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Hi, it's me, Wikipedia, and I am ready for your apology

mcsweeneys.net

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Re: Hi, it's me, Wikipedia, and I am ready for your apology

#51

Post by mapontosevenths »

marcellus23 wrote: post #38
mapontosevenths wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This 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".

I'm not talking about the Literati. Anything above the sixth grade level is no longer suitable for the majority of the population.

Re: Hi, it's me, Wikipedia, and I am ready for your apology

#52

Post by j2kun »

jalapenos wrote: post #42
babblingfish wrote: post #5

Especially relevant today with the release of grokipedia

Someone please enlighten me: what is the point of an AI-generated Wikipedia when we're all now using (Wikipedia-trained) AIs directly instead of Wikipedias?

Perhaps to muddy future corpora

Re: Hi, it's me, Wikipedia, and I am ready for your apology

#53

Post by add-sub-mul-div »

djeastm wrote: post #30
brightball wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s so good. I spent 2 hours reading articles on there last night and the consistency was excellent, although a little verbose at times.

Nevermind the Grok-ness of it, I can't seriously believe a thinking human being would spend 2 hours knowingly reading something written by AI.

It's for the intersection of people who want LLM summarization and people who want an assurance of confirmation of bias explicitly built in. It's not for thinking people.

Re: Hi, it's me, Wikipedia, and I am ready for your apology

#54

Post by greatgib »

The 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.

Re: Hi, it's me, Wikipedia, and I am ready for your apology

#55

Post by zozbot234 »

btilly wrote: post #7
marcellus23 wrote: post #2

I 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.

Indeed, 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.

Wikipedia 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.)

Re: Hi, it's me, Wikipedia, and I am ready for your apology

#56

Post by Spivak »

jalapenos wrote: post #42
babblingfish wrote: post #5

Especially relevant today with the release of grokipedia

Someone please enlighten me: what is the point of an AI-generated Wikipedia when we're all now using (Wikipedia-trained) AIs directly instead of Wikipedias?

It's Conservapedia, authored by AI, and exists to present the world as seen through the eyes of Mr. Musk. The hope is that through AI it can be comprehensive enough to be useful and if enough people adopt it you can quietly put your thumb on the scale to make truth what you say it is.

Re: Hi, it's me, Wikipedia, and I am ready for your apology

#57

Post by georgefrowny »

unethical_ban wrote: post #33
mapontosevenths wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

How? How do 28% of people not know how to read?

It'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.

Re: Hi, it's me, Wikipedia, and I am ready for your apology

#59

Post by j2kun »

embedding-shape wrote: post #20
kreetx wrote: post #18

What is there to apologize for, what do you think LLMs use for cheating?

"Cheating" is not something LLMs do, LLMs are something a human could use for cheating. But what's your point?

Tell that to the guy whose wife cheated on him with an LLM

Re: Hi, it's me, Wikipedia, and I am ready for your apology

#60

Post by HPsquared »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #22
babblingfish wrote: post #5

Especially relevant today with the release of grokipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grokipedia

That references another article "Views of Elon Musk" ... Quite an unusual format, "views of [public figure]". I don't remember seeing anything quite like it on Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Views_of_Elon_Musk

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