendsPlay/comments/15vxs2x/fandom_is_now_putting_aigenerated_quick_answers/ https://old.reddit.com/r/TwoBestFriendsPlay/comments/15vxs2x...
- iamacyborg 2y ago
  They tried this on a wiki and the community rightfully went and got their pitchforks out
jezzamon 2y ago
A data moat of user provided wiki contents? The thing that this article is advocating for the users themselves to own over the hosting site?? Somehow I don't think that is the solution.
- languagehacker 2y ago
  The licensing on that stuff is complicated, and I haven't looked at it in a while. It does allow you to take your toys and leave, but for those that don't, it would be simple enough to prevent ethical AI scrapers from extracting that content. That's all I mean by data moat in this context.
owyn 2y ago
Former Wikia engineer here too! I also thought there was a lot of potential there. We even invested in some RDF and structured data and NLP projects (second screen, sentiment analysis on comments for detecting flame wars, etc), but for various reasons they just didn't work out beyond hackathons and demos. I think there were a lot of well meaning engineers who wanted to make stuff like that work. Part of the problem is mediawiki itself. A page is literally just text using an awful hacked together xml parser and some regexes to emit HTML. It might look like a database sometimes when it is rendered (and there is Wikidata) but there is no actual structure to it, just a pile of templates made of other templates that people have to tediously wrangle by hand. That it eventually turns into some HTML that you can view is almost an accident.
- languagehacker 2y ago
  Oh man, good to see you on here, dude! Yes, extracting the real human-readable text from a Wiki was a lot harder than you'd expect. There was also a question of investment. I think even with some early successes quantified with A/B tests and things like that, there just wasn't the executive or product buy-in to broaden the investment.
- thealistra 2y ago
  Also former Wikia/Fandom engineer. I won a hackathon with a wiki text validator on page save - the idea was never moved to production because nobody ultimately cared about the wiki part of it for years and years. It was just a cost center. Nice chrome to put around ads.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Washuu 2y ago
Former Gamepedia/Wikia/Fandom engineer, I left not too long after Fandom bought out Gamepedia/Curse. You left at a good time. The upper management had no idea what they were doing and were entirely disinterested in the company. Talking with the CEO felt like talking with someone that had no idea what they were doing there.

rideontime 2y ago

I didn't think I could Fandom being worse than it already is, but imagining it stuffed with AI-generated slop...

languagehacker 2y ago
Sure, but think about something as low stakes as, "Does such-and-such a character from my favorite TV show have any siblings" vs. "Is it safe to consume XYZ" Even with the great structured and semi-structured data that Wikis can provide with this like infoboxes and other sort of templates, there were definitely limitations to the tech nearly ten years ago. My experience back then is one of the reasons I'm super skeptical of the long-term value of the AI / LLM trend we're going through right now.
- sushid 2y ago
  Aren't those types of prompts the MOST likely to generate hallucinations?
  - Sebguer 2y ago
    Not in the contexts that the author is talking about, when you have the canonical answers in your data set and know roughly where to look for them.
snowwrestler 2y ago
It’s worth remembering that there was AI before generative AI, and there are applications of AI that don’t produce slop, like knowledge graphs and natural language search. Some of that might be called just “machine learning” now.
- wpietri 2y ago
  Yeah, it seems like "AI" has mostly become a marketing term for generative large models. For the people doing the stuff that is often called "machine learning", I see two reactions. Those seeking hype will call it "AI" anyhow, and a bunch of those that don't are firmly sticking with "machine learning" to avoid the rising backlash. I'm very curious to hear how others are seeing the terms used, though.
pwdisswordfishz 2y ago
Imagining? https://about.fandom.com/news/fandom-launches-new-creator-tools-using-gen-ai-2 https://about.fandom.com/news/fandom-launches-new-creator-to... https://old.reddit.com/r/TwoBestFriendsPlay/comments/15vxs2x/fandom_is_now_putting_aigenerated_quick_answers/ https://old.reddit.com/r/TwoBestFriendsPlay/comments/15vxs2x...
iamacyborg 2y ago
They tried this on a wiki and the community rightfully went and got their pitchforks out

jezzamon 2y ago

A data moat of user provided wiki contents? The thing that this article is advocating for the users themselves to own over the hosting site?? Somehow I don't think that is the solution.

languagehacker 2y ago
The licensing on that stuff is complicated, and I haven't looked at it in a while. It does allow you to take your toys and leave, but for those that don't, it would be simple enough to prevent ethical AI scrapers from extracting that content. That's all I mean by data moat in this context.

owyn 2y ago

Former Wikia engineer here too! I also thought there was a lot of potential there. We even invested in some RDF and structured data and NLP projects (second screen, sentiment analysis on comments for detecting flame wars, etc), but for various reasons they just didn't work out beyond hackathons and demos. I think there were a lot of well meaning engineers who wanted to make stuff like that work. Part of the problem is mediawiki itself. A page is literally just text using an awful hacked together xml parser and some regexes to emit HTML. It might look like a database sometimes when it is rendered (and there is Wikidata) but there is no actual structure to it, just a pile of templates made of other templates that people have to tediously wrangle by hand. That it eventually turns into some HTML that you can view is almost an accident.

languagehacker 2y ago
Oh man, good to see you on here, dude! Yes, extracting the real human-readable text from a Wiki was a lot harder than you'd expect. There was also a question of investment. I think even with some early successes quantified with A/B tests and things like that, there just wasn't the executive or product buy-in to broaden the investment.
thealistra 2y ago
Also former Wikia/Fandom engineer. I won a hackathon with a wiki text validator on page save - the idea was never moved to production because nobody ultimately cared about the wiki part of it for years and years. It was just a cost center. Nice chrome to put around ads.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

Washuu 2y ago

Former Gamepedia/Wikia/Fandom engineer, I left not too long after Fandom bought out Gamepedia/Curse. You left at a good time. The upper management had no idea what they were doing and were entirely disinterested in the company. Talking with the CEO felt like talking with someone that had no idea what they were doing there.