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

mcsweeneys.net

151–160 of 168 posts

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

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it makes sense for some politicians, too —- especially politicians who have an extensive life story otherwise.

Not least because it bumps the topic up one heading level, as it were, which means more possible uses of mediawiki formatting to break it up than if it were a section of another page.

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

#152
post #82

I bet now you’d kill for a senior thesis based on my free, multilingual, publicly cited, text-based articles, motherfucker Yeeeeeeeeah.... Not if it's written in or about the Scots language. (see: https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/26/scots_wikipedia_fake/ ) (see also: that time the Scottish governmment used Scots wikipedia as a source)

Wasn't that an edge case, though? Not even done by a bad actor, just someone misguided? And it was discovered and quickly corrected, unlike what would happen on something owned by a massive FAANG-style corp. I have been schooled many times on the failures of Wikipedia, why I shouldn't waste my time editing it, how the editors are toxic; but ultimately, I can't help but buy into the idea of a crowdsourced, centrally a…

    > Not even done by a bad actor, just someone misguided?
I'm not sure how the actor's good intentions makes the information on the wiki accurate?

    > quickly corrected
As others have pointed out, it was certainly not "quickly" corrected. And to clarify on "corrected", about half the content on that wiki was simply deleted. A bunch of actual useful edits were definitely removed. And that didn't happen before the Scottish government used it as a source.

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

#153
post #82

I bet now you’d kill for a senior thesis based on my free, multilingual, publicly cited, text-based articles, motherfucker Yeeeeeeeeah.... Not if it's written in or about the Scots language. (see: https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/26/scots_wikipedia_fake/ ) (see also: that time the Scottish governmment used Scots wikipedia as a source)

You've cherrypicked 0.0006% of Wikipedia... that has been corrected.

Or another way of saying it would be that I've "cherrypicked" literally the majority of Scots wikipedia.

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

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you that the Grokipedia article is better here, though I guess I disagree that the wikipedia lead has "no neutrality" and is a "straight up ideological attack." Having read both articles (and knowing very little about this topic before), I came away with the firm conclusion that acupuncture is psuedoscience; both articles clearly explain that is not based on scientific principles and its practice is not…

>I came away with the firm conclusion that acupuncture is psuedoscience; I dont think most disagrees on this. As I said, I'm not interested in it at all, even if it did work. The science however is not saying it's pseduoscience. It's saying that the Qi and meridians and that sort of stuff is wrong. Whereas the actual needles are scientifically based as providing pain relief in a small and short term effect. It's a co…

> The science however is not saying it's pseduoscience. It's saying that the Qi and meridians and that sort of stuff is wrong. Whereas the actual needles are scientifically based as providing pain relief in a small and short term effect.

You seem to be conflating the concepts acupuncture and needling as well as the concepts of science and efficacy. Qi and Meridians are a part of acupuncture and it is entirely fair to point at that these systems are unscientific. The Grokipedia entry certainly considers qi and meridians to be parts of acupuncture.

Also, for something to be scientific, it has to be based on scientific methods. If acupuncture wants to be a science, it needs to discard all the baseless qi, meridians, and yin-yang explanations and there needs to be more widespread and rigorous investigation of the therapies.

I am an avid yoga practitioner (I do yoga 4 or 5 days a week) and I think it has all kinds of health benefits. That doesn't mean that yoga is "scientific." Indeed, if someone described yoga as pseudoscience I would probably agree (though it varies a lot between studios), because it is common for teachers to go off on unscientific explanatory tangents involving "chakra," "energy," "detoxification" and so on. Is yoga beneficial by various benchmarks? Yes. Is it based on and further developed by scientific inquiry? Not so much.

So it seems to me like you've misinterpreted a sentence in the wikipedia article. It is actually stating something like: "the acupuncture system is unscientific." You've interpreted it to mean something like: "needling therapy is ineffective." And from that misinterpretation, you've drawn lots of invalid conclusions.

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

#155
post #30

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.

I decided to read through a subject I already knew a lot about.

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

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I assure you, the reason McSweeney's is no longer funny is not because the humor is too smart. "peer review deez nutz" does not require reading above the sixth grade level.

Except it is still funny. You just don't like it.

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

#157

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?

Generally the UX could be an advantage, the hypertext format of wikipedia and length is nicer when you want to go on a random knowledge walk compared to LLMs.

Regarding the Wikipedia trained Ouroboros models, you can argue that the Wikipedia training is mostly there to learn to summarize sources and translate, and once you have the original sources the LLM might do a better job than humans

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

#158

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. I like how the website claims "McSweeney’s accepts no writing aided in any manner by AI."

Really hard to believe that a garbage “article” like this was produced by a human.

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

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if your comment is parody or not but can you cite some examples of where Grokipedia is “shockingly better” than Wikipedia? It’s and honest question. I haven’t noticed a strong bias on Wikipedia but that may just be because the kinds of the things I look up on Wikipedia are usually not political in nature.

>It’s and honest question. I haven’t noticed a strong bias on Wikipedia but that may just be because the kinds of the things I look up on Wikipedia are usually not political in nature. Lets do it on some random article that isnt political.I have aichophobia, so I'm an outside observer on this one. I will never ever ever ever have it done on me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acupuncture >Acupuncture[b] is a form of al…

> This is shockingly better writing.

Wow you are easily shocked.

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

#160

Maybe if Wikipedia sourced more peer reviewed publications and less Vox, I would be more satisfied. Thrilled to see Grokipedia as a competitor that could perhaps pressure Wikipedia to improve its editorial policies.

Did they omit Wikipedia when creating the models behind Grokipedia? Otherwise it less a competitor and more a re-hash.

Well, some of the "articles" on Grokipedia even state that they were sourced from Wikipedia.
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