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Hi, it's me, Wikipedia, and I am ready for your apology
- ValveFan6969 11mo agoFunny article, though none of it would pass as a legitimate Wikipedia article because it does not cite CNN, CNBC, or any other Trustworthy™ news site included in the Wikipedia's totally neutral whiteli- I mean... allow-list.
- marcellus23 11mo agoI love Wikipedia, but Wikimedia does not need your donations at all, as much as its misleading ads try to convince you it's on the brink of death. As far as this particular article goes, it just comes off as kind of cringeworthy to me. This is a style of internet humor that went out of fashion about 10 years ago.
- tapete2 11mo agoIndeed. I like how the website claims "McSweeney’s accepts no writing aided in any manner by AI." Really hard to believe that a garbage “article” like this was produced by a human.
- btilly 11mo agoIndeed, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C... is a worthwhile read on this. Wikimedia is on an internal expense growth spiral that won't stop until they max out on the willingness of others to donate.
- zozbot234 11mo agoWikipedia is one of the highest-traffic Internet sites worldwide, and it's still being run on a comparatively shoestring budget. It's also an ongoing project, so the usual claim that technical hosting expenses are only a few percent of what's being spent on it overall is misguided. No one would care about hosting a dead encyclopedia Keeping volunteers editors around is also a harder problem today than it was a decade ago or so, as purely passive consumption use of the Internet has exploded and overtaken the former model of a largely volunteer-run network. Wikipedia is just about managing it today with its current resources; if it had more, it could do better and launch a greater amount of technically compelling projects that would ultimately further its mission. (Already today, Wikidata, one of the more recently-created projects, is getting more edits over time than the largest Wikipedia and acting as a much-needed "hub" of the Semantic Web and Linked Data, which sees much use by the largest tech companies.)
- mapontosevenths 11mo ago> This is a style of internet humor that went out of fashion about 10 years ago. You know what else has happened in the last 10 years? People got stupid. Between 2017 and 2023, the percentage of U.S. adults at the lowest levels of illiteracy increased from 19% to 28%. Some studies show that the US's peak literacy was around 2015 and has been decreasing ever since.
- unethical_ban 11mo agoHow? How do 28% of people not know how to read?
- mapontosevenths 11mo agoFifty four percent of Americans now read below the sixth grade level, and the trend is getting worse rather than better. https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/08/02/us-literacy-rate/ https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/08/02/us-literacy-rate/
- georgefrowny 11mo agoIt'll be below PIAAC level 1 or similar. Even below that level many people can read simple text and extract basic information. Perhaps it also includes people who can read other languages, but not very well in English.
- marcellus23 11mo agoThis article is not some intellectual thinkpiece that only the literati can comprehend. Trends change, humor evolves. If "shoop da whoop", rage comics, leetspeak, and motivational posters aren't funny anymore, it's not because people "got stupid".
- mapontosevenths 11mo agoI'm not talking about the Literati. Anything above the sixth grade level is no longer suitable for the majority of the population.
- radley 11mo ago> This is a style of internet humor that went out of fashion about 10 years ago. That's because reality trumped satire.
- qingcharles 11mo agoThe donations are voluntary. I donate money and articles because I've gained so much from having Wikipedia available to me. If they have a big war chest, that's fine, I'll help make it bigger so they don't need to stress about money. If they spend it on some wacky projects, then that's OK too, experimentation is important as well.
- ssssssszzsssz 11mo ago[flagged]
- Imustaskforhelp 11mo agoCan someone give me a deeper understanding of what this post means or the backstory behind it?
- butler533 11mo ago[flagged]
- 8bitsrule 11mo agoAs an early WP editor, I can relate ... the project caught -a lot- of crap back in the early days. This is a smug but accurate, simple recounting of that sordid tale, and the value that WP retains now that AI is around to cite it. I don't edit much any more, but although it's not perfect, it's retinue of backup resources (including links to Wayback for those which died) remains invaluable.
- shortrounddev2 11mo ago
- babblingfish 11mo agoEspecially relevant today with the release of grokipedia
- brightball 11mo agoIt’s so good. I spent 2 hours reading articles on there last night and the consistency was excellent, although a little verbose at times.
- GaryBluto 11mo agoIf it works, it works.
- IAmBroom 11mo agoUnsupervised Source of Truth(tm), what could possibly go wrong?
- sunaookami 11mo agoJust like Wikipedia?
- neaden 11mo agoWith Wikipedia there is the talk page which will alert you to controversies about topics, as well as checking the citations. While Grokopedia has "citations" when I checked many of them didn't actually have anything to do with what they were supposed to be citing.
- IAmBroom 11mo agoWikipedia has 7 billion potential editors. Grokapedia explicitly says we can't edit it. So, absolutely the opposite thing.
- GaryBluto 11mo agoI don't understand what supervision you want. Worried about inaccuracies? Double check and use it in conjunction with other sources.
- DubiousPusher 11mo agoThe sneering and nihilist tone is very off putting. But not nearly as much as the boomer brained conception of the world's information model pre 2004, which was not nearly as good as those who invoke Murrow and Cronkite believe it was.
- SideburnsOfDoom 11mo ago> The sneering and nihilist tone is very off putting You don't seem to be familiar with McSweeney's Internet Tendency. Fair enough, it's not to everyone's taste and doesn't try to be.
- DubiousPusher 11mo agoI guess maybe the tone would be less noxious if the core coceit of the satire felt more legitimate. I mean, Wikipedia was kind of a shit show back in the day. It's had 20 years of maturation which is more what makes it useful today. And yes, the media is full of blatant and bald faced lies but is that worse than the credulous and uncritical way the media basically endorsed the war in Iraq? I get that it's a joke but the joke kinda only works if there's some truth behind it. And I just don't think there is here. I think people are lamenting old media now, not because the information sphere is genuinely worse today but because it was a comfort to have a consensus in public opinion regardless of how true that consensus was.
- SideburnsOfDoom 11mo ago> "The tone is noxious and the joke doesn't work" Thank you for your opinion, however I don't view it as anything more than that.
- kreetx 11mo agoWhat is there to apologize for, what do you think LLMs use for cheating?
- embedding-shape 11mo ago"Cheating" is not something LLMs do, LLMs are something a human could use for cheating. But what's your point?
- kreetx 11mo agoI'm continuing the satire. Did you read the article?
- exasperaited 11mo agoYes. Cheating is not something LLMs do. It is only what they are.
- j2kun 11mo agoTell that to the guy whose wife cheated on him with an LLM
- embedding-shape 11mo agoNot sure I have to, that makes as much sense as considering your wife using a vibrator as cheating.
- johnnyanmac 11mo ago>a violation of a couple's emotional or sexual exclusivity that commonly results in feelings of anger, sexual jealousy, and rivalry Well, the shoe fits. You can say the boundaries are extremely unreasonable but it fits the definition. I guess as a more realistic example: I have heard of couples break up over porn habits. Not a viable romantic rival, but one that seeded jealousy and rivalry regardless.
- paulvnickerson 11mo agoMaybe if Wikipedia sourced more peer reviewed publications and less Vox, I would be more satisfied. Thrilled to see Grokipedia as a competitor that could perhaps pressure Wikipedia to improve its editorial policies.
- whoknowsidont 11mo agoIf this isn't ragebait I don't know what is.
- unethical_ban 11mo agoPoe's Law in effect.
- antoniojtorres 11mo agoI can’t, in good conscience, think that Musk would objectively be a good steward of an encyclopedia.
- advisedwang 11mo agoDid they omit Wikipedia when creating the models behind Grokipedia? Otherwise it less a competitor and more a re-hash.
- tapete2 11mo agoWell, some of the "articles" on Grokipedia even state that they were sourced from Wikipedia.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- greatgib 11mo agoThe few last times I went on Wikipedia, I was totally disgusted by their donation bar. The message is feeling off regarding how much money they have and how much they waste at useless executives. But also I was really pissed off by the fact that they put multiple bubbles for that that completely cover the main page when you are on mobile and a lot in desktop. Having to scroll that much is kind of worse than cookie popup that I can close in one click. So I realized that it is the reason why I don't go to the site anymore. It's more relaxing to get the answer directly from Google, Kagi, or a llm. Sadly for Wikipedia, they are responsible for them own demise in my opinion. And it is a good think in the hope that they will realize something when the traffic will really go down. Despite my sadness on the topic regarding the initial goal of the encyclopedia that was laudable.
- geye1234 11mo agoPeter Hitchens had a hell of a time trying to fix Wikipedia's appalling biases: https://hitchensblogarchive.wordpress.com/2018/08/06/goodbye-wikipedia-and-thanks-for-all-the-laughs/ https://hitchensblogarchive.wordpress.com/2018/08/06/goodbye... Search the site for other examples of the fun he had with it. I'd choose Wikipedia over AI, of course, so I'm ultimately grateful it's there. But better than both would be a well-edited traditional encyclopedia, written by experts in a single voice, and possibly peer-reviewed.
- JKCalhoun 11mo ago> written by experts …and let the bickering begin… Nothing is going to be immune from people accusing it of bias, etc. Wikipedia is pretty damn good (and free).
- alex1138 11mo agoThis is true but Britannica articles are also written by LESS people Less room for activism and other things
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- j_w 11mo agoI wouldn't take an anti-vaxxers word on Wikipedia being biased. They believe heavily in something that has no scientific basis.
- theamk 11mo agoI decided to look at why the original block happened.. it's on [0], search for "July 2018", then check out administrator's reply, including the links to recent edits. I had no opinion either way, but wow, I have to agree with the block here. Peter put words like "This was a ridiculous statement" into wikipedia article, which is as far from wikipedia tone as it can get; and then completely failed to understand administrator's advice on the tone. If you want to show wikipedia has problems, you might want to choose some other example. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Clockback&oldid=854527538 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Clockba...
- wortelefant 11mo agoWith some controversial topics like Nuclear Power on the German wikipedia or the Gaza conflict on the English one, wikipedia has become less than useless. Once an activist editor sith too much time gets hold of a page, it is game over for neutrality of wokipedia. Grokipedia might introduce some much needed competition.
- monknomo 11mo agoIt is not politically correct to observe this, of course, but the only competition Grokipedia is introducing is the competition to mainstream white supremacist ideas while maintaining plausible deniability. I think the question that XAI asks is "how close to mecha hitler can we get before people notice and complain?"
- unmotivated-hmn 11mo agoThere are more than 7 million articles on wikipedia. 2 controversial ones do not invalidate the rest and sure does not deserve the "less than useless" label.
- djha-skin 11mo agoI think it depends on the subject. Sure, I have heard a historian call it "Wickedpedia" because it gets all the facts wrong. But have a look at the "hash function" page. That is pretty in-depth. However, this all misses the point that the article is making: It's a store of knowledge added to and edited by humans. At least they're not AI, the article says. I don't know if this is true, but if so, I find it compelling.
- tonnydourado 11mo agoEveryone in this comment session is now worse for having read this comment
- Rygian 11mo agoHow would "competition" lead to better neutrality? What's the selling point of "I'm more neutral than you"?
- whoknowsidont 11mo ago
- antisol 11mo agoI bet now you’d kill for a senior thesis based on my free, multilingual, publicly cited, text-based articles, motherfucker Yeeeeeeeeah.... Not if it's written in or about the Scots language. (see: https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/26/scots_wikipedia_fake/ https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/26/scots_wikipedia_fake/ ) (see also: that time the Scottish governmment used Scots wikipedia as a source)
- thepuppet33r 11mo agoWasn't that an edge case, though? Not even done by a bad actor, just someone misguided? And it was discovered and quickly corrected, unlike what would happen on something owned by a massive FAANG-style corp. I have been schooled many times on the failures of Wikipedia, why I shouldn't waste my time editing it, how the editors are toxic; but ultimately, I can't help but buy into the idea of a crowdsourced, centrally administrated, store of knowledge. I wouldn't base critical decisions off of Wikipedia alone, but it sure helps me understand things in general.
- antisol 11mo ago> Not even done by a bad actor, just someone misguided? I'm not sure how the actor's good intentions makes the information on the wiki accurate? > quickly corrected As others have pointed out, it was certainly not "quickly" corrected. And to clarify on "corrected", about half the content on that wiki was simply deleted. A bunch of actual useful edits were definitely removed. And that didn't happen before the Scottish government used it as a source.
- philipwhiuk 11mo ago> And it was discovered and quickly corrected It was definitely not quickly corrected. It was going on for years.
- IAmBroom 11mo agoYou've cherrypicked 0.0006% of Wikipedia... that has been corrected.
- jchip303 11mo ago[dead]
- incomingpain 11mo agoWikipedia was the greatest long ago. Then anonymous partisans setup a 'source blacklist' which essentially curates all of wiki for a specific ideology. They acknowledge their systemic bias and have done nothing to fix it. Wiki deserves to give us an apology. In reality no apology needed from wiki, we just move on to what's better. Grokipedia v0.1 is out and from what I've seen it's shockingly better. Tons of improvements are still to come no doubt. Ive found inaccuracies in articles that I look forward to having grok remedy. Soon we will get APIs which will slot into searxng well. The plan is to have grok be the only editor. You have to convince grok to edit a page. Grokipedia's AI editor point of view will thus eliminate the human/ideological abuse of wikipedia.
- PaulDavisThe1st 11mo ago> Wikipedia was the greatest long ago. by what metric(s) ? > Grokipedia's AI editor point of view will thus eliminate the human/ideological abuse of wikipedia. Where do you think Grok's "AI editor point of view" comes from?
- patrickmcnamara 11mo agoIs this satire?
- tstrimple 11mo ago[flagged]
- jaredklewis 11mo agoNot sure if your comment is parody or not but can you cite some examples of where Grokipedia is “shockingly better” than Wikipedia? It’s and honest question. I haven’t noticed a strong bias on Wikipedia but that may just be because the kinds of the things I look up on Wikipedia are usually not political in nature.
- incomingpain 11mo ago>It’s and honest question. I haven’t noticed a strong bias on Wikipedia but that may just be because the kinds of the things I look up on Wikipedia are usually not political in nature. Lets do it on some random article that isnt political.I have aichophobia, so I'm an outside observer on this one. I will never ever ever ever have it done on me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acupuncture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acupuncture >Acupuncture[b] is a form of alternative medicine[2] and a component of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) in which thin needles are inserted into the body.[3] Acupuncture is a pseudoscience;[4][5] the theories and practices of TCM are not based on scientific knowledge,[6] and it has been characterized as quackery.[c] So no neutrality here at all. Just straight up ideological attack. You scroll down: >It is difficult but not impossible to design rigorous research trials for acupuncture.[69][70] So that's some pretty strong and biased statements against a widely used procedure that they cant really make conclusions about? https://grokipedia.com/page/Acupuncture https://grokipedia.com/page/Acupuncture >Scientific evaluation reveals that while acupuncture demonstrates short-term benefits for some pain-related issues compared to no treatment, its superiority over sham procedures—such as needle insertion at non-acupoints—is often minimal or absent, suggesting effects may stem from placebo responses, expectation, or non-specific factors like counter-irritation rather than meridian-based mechanism This is shockingly better writing. >A 2020 Cochrane systematic review of 33 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) involving 7,297 participants found that acupuncture, compared to no treatment or sham acupuncture, provided short-term pain relief and functional improvement for chronic nonspecific low back pain, with standardized mean differences (SMD) of -0.82 for pain versus no treatment (moderate-quality evidence) and -0.18 versus sham (low-quality evidence due to imprecision and inconsistency).[91] The This is what I'm aware of. That acupuncture has some minimum affect on pain better than placebo. Efficacy comparable to tylenol for pain relief. Which I dont know if you know, but tylenol is extremely ineffective for pain relief. The science says there's something to it, it's difficult to measure, and further investigation is needed. But Wiki's ideological bias is showing big time.
- culebron21 11mo agoYes. I thought of Wikipedia as a forum for annoying socially inept nerds, who'd have millions of pages for pokemons, but delete pages for thing that exist on Earth. Now I have to remember those days with nostalgia. I'm not yet decided on StackOverflow. I won't bother posting there, since every question there nowadays is flagged as offtopic. But I will prefer a stackoverflow answer from a living being, direct and on topic, rather than anything from all those GPTs.
- dreamcompiler 11mo agoI still find SO a valuable resource of already-answered questions, with the most useful almost always marked offtopic. It's almost like adding "offtopic" to a SO query finds better results.
- afro88 11mo agoThis actually reads like it was written by one of those character LLMs
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 11mo agoWikipedia does not conduct scientific research or fact-finding. It's only a publisher. It routinely sources citations from books, journals and other sources, many of them produced by members of the "global academic, scientfic ... community" Without those sources Wikipedia would have relatively little value, except to quote and cite to web pages In many (most) fieds, web pages are not a substitute for scientific journals or books from academic publishers
- johnnyanmac 11mo agoI don't see that any different from saying "bloggers have little value, except to quote and cite to web pages". Even if I agreed, could we both agree that that itself offers value? Delivering acedemic results to laymen is in many ways more important than the research itself, given the landscape of social media.