Tony BarkJimmy Wales Says Wikipedia Could Use AI. Editors Call It the 'Antithesis of Wikipedia'
Alphane MoonWhy is leadership always so vapid and disconnected from reality?
captainastronautBecause this is one of the rare times he sat down at the keyboard to do the real work being done by people in this organization and he realized that it’s hard and he wants a shortcut. He sees his time as more valuable and sees this task as wasting his time, but it is their primary task and one they do as volunteers because they are passionate about it. He’s not going to get a lot of traction with them telling them the thing they do for free because they love it isn’t worth anyone’s time.
AatubeI think commenters here don't actually do Wikipedia. Wales was instrumental in Wikipedia's principles and organization besides the first year of Sanger. He handpicked the first administrators to make sure the project would continue its anarchistic roganization and prevent a hierarchy from having a bigger say in content matters.
I would characterize Wales as a long-retired leader rather than leadership.
ronigamiI swear these people have never been around a cathedral and thought about how it was built.
Because that’s what being in a position of power does to a mf
Whale’s quote isn’t nearly as bad as the byline makes it out to be:
Wales explains that the article was originally rejected several years ago, then someone tried to improve it, resubmitted it, and got the same exact template rejection again.
“It’s a form letter response that might as well be ‘Computer says no’ (that article’s worth a read if you don’t know the expression),” Wales said. “It wasn’t a computer who says no, but a human using AFCH, a helper script […] In order to try to help, I personally felt at a loss. I am not sure what the rejection referred to specifically. So I fed the page to ChatGPT to ask for advice. And I got what seems to me to be pretty good. And so I’m wondering if we might start to think about how a tool like AFCH might be improved so that instead of a generic template, a new editor gets actual advice. It would be better, obviously, if we had lovingly crafted human responses to every situation like this, but we all know that the volunteers who are dealing with a high volume of various situations can’t reasonably have time to do it. The templates are helpful - an AI-written note could be even more helpful.”
That being said, it still wreaks of “CEO Speak.” And trying to find a place to shove AI in.
More NLP could absolutely be useful to Wikipedia, especially for flagging spam and malicious edits for human editors to review. This is an excellent task for dirt cheap, small and open models, where an error rate isn’t super important. And it’s a huge existing problem that needs solving.
…Using an expensive, proprietary API to give error prone yet “pretty good” sounding suggestions to new editors is not.
This is the problem. Not natural language processing itself, but the seemingly contagious compulsion among executives to find some place to shove it when the technical extend of their knowledge is typing something into ChatGPT.
That being said, it still wreaks of “CEO Speak.”
I think you mean reeks, which means to stink, having a foul odor.
cygnusThose homophones have reeked havoc for too long!
heavybootsThank you. Glad to know I am not the only one that got triggered, lol.
Waves hands “You didn’t see anything.”
FaceDeerThat being said, it still wreaks of “CEO Speak.” And trying to find a place to shove AI in.
I don't see how this is "shoved in." Wales identified a situation where Wikipedia's existing non-AI process doesn't work well and then realized that adding AI assistance could improve it.
Neither did Wales. Hence, the next part of the article:
For example, the response suggested the article cite a source that isn’t included in the draft article, and rely on Harvard Business School press releases for other citations, despite Wikipedia policies explicitly defining press releases as non-independent sources that cannot help prove notability, a basic requirement for Wikipedia articles.
Editors also found that the ChatGPT-generated response Wales shared “has no idea what the difference between” some of these basic Wikipedia policies, like notability (WP:N), verifiability (WP:V), and properly representing minority and more widely held views on subjects in an article (WP:WEIGHT).
“Something to take into consideration is how newcomers will interpret those answers. If they believe the LLM advice accurately reflects our policies, and it is wrong/inaccurate even 5% of the time, they will learn a skewed version of our policies and might reproduce the unhelpful advice on other pages,” one editor said.
It doesn’t mean the original process isn’t problematic, or can’t be helpfully augmented with some kind of LLM-generated supplement. But this is like a poster child of a troublesome AI implementation: where a general purpose LLM needs understanding of context it isn’t presented (but the reader assumes it has), where hallucinations have knock-on effects, and where even the founder/CEO of Wikipedia seemingly missed them.
Don’t mistake me for being blanket anti-AI, clearly it’s a tool Wikipedia can use. But the scope has to be narrow, and the problem specific.
Adding AI assistance to any review process only ever worsens it, because instead of having to review one thing, now the reviewer has to review two things, one of which is defo hallucinated but it’s hard to justify the “why”, and the reviewer is also paid far less in exchange and has his entire worker class threatened.
I don't see how this fits into the actual case being discussed here.
The situation currently is that a newbie editor whose article is deleted gets presented with a simple "your article was deleted" message. The proposition is to have an AI flesh that out with a "possibly for the following reasons:" Explanation. How is that worse?
All that stuff about paying less and threatening the worker class is irrelevant. This is Wikipedia, its editors and administrators are all unpaid volunteers.
This is another reason why I hate bubbles. There is something potentially useful in here. It needs to be considered very carefully. However, it gets to a point where everyone’s kneejerk reaction is that it’s bad.
I can’t even say that people are wrong for feeling that way. The AI bubble has affected our economy and lives in a multitude of ways that go far beyond any reasonable use. I don’t blame anyone for saying “everything under this is bad, period”. The reasonable uses of it are so buried in shit that I don’t expect people to even bother trying to reach into that muck to clean it off.
This bubble’s hate is pretty front-loaded though.
Dotcom was, well, a useful thing. I guess valuations were nuts, but it looks like the hate was mostly the enshittified aftermath that would come.
Crypto is a series of bubbles trying to prop up flavored pyramid schemes for a neat niche concept, but people largely figured that out after they popped.
Machine Learning is a long running, useful field, but ever since ChatGPT caught investors eyes, the cart has felt so far ahead of the horse. The hate started, and got polarized, waaay before the bubble popping.
Crypto was an annoying bubble. If you were in the tech industry, you had a couple of years where people asked you if you could add blockchain to whatever your project was and then a few more years of hearing about NFTs. And GPUs shot up in price. Crypto people promised to revolutionize banking and then get rich quick schemes. It took time for the hype to die down, for people to realize that the tech wasn’t useful, and that the costs of running it weren’t worth it.
The AI bubble is different. The proponents are gleeful while they explain how AI will let you fire all your copywriters, your graphics designers, your programmers, your customer support, etc. Every company is trying to figure out how to shoehorn AI into their products. While AI is a useful tool, the bubble around it has hurt a lot of people.
That’s the bubble side. It also gets a lot of baggage because of the slop generated by it, the way it’s trained, the power usage, the way people just turn off their brains and regurgitate whatever it says, etc. It’s harder to avoid than crypto.
Yeah, you’re right. My thoughts were kinda uncollected.
Though I will argue some of the negatives (like inference power usage) are massively overstated, and even if they aren’t are just the result of corporate enshittification more than the AI bubble itself.
Even the large scale training is apparently largely useless: old.reddit.com/…/frontier_ai_labs_publicized_100k…
I believe that the bad behavior of corporate interests is often one of the key contributors to these financial bubbles in every sector where they appear.
To say that some of the bad things about this particular financial bubble are because of a bunch of companies being irresponsible and/or unethical seems not to acknowledge that one is primarily caused by the other.
God I had coworkers that had never used a vr headset claiming the metaverse was going to be the next big thing. I wish common sense was common.
“The metaverse” changed it’s definition depending on who you talked to. Some definitions didn’t even include VR.
“AI” also changes it’s definition depending on who you talk to.
Vague definitions = hype
peoplebeproblemsSo… I actually proposed a use case for NLP and LLMs in 2017. I don’t actually know if it was used.
But the usecase was generating large sets of fake data that looked real enough for performance testing enterprise sized data transformations. That way we could skip a large portion of the risk associated with using actual customer data. We wouldn’t have to generate the data beforehand, we could validate logic with it, and we could just plop it in the replica non-prodiction environment.
At the time we didn’t have any LLMs. So it didn’t go anywhere. But it’s always funny when I see all this “LLMs can do x” because I always think about how my proposal was to use it… For fake data.
Remember you can download all of Wikipedia in your language and safely store it on a drive buried in your backyard, for after they rewrite history and eliminate freedom of speech.
Already got it downloaded. It’s only like 100 - 150 gigabytes or something like that. Got it on my PC, my laptop, and my external hard drive. I don’t trust the powers that be to keep it intact anymore so I’d rather have my own copy, even if outdated.
What about any of this remotely connects to "rewriting history and eliminating freedom of speech?"
LainTrainProprietary AI means corpo involvement, and usually it’s the really actively awful sort of techbros, this involvement gives them some power, and this power is a threat. Whether it materializes or not, living in the world we do now, it’s only right to be wary. I already figured Wikipedia was on its way out a few months ago and downloaded both the kiwi program reader version and the raw xml dump + file for truly apocalyptic situations.
It’s AI involved in the process of editing articles.
Which is not relevant to the actual use case for AI being discussed. There's no direct AI involvement in editing articles being proposed here.
EngywookSome people can’t really stop seeing conspiracies everywhere.
FarraigePlaisteaċ (sé/é)As long as billionaires are campaigning to destroy it, there is no place for that comment you made.
Pathetic…
I don’t think an existing conspiracy is necessary, it’s just a cheap way to help protect yourself and others against something that could happen one day.
I can understand that. But should one apply this to every aspect of their life, they’ll just be living in a cave.
By downloading it every month and seeding its torrent (totally legal!), you are also helping to keep Wikimedia accountable.
The problem with LLMs and other generative AI is that they’re not completely useless. People’s jobs are on the line much of the time, so it would really help if they were completely useless, but they’re not. Generative AI is certainly not as good as its proponents claim, and critically, when it fucks up, it can be extremely hard for a human to tell, which eats away a lot of their benefits, but they’re not completely useless. For the most basic example, give an LLM a block of text and ask it how to improve grammar or to make a point clearer, and then compare the AI generated result with the original, and take whatever parts you think the AI improved.
Everybody knows this, but we’re all pretending it’s not the case because we’re caring people who don’t want the world to be drowned in AI hallucinations, we don’t want to have the world taken over by confidence tricksters who just fake everything with AI, and we don’t want people to lose their jobs. But sometimes, we are so busy pretending that AI is completely useless that we forget that it actually isn’t completely useless. The reason they’re so dangerous is that they’re not completely useless.
It’s almost as if nuance and context matters.
How much energy does a human use to write a Wikipedia article? Now also measure the accuracy and completeness of the article.
Now do the same for AI.
Objective metrics are what is missing, because much of what we hear is “phd-level inference” and it’s still just a statistical, probabilistic generator.
[deleted] in lemmyIt is completely useless as presented by the major players who atrocities trying to jam models that are trying to everything at the same time and that is what we always talk about when discussing AI.
We aren’t talking about focused implementations that are Wikipedia to a certain set of data or designed for specific purposes. That is why we don’t need nuance, although the reminder that we aren’t talking about smaller scale AI used by humans as tools is nice once in a while.
pelespiritThey’re trying to get rid of Wikipedia by saying they’re shit and doing things you’ll hate. Fight for no AI if that’s your thing, but read very carefully what’s happening. Wikipedia can NOT go away.
riverok jimmy boy, will that ai also beg for donations? /s
katy ✨if jimmy wales puts ai in wikipedia i stg imma scream
kazernielThe editor community rejected the idea so overwhelmingly, that Wikipedia paused the planned experiment in June, hopefully for good.
Chloé 🥕jimmy wales is also the president and co-founder of fandom
to give you an idea of who that guy is
Oh gross
Fandom (previously Wikia) is an extremely shitty service with low-quality wikis mostly consisting of content copied from independent wikis and a terrible layout that only exists to amplify their overwhelming advertising.
While this is true, the majority of the wikis are not at all low quality. Some are the only ones existing for a topic. The wikis are community-based, after all.
But its easy to vandalize and is highly profit-driven. The fandom wikis are filled with ads that absolutely destroy navigation. Infamous is the video ad that scrolls you up automatically in the middle of reading once it finishes. You have to pause it to read the article with no interruption.
GnuLinuxDudemy one weird trick for using fandom.com is to disable javascript for that domain.
What if they put anubis on it ?
Anubis only does a proof of work challenge if you lack a specific cookie that it gives you. You can temporarily enable JavaScript, pass the challenge, get the cookie, then disable JavaScript.
I use uBlock Origin, btw, to make selectively enabling/disabling JavaScript per domain a simple two-click task.
lime!they captured the “niche wiki” market as wikia, then rebranded and started serving shittons of ads. the vim wiki is unusable these days because it runs like ass and looks like a gamer rgb nightmare
JohnEdwaThere’s an addon for that, Indie Wiki Buddy.
It tries to redirect you to non fandom/fextralife wikis if they exist, and if not, it proxies fandom wikis through BreezeWiki which just displays the content.
It tries to redirect you to non fandom/fextralife wikis if they exist, and if not, it proxies fandom wikis through BreezeWiki which just displays the content.
Oh yeah that website’s pretty great It has really in depth wiki about games like fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Caesar's_Legion
So I guess you mean that Wales guy is pretty great then
Caesar's Legion
Caesar's Legion (Latin: Legio Caesaris),[1] also referred to simply as the Legion, is an imperialistic slaver society and totalitarian dictatorship founded in 2247 by Edward "Caesar" Sallow and Joshua Graham, built on the conquest and enslavement of tribal societies in the Mojave Wasteland and American southwest. To enforce unity in the absence of any civilian institutions, the Legion loosely models itself after the military of the Roman Empire, repurposing its language and aesthetics for...
Oh, you mean the fallout.wiki/wiki/Caesar's_Legion ?
RoseYup, Fallout Wiki has a pretty crazy history. I don’t remember if they were originally a Fandom wiki, but at some point they definitely went “well, we don’t want to go with Fandom, we’ll go with Curse wiki host instead.” Then Fandom bought Curse wikis and put all of them under Fandom banner anyway.
The independent Fallout Wiki is basically where the actual community is right now, the Fandom wiki is just there to confuse passers-by with their high search engine rank. Fandom has the policy that the community can fork a wiki and go elsewhere, but they will not close down the Fandom wiki, so good luck with your search rankings.
Many game communities have opted for the “unbridled vandalism” strategy to push people away from fandom. Just replace all the articles with plausible lies.
The “fandom” one is much more complete ?
I mean, they’re both pretty great,
From the search engine if I wanted to know about in-game faction,
I’d just pick which ever appeared first.
and it’d be fine either way
So why would “Chloé 🥕@lemmy.blahaj.zone”
think they can just point at it and imagine any random people would even know
what she “who that guy is” means just because he’s associated with that wiki ?
And that my innocuous comment
would triggers the nerds with such an anonymously negative response ?
The user content on fandom is generally pretty good, at least for the wikis I frequent. It’s everything else about the site which is awful – the pop-ups, the completely irrelevant auto-playing videos, how it’s constantly trying to shove other fandom wikis into your attention.
I’m sure the site is improved with userscripts and such, and I am already using adblock, but it’s pretty unforgivable IMO.
I mean, the Wikipedia page does say it was sold in 2018. Not sure how it was before but it’s not surprising that it enshittified by now.
I guess in his defense it wasn’t too bad before 2018, as far as I can remember. Most of the enshittification of fandom I can remember has happened since.
Obligatory plug for BreezeWiki. Makes that shit actually usable.