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Endless AI-Generated Wikipedia

seangoedecke.com

11–20 of 25 posts

Re: Endless AI-Generated Wikipedia

#11
post #3

> I’ve disabled new page generation for now because someone ran a script overnight to endlessly click links and cost me $70. I don’t really understand why anybody would do that. Guess it wasn't so endless after all. Author is assuming malice, but honestly bots clicking links is just what happens to every public site on the internet. Not to mention going down the link clicking rabbit hole is common among wikipedia rea…

> but honestly bots clicking links is just what happens to every public site on the internet.

As a CS student ~20 years ago I wrote a small website to manage my todo list and hosted it on my desktop in the department. One day I found my items disappearing before my eyes. At first I assumed someone was intentionally messing with my app but logs indicated it was just a scraping bot someone was running.

It was a low stakes lesson on why GET should not mutate meaningful state. I knew when I built it anyone could click the links and I wasn’t bothered with auth since it was one accessible from within the department network. But I didn’t plan for the bots.

Re: Endless AI-Generated Wikipedia

#13

This is a slippery slope to hallucinated hell

I would use Deep Research mode outputs. Sometimes I run multiple of these in parallel on different models, then compare between them to catch hallucinations. If I wanted to publish that, I would also doublecheck each citation link.

I think the idea is sound, the potential is to have a much larger AI-wikipedia than the human one. Can it cover all known entities, events, concepts and places? All scientific publications? It could get 1000x larger than Wikipedia and be a good pre-training source of text.

Covering a topic I would not make the AI agent try to find the "Truth" but just to analyze the distribution of information out there. What are the opinions, who has them? I would also test a host of models in closed book mode and put an analysis of how AI covers the topic on its own, it is useful information to have.

This method has the potential to create much higher quality text than usual internet scrape, in large quantities. It would be comparative analysis text connecting across many sources, which would be better for the model than training on separate pieces of text. Information needs to circulate to be understood better.

Re: Endless AI-Generated Wikipedia

#15
post #11
post #3

> I’ve disabled new page generation for now because someone ran a script overnight to endlessly click links and cost me $70. I don’t really understand why anybody would do that. Guess it wasn't so endless after all. Author is assuming malice, but honestly bots clicking links is just what happens to every public site on the internet. Not to mention going down the link clicking rabbit hole is common among wikipedia rea…

> but honestly bots clicking links is just what happens to every public site on the internet. As a CS student ~20 years ago I wrote a small website to manage my todo list and hosted it on my desktop in the department. One day I found my items disappearing before my eyes. At first I assumed someone was intentionally messing with my app but logs indicated it was just a scraping bot someone was running. It was a low sta…

Reminds me of the Spider of Doom which was a similar issue where "Get/Delete" links were hidden by simple javascript to see if the user was logged in. All of a sudden pages and content on the website began to mysteriously vanish.

You know what doesn't care about Javascript and tries to click every link on your page? A search engine's web crawler.

https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The_Spider_of_Doom

Re: Endless AI-Generated Wikipedia

#16
I'm trying to link to Philip Glass. This could take a while. Kinda fun and a bit reminiscint of googlewhacking or maybe the LLM equivalent of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, but it's gonna be way more than six to get to Philip Glass.

Edit, well shit looks like there is a Minimalism page, but it didn't make any names clickable. Sean, looks like you need to tweak the code a bit?

https://www.endlesswiki.com/wiki/minimalism

Re: Endless AI-Generated Wikipedia

#17
post #3

> I’ve disabled new page generation for now because someone ran a script overnight to endlessly click links and cost me $70. I don’t really understand why anybody would do that. Guess it wasn't so endless after all. Author is assuming malice, but honestly bots clicking links is just what happens to every public site on the internet. Not to mention going down the link clicking rabbit hole is common among wikipedia rea…

You should always have per-IP rate limiting.

Re: Endless AI-Generated Wikipedia

#19
post #3

> I’ve disabled new page generation for now because someone ran a script overnight to endlessly click links and cost me $70. I don’t really understand why anybody would do that. Guess it wasn't so endless after all. Author is assuming malice, but honestly bots clicking links is just what happens to every public site on the internet. Not to mention going down the link clicking rabbit hole is common among wikipedia rea…

New page generation has been re-enabled, with a rate limit and "using openai/gpt-oss-120b instead of Kimi-K2".
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