Another issue, somewhat indirectly, is Grokipedia. As we now have more and more information, the AI that is used here deliberately engineers Grokipedia to contain,
shall we say it ... "alternative facts". If you look at Grokipedia, it actually looks visually better than Wikipedia, on a smartphone at the least. At the same time it tries to destroy an objective purpose, e. g. Wikipedia trying to show accurate information without any "spin". I don't believe that how AI is used by, e. g. Elon or mega-corporations, has purity and truth at heart though. We may have to look carefully at what happens to Wikipedia - it almost seems as if the attacks against Wikipedia by AI may not be merely "accidental". (Since it stores a lot of data, of course AI bots will leech off regularly, but I am talking here about purposes by organisations who may dislike democracy, for instance.)
Generative AI and Wikipedia editing: What we learned in 2025
101–110 of 132 posts
Re: Generative AI and Wikipedia editing: What we learned in 2025
#102> 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…
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 unle…
> 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.
Citations have become heavily weaponized across a lot of spaces on the internet. There was a period of time where we all learned that citations were correlated with higher quality arguments and Wikipedia’s [Citation Needed] even became a meme.
But the quacks and the agenda pushers realized that during casual internet browsing readers won’t actually read, let alone scrutinize the citation links, so it didn’t matter what you linked to. As long as the domain and title looked relevant it would be assumed correct. Anyone who did read the links might take so much time that the comment section would be saturated with competing comments by the time someone can respond with a real critique.
This has become a real problem on HN, too. Often when I see a comment with a dozen footnoted citations from PubMed they’re either misunderstandings what the study says or some times they even say the opposite of what the commenter claims.
The strategy is to just quickly search PubMed or other sources for keywords and then copy those into the post with the HN footnote citation format, knowing that most people won’t read or question it.
Re: Generative AI and Wikipedia editing: What we learned in 2025
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s a bad analogy. In this case Lockheed isn’t building a killer drone and then finding a market for it, nation states are sending requirements to Lockheed based on what they want to do. Hence the label “defense contractor.” I think your analogy would hold if slop creators were creating requirements and contracting OpenAI to build the thing that lets them slop edit Wikipedia and GitHub issues. But since they aren’t,…
I suspect that this is a very simplistic view of how R&D and the revolving door work. For example, previous Secretary of War Lloyd Austin was on the board of Ratheon https://www.opensecrets.org/revolving-door/lloyd-austin/summ...
You’re not wrong at all, and I agree, but it was an analogy for someone who was comparing defense contracting companies with a regular saas company. In any case, for these purposes I don’t think we need to address all edge cases.
Re: Generative AI and Wikipedia editing: What we learned in 2025
#104> 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…
> 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.
Re: Generative AI and Wikipedia editing: What we learned in 2025
#105"Never copy and paste the output from generative AI chatbots" is mentioned in the article three times. This has been my experience as well. Initial AI output can be stunning until you quickly realize that it is mostly BS, filler and pap. However, I do find LLMs to be really useful for brainstorming, ideation, sounding boards etc.
Re: Generative AI and Wikipedia editing: What we learned in 2025
#106[flagged]
Grokipedia is a pile of propaganda written by an AI that moonlights as a CSAM generator, built to serve as a weapon in a culture war being waged by a bunch of billionaires trying to normalize pedophilia by selling it to neo-Nazis.
For now, I think I'll take the Wikipedia edit gangs.
Re: Generative AI and Wikipedia editing: What we learned in 2025
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Main competitor? I’m pretty sure that Uncyclopedia is a more relevant competitor to Wikipedia than Grokipedia. Likely more accurate, too.
In some time it will become a serious alternative.
Maybe, maybe not. There are a ton of failed attempts at competing with Wikipedia out there. Whether grokipedia is one remains to be seen.
Re: Generative AI and Wikipedia editing: What we learned in 2025
#108Re: Generative AI and Wikipedia editing: What we learned in 2025
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s on its way to becoming more popular and a clear competitor to it. Just a matter of time.
Is that "more popular" in the sense of McDonald's popular?
Doesnt really matter the reason why does it?
If more people use it then it is more popular. Simple metric.
Re: Generative AI and Wikipedia editing: What we learned in 2025
#110wikipedia is great but I can't get over this - https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z16393
Have you tried going under it? /s