4 ms·
I remember back when I was in secondary school, something commonly heard was "Don't just trust wikipedia, check it's resources, because it's crowdsourced and c
by Insanity 1y ago
I remember back when I was in secondary school, something commonly heard was
"Don't just trust wikipedia, check it's resources, because it's crowdsourced and can be wrong".
Now, almost 2 decades later, I rarely hear this stance and I see people relying on wikipedia as an authoritative source of truth. i.e, linking to wikipedia instead of the underlying sources.
In the same sense, I can see that "Don't trust LLMs" will slowly fade away and people will blindly trust them.
- aabhay 1y agoThere’s also the fact that both Wikipedia and LLMs are non-stationary. The quality of wikipedia has grown immensely since its inception and LLMs will get more accurate (if not explicitly “smarter”)
- derektank 1y agoI'm not entirely convinced that the quality of Wikipedia has improved substantially in the last decade.
- vablings 1y agoCare to provide any counter-examples? Please make it know if you end up using Wikipedia for your source of if Wikipedia's quality has changed
- pessimizer 1y agoHow in the world would you supply a counter-example for "the quality of Wikipedia has/hasn't improved substantially in the last decade"? I also can't even read the second sentence. I think there are typos there, but there's no mental correction I can do to make it coherent for me.
- jancsika 1y agoI can't think of a better accidental metric than that! I'll go ahead and speculate that the number of incoherent sentences per article has gone down substantially over the last decade, probably due to the relevant tooling getting better over the same period.
- knollimar 1y agoKnow should be known
- SJMG 1y agoI think you would need a complicated set of metrics to claim something like "improved" that wasn't caveated to death. An immediate conflict being total number of articles vs impressions of articles labeled with POV biases. If both go up has the site improved? I find I trust Wikipedia less these days, though still more than LLM output.
- djoldman 1y agoWikipedia probably wins here because you can link to a permalink version of an article.
- sho_hn 1y agoI don't think the cases are really the same. With Wikipedia people have learned to trust that the probability of the information being at least reasonably good is pretty high because there's an editing crucible around it and the ability to correct misinformation surgically. No one can hotpatch a LLM in 5mins.
- _cenw 1y agoThe best LLM powered solutions are as little LLM and as much conventional search engine / semantic database lookups and handcrafted coaxing as possible. But even then, the conversational interface is nice and lets you do less handcrafting in the NLP department. Using Perplexity or Claude in "please source your answer" mode is much more like a conventional search engine than looking up data embedded in 5 trillion (or whatever) parameters.
- tayo42 1y agoWikipedia is usually close enough and most users don't require perfection for their "facts" Ive noticed things like gemini summaries on Google searches are also generally close enough.
- cratermoon 1y agoClose enough only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades
- brookst 1y agoAnd most human communication
- themadturk 1y agoAnd nuclear weapons. Don't forget the nuclear weapons.
- hn_acc1 1y agoExcept when they glaringly get things wrong like "character X on show Y said catchphrase Z", and two queries produce two different values of X, one right, one wrong. The more I use gemini summaries for things I know a bit about, the worse my opinion of them..
- daotoad 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
- withinboredom 1y agoThanks for the Wikipedia link, do you have a source? /s
- johnisgood 1y agoI know you are not serious, but what would constitute as an acceptable source? I could paste its content into an LLM for rephrasing or summarizing or whatever, or just simply ask an LLM about it and put it on my personal website. Would that be an acceptable source? What even is an acceptable source for such things?
- rsynnott 1y ago> Now, almost 2 decades later, I rarely hear this stance and I see people relying on wikipedia as an authoritative source of truth. i.e, linking to wikipedia instead of the underlying sources. That's a different scenario. You shouldn't _cite wikipedia in a paper_ (instead you should generally use its sources), but it's perfectly fine in most circumstances to link it in the course of an internet argument or whatever.
- miningape 1y ago> "Don't just trust wikipedia, check it's resources, because it's crowdsourced and can be wrong" This comes from decades of teachers misremembering what the rule was, and eventually it morphed into the Wikipedia specific form we see today - the actual rule is that you cannot cite an encyclopaedia in an academic paper. full stop. Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia and therefore should not be cited. Wikipedia is the only encyclopaedia most people have used in the last 20 years, therefore Wikipedia = encyclopaedia in most people's minds. There's nothing wrong with using an encyclopaedia for learning or introducing yourself to a topic (in fact this is what teachers told students to do). And there's nothing specifically wrong about Wikipedia either.
- ok_dad 1y agoThe original rule when I was a lad (when wikipedia was a baby) was, "don't trust stuff on the internet, especially Wikipedia where people can change it at will." Today they might have better trust for Wikipedia-- and I know I use it as a source of truth for a lot of things-- but back in my day teachers were of the opinion that it couldn't be trusted. This was for like middle and high school, not college or university, so we would cite encyclopedias and that sort of thing, since we weren't reading cutting edge papers back then (maybe today kids read them, who knows). Edit: Also, I think the GP comment was proven correct by all of the replies claiming that Wikipedia was never controversial because it was very clear to everyone my age when Wikipedia was created/founded that teachers didn't trust the internet nor Wikipedia at the time.
- ecocentrik 1y agoThere was a period of time where Wikipedia was more scrutinized than print encyclopedias because people did not understand the power of having 1000s of experts and the occasional non-experts editing an entry for free instead of underpaying one sudo-expert. They couldn't comprehend how an open source encyclopedia would even work or trust that humans could effectively collaborate on the task. They imagined that 1000s of self-interested chaos monkeys would spend all of their energy destroying what 2-3 hard working people has spent hours creating instead of the inverse. Humans are very pessimistic about other humans. In my experience when humans are given the choice to cooperate or fight, most choose to cooperate. All of that said, I trust Wikipedia more than I trust any LLMs but don't rely on either as a final source for understanding complex topics.
- CobrastanJorji 1y agoA big reason for this is that Wikipedia's source is often a book or a journal article that is either offline or behind an academic paywall. Checking the source is effectively impossible without visiting a college campus's library. The likelihood that the cited information is wrongly summarizing the contents is low enough and the cost is high enough that doing so regularly would be irrational.
- Ultimatt 1y agoA bigger problem in this respect with Wikipedia is it often cites secondary sources hidden behind an academic fire/paywall. It very often cites review articles and some of these aren't necessary entirely accurate.
- Theodores 1y agoIt wasn't just Wikipedia, which was a relatively recent addition to the web, everything online was a 'load of rubbish'. In turn-of-the-century boomer world, reality was what you saw on TV. If you saw something with your own eyes that contradicted the world view presented by the media, then one's eyes were to be disbelieved. The only reputable sources of news were the mainstream media outlets. The only credible history books would be those with reviews from the mainstream media, with anything else just being the 'ramblings of a nutter'. In short, we built a beautiful post-truth world and now we are set on outsourcing our critical thinking to LLMs.
- thewebguyd 1y ago> I can see that "Don't trust LLMs" will slowly fade away and people will blindly trust them. That's already happening. I don't even think we had a very long "Don't trust LLMs" phase, if we did it was very short. The "normies" already trust whatever they spit out. At leadership meetings at my work, if I say anything that goes against the marketing hype for LLMs, such as talking about "Don't trust LLMs", it's met with eye rolls and I'm not forward thinking enough, blah blah. Management-types have 100% bought into the hype and are increasingly more difficult to convince otherwise.
- brookst 1y agoI can’t speak to your specific experience, but I do some of this kind of eye-rolling when people bring short term limitations on LLMs into long term strategy. I’m reminded of when people at work assured me the internet was never going to impact media consumption because 28.8kbps is not nearly enough for video.
- alfalfasprout 1y agoAnd what makes you think they're short term?
- Ultimatt 1y agoWell also years of Wikipedia proving to be more accurate than anything in print and rarely and not for very long misrepresenting source materials. For LLMs to get that same respect they would have to pull off all of the same reassuring qualities.
- alfalfasprout 1y agoWikipedia also didn't have remotely the controls they have today around review + locking contentious articles, etc.
- AlexCoventry 1y agoThat's partly because they are getting more reliable, though, just as WP did.
- jalapenos 1y agoProblem is they also included newspapers in authoritative sources - except foreign ones that is - and Wikipedia at least has some kind of peer review process. It's genuinely as authoritative as most other things called authoritative.
- more_corn 1y agoThe difference is that Wikipedia validates its sources and LLMS don’t and can’t.