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Wikipedia row erupts as Jimmy Wales intervenes on 'Gaza genocide' page

thenational.scot

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Re: Wikipedia row erupts as Jimmy Wales intervenes on 'Gaza genocide' page

#12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wikipedia would do really well for itself if it instead created a set of public high level rules for an open model to follow This is literally every LLM that quotes Wikipedia. The value in Wikipedia is it’s curated. A model is the opposite of that. As for the topic at hand, it seems nobody agrees on what genocide means anymore, few are willing to accept there is legitimate disagreement, everyone has a unique defini…

I don’t think curation is the answer, if Wikipedia was based off rules and if fundamental articles were dependencies to more complex downstream articles I think people would have more respect the site. Curation invites unintentional omission of information which people may suspect is intentional. If a Wikipedia model first defined rules for a genocide article and then screened events that were suspected to be genocid…

An issue not brought up is that LLMs are not deterministic enough to follow rules -- it would be nice if we had a perfect robot that could do all these things and then determine rules for it to follow. But it only took prompt tampering with Grok for it to start talking about mechahitler, and I'm pretty sure at least that wasn't entirely planned. Inconsistency is almost to be expected from LLMs.

Re: Wikipedia row erupts as Jimmy Wales intervenes on 'Gaza genocide' page

#13
post #3

This was not linked in the article, so here is what Jimmy wrote in the talk page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gaza_genocide#Statement_f...

Reading the discussion, this appears to be an instance of the system working as intended. People are discussing Jimbo's message and weighing his position against the position of previous editors of the article, and they are weighing the merits and adherence to Wikipedia policy of each.

Re: Wikipedia row erupts as Jimmy Wales intervenes on 'Gaza genocide' page

#14
> Another editor responded: “There's also an ‘ongoing controversy’ over whether mRNA vaccines cause ‘turbo cancer’ and whether [Donald] Trump actually won the 2020 Presidential election. Do you want us to be [bold] and go edit those articles as well?”

LOL

Re: Wikipedia row erupts as Jimmy Wales intervenes on 'Gaza genocide' page

#15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think curation is the answer, if Wikipedia was based off rules and if fundamental articles were dependencies to more complex downstream articles I think people would have more respect the site. Curation invites unintentional omission of information which people may suspect is intentional. If a Wikipedia model first defined rules for a genocide article and then screened events that were suspected to be genocid…

> if Wikipedia was based off rules and if fundamental articles were dependencies to more complex downstream articles I think people would have more respect the site These structured sources of truth have been tried. They don’t work. Natural language allows for ambiguity where necessary in a way code does not. > If a Wikipedia model first defined rules for a genocide article It would be worthless. Also, futile. You th…

I don’t think you’re entertaining the idea sufficiently considering you’ve stated that it’s a worthless and futile idea. I think it’s a worthwhile and valuable idea. Rules-derived articles with logical dependencies could hold a mirror to our own biases. I think truth should be logically derived and I don’t want people to be hostile to the outcomes since we’re approaching a future where technology will be able to do this.

Re: Wikipedia row erupts as Jimmy Wales intervenes on 'Gaza genocide' page

#18
post #3

This was not linked in the article, so here is what Jimmy wrote in the talk page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gaza_genocide#Statement_f...

Thank you for sharing that, turns out to be a lot more measured and balanced than the news article makes it out to be. Damn media always fueling the fires rather than spreading understanding and clarify. I think both sides seems to be raising good points, and probably the truth and more balanced view sits in the middle.

I continued reading through the talk page and eventually come across this:

> the United States government is exerting serious political pressure on Wikipedia as a whole to reveal the real life identities of many editors here who disagree with the current military actions of the government of Israel.

I have not heard about this before, what specifically is this about, if it's true?

Re: Wikipedia row erupts as Jimmy Wales intervenes on 'Gaza genocide' page

#19

[flagged]

Exactly. There's another 20th century genocide that is "highly contested" in specific odious circles, but there's no reason to present that opposing viewpoint in an encyclopedic treatment of it, given mounds of evidence of intent and outcomes for both.
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