4 ms·

> That means the article contained a plausible-sounding sentence, cited to a real, relevant-sounding source. But when you read the source it’s cited to, the inf

> That means the article contained a plausible-sounding sentence, cited to a real, relevant-sounding source. But when you read the source it’s cited to, the information on Wikipedia does not exist in that specific source. When a claim fails verification, it’s impossible to tell whether the information is true or not. This has been a rampant problem on Wikipedia always. I can't seem to find any indicator that this has increased recently? Because they're only even investigating articles flagged as potentially AI. So what's the control baseline rate here? Applying correct citations is actually really hard work, even when you know the material thoroughly. I just assume people write stuff they know from their field, then mostly look to add the minimum number of plausible citations after the fact, and then most people never check them, and everyone seems to just accept it's better than nothing. But I also suppose it depends on how niche the page is, and which field it's in.

crabmusket 9mo ago
There was a fun example of this that happened live during a recent episode of the Changelog[1]. The hosts noted that they were incorrectly described as being "from GitHub" with a link to an episode of their podcast which didn't substantiate that claim. Their guest fixed the citation as they recorded[2]. [1]: https://changelog.com/podcast/668#transcript-265 https://changelog.com/podcast/668#transcript-265 [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Eugen_Rochko&diff=prev&oldid=1323127336 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Eugen_Rochko&diff...
- chr15m 9mo ago
  How did they know it was not LLM generated?
  - michaelt 9mo ago
    The false claim was added 7 Nov 2022 [1] while chatgpt wasn't released until 30 Nov 2022. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Eugen_Rochko&diff=next&oldid=1120454224 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Eugen_Rochko&diff...
    - mmcwilliams 9mo ago
      Not that it's likely but there were publicly-released LLMs, like GPT-J, that were released in 2021.
    - chr15m 9mo ago
      Thanks!
mmooss 9mo ago
When I've checked Wikipedia citations I've found so much brazen deception - citations that obviously don't support the claim - that I don't have confidence in Wikipedia. > Applying correct citations is actually really hard work, even when you know the material thoroughly. Why do you find it hard? Scholarly references can be sources for fundamental claims, review articles are a big help too. Also, I tend to add things to Wikipedia or other wikis when I come across something valuable rather than writing something and then trying to find a source (which also is problematic for other reasons). A good thing about crowd-sourcing is that you don't have to write the article all yourself or all at once; it can be very iterative and therefore efficient.
- crazygringo 9mo ago
  It's not that I personally find it hard. It's more like, a lot of stuff in Wikipedia articles is somewhat "general" knowledge in a given field, where it's not always exactly obvious how to cite it, because it's not something any specific person gets credit for "inventing". Like, if there's a particular theorem then sure you cite who came up with it, or the main graduate-level textbook it's taught in. But often it's just a particular technique or fact that just kind of "exists" in tons of places but there's no obvious single place to cite it from. So it actually takes some work to find a good reference. Like you say, review articles can be a good source, survey articles or books. But it can take a surprising amount of effort to track down a place that actually says the exact thing. I literally just last week was helping a professor (leader in their field!) try to find a citation during peer review for their paper for an "obvious fact" in the field, that was in their introduction section. It was actually really challenging, like trying to produce a citation for "the sky is blue". I remember, years ago, creating a Wikipedia article for a particular type of food in a particular country. You can buy it at literally every supermarket there. How the heck do you cite the food and facts about it? It just... is. Like... websites for manufacturers of the food aren't really citations. But nobody's describing the food in academic survey articles either. You're not going to link to Allrecipes. What do you do? It's not always obvious.
  - Jepacor 9mo ago
    If you can buy the food at a supermarket, can't you cite a product page? Presumably that would include a description of the product. Or is that not good enough of a citation?
gonzobonzo 9mo ago
The problems I've run into is both people giving fake citations (the citations don't actually justify the claim that's being made in the article), and people giving real citations, but if you dig into the source you realize it's coming from a crank. It's a big blind spot among the editors as well. When this problem was brought up here in the past, with people saying that claims on Wikipedia shouldn't be believed unless people verify the sources themselves, several Wikipedia editors came in and said this wasn't a problem and Wikipedia was trustworthy. It's hard to see it getting fixed when so many don't see it as an issue. And framing it as a non-issue misleads users about the accuracy of the site.
- 6510 9mo ago
  > but if you dig into the source you realize it's coming from a crank. It is a dark sunday afternoon, Bob Park is sitting on his sofa as usual, drunk as usual, suddenly the TV reveals to him there to be something called the Paranormal (Twilight Zone music) ..instantly Bob knows there are no such things and adds a note to the incomprehensible mess of notes that one day will become his book. He downs one more Budweiser. In the distance lightning strikes a tree, Bob shouts You don't scare me! and shakes his fist. After a few more beers a miracle of inspiration descends and as if channeling, in the time span of 10 minutes he writes notes about Cold Fusion, Alternative Medicine, Faith Healing, Telepathy, Homeopathy, Parapsychology, Zener cards, the tooth fairy and father xmas. With much confidence he writes that non of them are real. It's been a really productive afternoon. It reminds him of times long gone back when he actually published many serious papers. He counts the remaining beers in his cooler and says to himself, in the next book I will need to take on god himself. The world needs to know, god is not real. I too will be the authority on that subject. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:WhatLinksHere/Robert_L._Park&limit=500 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:WhatLinks...
  - CPLX 9mo ago
    Curious what the point you're making here is. I don't know anything at all about Bob Park and whether he is a crank. But if you make your career doing the admirable work of debunking pseudo-science and nonsense theories, you would necessarily be linked to in discussions of those theories very, very frequently. So maybe that's not a good description of him. But the link you posted is hardly dispositive.
chr15m 9mo ago
LLMs can add unsubstantiated conclusions at a far higher rate than humans working without LLMs.
- EA-3167 9mo ago
  At some point you're forced to either believe that people have never heard of the concept of a force multiplier, or to return to Upton Sinclair's observation about getting people to believe in things that hurt their bottom line.
  - DrewADesign 9mo ago
    I don’t see why people keep blaming cars for road safety problems; people got into buggy crashes for centuries before automobiles even existed
    - nullsanity 9mo ago
      Because a difference in scale can become a difference in category. A handful of buggy crashes can be reduced to operator error, but as the car becomes widely adopted and analysis matures, it becomes clear that the fundamental design of the machine and its available use cases has fundamental flaws that cause a higher rate of operator error than desired. Therefore, cars are redesigned to be safer, laws and regulations are put in place, license systems are issued, and traffic calming and road design is considered. Hope that helps you understand.
      - DrewADesign 9mo ago
        Is the sarcasm really that opaque? Who would unironically equate buggy accidents and automobile accidents?
        obidee2 9mo ago
        I’d like to introduce you to the internet. There’s a reason /s was a big thing, one persons obvious sarcasm is (almost tautologically) another persons true statement of opinion.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
jacquesm 9mo ago
Linkrot is a problem and edited articles are another. Because you can cite all you want, but if the underlying resource changes your foundation just melted away.
- jayflux 9mo ago
  Pretty much every citation added to wikipedia is passed on to web archive now, either by the editor or automatically later on. For news articles especially the recommendation now is to use the archive snapshot and not the url of the page. It’s not a perfect solution, but it tries to solve the link rot issue.
shevy-java 9mo ago
> Applying correct citations is actually really hard work Not disagreeing - many existing articles on wikipedia have barely any references or citation at all and in some cases wrong citation or wrong conclusions. Like when an article says water molecules behave oddly and then the wikipedia article concluding that water molecules behave properly.
Wowfunhappy 9mo ago
> This has been a rampant problem on Wikipedia always. I can't seem to find any indicator that this has increased recently? Because they're only even investigating articles flagged as potentially AI. So what's the control baseline rate here? ...y'know, I don't want to be that guy, but this actually seems like something AI could check for, and then flag for human review.
- bjourne 9mo ago
  You don't need an LLM to find loads of uncorroborated claims on Wikipedia. See f.e. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variational_autoencoder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variational_autoencoder Most articles about tech are woefully undersourced.

crabmusket 9mo ago

There was a fun example of this that happened live during a recent episode of the Changelog[1]. The hosts noted that they were incorrectly described as being "from GitHub" with a link to an episode of their podcast which didn't substantiate that claim. Their guest fixed the citation as they recorded[2]. [1]: https://changelog.com/podcast/668#transcript-265 https://changelog.com/podcast/668#transcript-265 [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Eugen_Rochko&diff=prev&oldid=1323127336 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Eugen_Rochko&diff...

chr15m 9mo ago
How did they know it was not LLM generated?
- michaelt 9mo ago
  The false claim was added 7 Nov 2022 [1] while chatgpt wasn't released until 30 Nov 2022. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Eugen_Rochko&diff=next&oldid=1120454224 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Eugen_Rochko&diff...
  - mmcwilliams 9mo ago
    Not that it's likely but there were publicly-released LLMs, like GPT-J, that were released in 2021.
  - chr15m 9mo ago
    Thanks!

mmooss 9mo ago

When I've checked Wikipedia citations I've found so much brazen deception - citations that obviously don't support the claim - that I don't have confidence in Wikipedia. > Applying correct citations is actually really hard work, even when you know the material thoroughly. Why do you find it hard? Scholarly references can be sources for fundamental claims, review articles are a big help too. Also, I tend to add things to Wikipedia or other wikis when I come across something valuable rather than writing something and then trying to find a source (which also is problematic for other reasons). A good thing about crowd-sourcing is that you don't have to write the article all yourself or all at once; it can be very iterative and therefore efficient.

crazygringo 9mo ago
It's not that I personally find it hard. It's more like, a lot of stuff in Wikipedia articles is somewhat "general" knowledge in a given field, where it's not always exactly obvious how to cite it, because it's not something any specific person gets credit for "inventing". Like, if there's a particular theorem then sure you cite who came up with it, or the main graduate-level textbook it's taught in. But often it's just a particular technique or fact that just kind of "exists" in tons of places but there's no obvious single place to cite it from. So it actually takes some work to find a good reference. Like you say, review articles can be a good source, survey articles or books. But it can take a surprising amount of effort to track down a place that actually says the exact thing. I literally just last week was helping a professor (leader in their field!) try to find a citation during peer review for their paper for an "obvious fact" in the field, that was in their introduction section. It was actually really challenging, like trying to produce a citation for "the sky is blue". I remember, years ago, creating a Wikipedia article for a particular type of food in a particular country. You can buy it at literally every supermarket there. How the heck do you cite the food and facts about it? It just... is. Like... websites for manufacturers of the food aren't really citations. But nobody's describing the food in academic survey articles either. You're not going to link to Allrecipes. What do you do? It's not always obvious.
- Jepacor 9mo ago
  If you can buy the food at a supermarket, can't you cite a product page? Presumably that would include a description of the product. Or is that not good enough of a citation?

gonzobonzo 9mo ago

The problems I've run into is both people giving fake citations (the citations don't actually justify the claim that's being made in the article), and people giving real citations, but if you dig into the source you realize it's coming from a crank. It's a big blind spot among the editors as well. When this problem was brought up here in the past, with people saying that claims on Wikipedia shouldn't be believed unless people verify the sources themselves, several Wikipedia editors came in and said this wasn't a problem and Wikipedia was trustworthy. It's hard to see it getting fixed when so many don't see it as an issue. And framing it as a non-issue misleads users about the accuracy of the site.

6510 9mo ago
> but if you dig into the source you realize it's coming from a crank. It is a dark sunday afternoon, Bob Park is sitting on his sofa as usual, drunk as usual, suddenly the TV reveals to him there to be something called the Paranormal (Twilight Zone music) ..instantly Bob knows there are no such things and adds a note to the incomprehensible mess of notes that one day will become his book. He downs one more Budweiser. In the distance lightning strikes a tree, Bob shouts You don't scare me! and shakes his fist. After a few more beers a miracle of inspiration descends and as if channeling, in the time span of 10 minutes he writes notes about Cold Fusion, Alternative Medicine, Faith Healing, Telepathy, Homeopathy, Parapsychology, Zener cards, the tooth fairy and father xmas. With much confidence he writes that non of them are real. It's been a really productive afternoon. It reminds him of times long gone back when he actually published many serious papers. He counts the remaining beers in his cooler and says to himself, in the next book I will need to take on god himself. The world needs to know, god is not real. I too will be the authority on that subject. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:WhatLinksHere/Robert_L._Park&limit=500 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:WhatLinks...
- CPLX 9mo ago
  Curious what the point you're making here is. I don't know anything at all about Bob Park and whether he is a crank. But if you make your career doing the admirable work of debunking pseudo-science and nonsense theories, you would necessarily be linked to in discussions of those theories very, very frequently. So maybe that's not a good description of him. But the link you posted is hardly dispositive.

chr15m 9mo ago

LLMs can add unsubstantiated conclusions at a far higher rate than humans working without LLMs.

EA-3167 9mo ago
At some point you're forced to either believe that people have never heard of the concept of a force multiplier, or to return to Upton Sinclair's observation about getting people to believe in things that hurt their bottom line.
- DrewADesign 9mo ago
  I don’t see why people keep blaming cars for road safety problems; people got into buggy crashes for centuries before automobiles even existed
  - nullsanity 9mo ago
    Because a difference in scale can become a difference in category. A handful of buggy crashes can be reduced to operator error, but as the car becomes widely adopted and analysis matures, it becomes clear that the fundamental design of the machine and its available use cases has fundamental flaws that cause a higher rate of operator error than desired. Therefore, cars are redesigned to be safer, laws and regulations are put in place, license systems are issued, and traffic calming and road design is considered. Hope that helps you understand.
    - DrewADesign 9mo ago
      Is the sarcasm really that opaque? Who would unironically equate buggy accidents and automobile accidents?
      - obidee2 9mo ago
        I’d like to introduce you to the internet. There’s a reason /s was a big thing, one persons obvious sarcasm is (almost tautologically) another persons true statement of opinion.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

jacquesm 9mo ago

Linkrot is a problem and edited articles are another. Because you can cite all you want, but if the underlying resource changes your foundation just melted away.

jayflux 9mo ago
Pretty much every citation added to wikipedia is passed on to web archive now, either by the editor or automatically later on. For news articles especially the recommendation now is to use the archive snapshot and not the url of the page. It’s not a perfect solution, but it tries to solve the link rot issue.

shevy-java 9mo ago

> Applying correct citations is actually really hard work Not disagreeing - many existing articles on wikipedia have barely any references or citation at all and in some cases wrong citation or wrong conclusions. Like when an article says water molecules behave oddly and then the wikipedia article concluding that water molecules behave properly.

Wowfunhappy 9mo ago

> This has been a rampant problem on Wikipedia always. I can't seem to find any indicator that this has increased recently? Because they're only even investigating articles flagged as potentially AI. So what's the control baseline rate here? ...y'know, I don't want to be that guy, but this actually seems like something AI could check for, and then flag for human review.

bjourne 9mo ago
You don't need an LLM to find loads of uncorroborated claims on Wikipedia. See f.e. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variational_autoencoder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variational_autoencoder Most articles about tech are woefully undersourced.