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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

#141

Post by dreamcompiler »

culebron21 wrote: post #115

Yes. I thought of Wikipedia as a forum for annoying socially inept nerds, who'd have millions of pages for pokemons, but delete pages for thing that exist on Earth. Now I have to remember those days with nostalgia. I'm not yet decided on StackOverflow. I won't bother posting there, since every question there nowadays is flagged as offtopic. But I will prefer a stackoverflow answer from a living being, direct and on t…

I still find SO a valuable resource of already-answered questions, with the most useful almost always marked offtopic. It's almost like adding "offtopic" to a SO query finds better results.

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

#142

Post by tstrimple »

patrickmcnamara wrote: post #94
incomingpain wrote: post #90

Wikipedia was the greatest long ago. Then anonymous partisans setup a 'source blacklist' which essentially curates all of wiki for a specific ideology. They acknowledge their systemic bias and have done nothing to fix it. Wiki deserves to give us an apology. In reality no apology needed from wiki, we just move on to what's better. Grokipedia v0.1 is out and from what I've seen it's shockingly better. Tons of improvem…

Is this satire?

[flagged]

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

#143

Post by orwin »

tim333 wrote: post #139
wortelefant wrote: post #69

With some controversial topics like Nuclear Power on the German wikipedia or the Gaza conflict on the English one, wikipedia has become less than useless. Once an activist editor sith too much time gets hold of a page, it is game over for neutrality of wokipedia. Grokipedia might introduce some much needed competition.

I glanced at the Gaza stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza%E2%80%93Israel_conflict and it seemed quite a reasonable summary. What makes it useless? Any facts wrong? I'm kind of neutral on the conflict and genuinely curious. About the only bit of Wikipedia I've come across that I feel is inaccurate due to editorial policy is on covid origins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_SARS-CoV-2 >While other expl…

To be fair, their isn't any evidence for any explanation how COVID happened. The only thing we know is that gene splicing isn't involved, it's a genetically 'natural' variant. All other theories about what happened, including it's origin, is unsatisfactory at best.

Some Chinese I talk to think it's not from Wuhan, but rural China, and got confused with flu there, and since no one care about them [0].

If the virus circulated two months in rural China and the local authorities only detected it once it got in a big city, that's a big indictment against the CCP. Like a virus breaking out of a lab would be. But we have no evidence of either, and I'm not ready to choose between the two.

[0] China biggest issue is its countryside away from the coast, it's terrible there. less addict than in WV for sure, but tribes of 'abandoned' kids that makes 'lord of the fly' seems like a documentary. Since rural China population curve looks like a U (all the working age adults work for months in the city and come back twice a year, leaving their old parents or sometimes grandparents take care of the kid), and COVID was so hard on the elderly, post COVID it seems you have villages with two adults for 50 kids, and maybe worse.

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

#144

Post by dreamcompiler »

rsynnott wrote: post #134
jalapenos wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Safe space for Musk. He's been upset about Wikipedia for years (I suspect because it refuses to buy into his headcanon that he founded Tesla.)

His own entry in grokpedia [0] says two conflicting things:

"Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 as CEO and chief engineer, Tesla in 2003 where he became CEO in 2008..."

and later on the same page,

"...the company [Tesla] had been founded in 2003 by engineers Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning with a focus on high-performance EVs."

Grok can't seem to keep its story straight.

[0] https://grokipedia.com/page/Elon_Musk

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

#145

Post by embedding-shape »

exasperaited wrote: post #129
embedding-shape wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems there are a couple of pages like that, if you enter "views of" without hitting enter in the Wikipedia search bar, you get some suggestions. Seems there is similar pages for Kanye West, Richard Dawkins and some more. Many of the pages are redirects back to the main page of the person though, so seems they're maybe disappearing or exclusively used for people who are very outspoken about lots of different things.

They are largely used to put the Talk: flamewar in a box, I think, so they can separate out the mundane fact edits from the rest.

That's actually kind of neat, at least for us that don't care much of the political views of celebrities.

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

#146

Post by tim333 »

orwin wrote: post #143
tim333 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I glanced at the Gaza stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza%E2%80%93Israel_conflict and it seemed quite a reasonable summary. What makes it useless? Any facts wrong? I'm kind of neutral on the conflict and genuinely curious. About the only bit of Wikipedia I've come across that I feel is inaccurate due to editorial policy is on covid origins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_SARS-CoV-2 >While other expl…

To be fair, their isn't any evidence for any explanation how COVID happened. The only thing we know is that gene splicing isn't involved, it's a genetically 'natural' variant. All other theories about what happened, including it's origin, is unsatisfactory at best. Some Chinese I talk to think it's not from Wuhan, but rural China, and got confused with flu there, and since no one care about them [0]. If the virus cir…

I wouldn't say it's proven one way or the other but you can cite evidence on both sides, like in favour of a zoonotic origin, the previous SARS outbreak and other viruses have been zoonotic, there were cases near the wet market. In favour of lab, it's a bit of a coincidence that a novel form or SARS popped up near the number one lab in the world researching such stuff, and in a way that could be easily explained by research proposed by Ralph Baric, the no 1 researcher of such stuff who proposed such research in collaboration with the Wuhan lab.

My guess is that although a grant application for Baric's research was turned down, the Wuhan lab went ahead and did it anyway and had a screw up.

Evidence doesn't have to mean proven beyond all doubt.

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

#147

Post by mapontosevenths »

IAmBroom wrote: post #110
mapontosevenths wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learned much of what I know by reading the set of encyclopedias someone gave my family as a gift when I was born. By the time I really got to them there were a bit out of date. What a lot of folks miss is that traditional encyclopedias ensured correctness by employing experts in various fields. Wikipedia often cites those same experts via academic papers, etc. They just don't pay those SME's money directly. If anyt…

And more experts per topic. I'll never forget EB's entry on "baby". It started with a lengthy paragraph that made a human baby sound like a horrifying, antisocial, psychotic parasite. Yes, you feel obligated to reply with a joke about how accurate that is. Not the point. The point is: the author was clearly a man, who didn't raise his own children, and it was unvetted by others.

I would love to see the article you're referencing. It sounds great.

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

#148

Post by mapontosevenths »

georgefrowny wrote: post #136
mapontosevenths wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It would be genuinely interesting to know if it was that generic or if it had special sauce for certain subjects. For example, Ask Grok allegedly uses this system prompt: https://github.com/xai-org/grok-prompts/blob/main/ask_grok_s... Which does seem very neutral. So then then question is have they encoded bias at a much deeper level directly in the training data or what? A contrarian might say that maybe is really i…

> moral absolutism

I have a personal rule that whenever someone starts to whinge about moral relativism when talking about Nazi's it's pretty safe to just assume they're either Nazi's or Nazi-adjacent.

I think it's fair to include AI's in that rule.

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

#149

Post by stubish »

benphley wrote: post #121
miltonlost wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the wikipedia on grokipedia: "Following the public launch of Grokipedia, it was criticised for publishing false information. Wired reported that "The new AI-powered Wikipedia competitor falsely claims that pornography worsened the AIDS epidemic and that social media may be fueling a rise in transgender people." So, it's a way of Musk using AI to propagandize on a large scale.

Are these false claims? From Grokipedia: > This marked the onset of what would become a devastating crisis disproportionately affecting gay male communities, where behaviors idealized in pornography—such as unprotected receptive anal intercourse and multiple anonymous partners—aligned directly with primary transmission routes, leading to rapid seroconversion rates. This sounds plausible. Is it factually incorrect?

Yes, it is factually incorrect.

Now you have two unsubstantiated opinions contradicting each other.

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

#150

Post by Yizahi »

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 reduces a barrier to entry, so less knowledgeable people can access the same information without inputting a prompt and then corrections. Also a person using an LLM directly may accidentally produce a progressive/liberal result, which is not good. So while for now it seems Elonopedia is mostly automated, in the future I foresee that young energetic party members will vet the most popular articles, to follow the party line.
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