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Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search summaries and social video

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Re: Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search summaries and social video

#461
post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Postmodernism cares deeply about truth. It is highly skeptical of power, bias, perception, etc. and provides tools to mitigate these risks to truth. I think someone told you this and you believed it, but the track record of postmodernists in academia tells a different story. I once saw a history lecture from a dean of the history department who had written of a book on WWII in the Philippines. This is one of the mo…

> I think someone told you this and you believed it Obviously you don't care about the truth but just fabricate bullshit about other people that's convenient to you. I know the topic well; you clearly don't. Your father is one source; he no doubt has his experience and memory which are important to him. If you look at the sources of a scholarly history book, you'll see thousands of people - that's how history is done…

It's hilarious to read American history and read in every book how everyone who had something the US wanted, or went counter to US interests accidentally happened to have been evil in some way so the US could conveniently show up out of selfless desire just to right the wrongs and end up with the geopolitical result that it wanted in the first place.

People with decades long scholarly careers write this shit (some even having the highest credentials), and people eat it up.

History as written by (especially US) historians is just racist boomer fanfiction (pushed as propaganda to enforce the national myth) for your own country. This is especially true of the US.

And their errors and not subtle by any means. When they write something that is so wrong about you that every man on the street who even has cursory familiarity with the subject would reject as not even wrong, so far from the truth it's clear to the observer that the one who made these claims doesn't even have basic familiarity with the subject.

You've countered this argument with an appeal to authority (his word against thousands of researchers) - how fortunate was a person like Galileo who could just make people look into a telescope and show his numerous and highly distinguished opponents that they we wrong - unfortunately no such thing can exist for history. The next best thing I could recommend to US scholars is to have their work reviewed by top and highly respected local scholars for obvious errors, not biases of overarching narrative but, basic shit and continuity errors that common man on the street wold laugh at.

How could this be? Do I believe Americans to be specially dumb? Just like Big Tobacco pushing studies on the health benefits of smoking for pregnant mothers, and Coca Cola delegitimizing the view that sugar is bad, US historians have a vested interest in propping up US imperialism - or are acting as reactionaries saying everything the US (or white people) has ever done was purely evil, what you have is a partisan shouting match (also called activism), that is the exact opposite of scholarly work.

Re: Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search summaries and social video

#462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a pretty strong bias in the statement "2 + 2 = 4" because math doesn't care about the encoding used to describe a sum. For example, in an alternative society the expression could be written with flipped number symbols, right to left or in a vertical layout. Axioms are also a form of bias.

Axioms would only be a form of bias if they were taken at random. It's not biased to take the axiom that repeatedly holds true in empiric testing, over others that do not.

Well, it is a bias. It’s a bias towards truth :)

Re: Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search summaries and social video

#463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get your point. You are allowed to edit articles on contentious topics. Its just more likely to be reverted. Because the topic is... contentious.

My attempt at a point is that the controversial topics are a tiny percentage of the human knowledge stored on Wikipedia. If there were no controversies, then I would actually start to get worried. That would indicate that there was pure control of information on Wikipedia, like a theoretical CCPedia. [0] Wikipedia is so open, that they even have their own "controversial" section! Is that not the coolest thing ever? T…

I can't edit now, but when I wrote "CCPedia" I was first thinking about "muskpedia," but I didn't want to get political in a way that might offend other readers.

Currently ROFL, given grokpedia or whatever objectively dumb shit to which we are now exposed. I should not have bitten my tongue. Self-censorship is the worst kind.

Re: Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search summaries and social video

#464

Knowledge isn’t knowledge in itself — it’s about how people organize it. With more AI tools mining existing knowledge and presenting it in increasingly accessible ways, I don’t think AI search fundamentally changes how information and knowledge are organized. Of course, AI could reshape the organization of knowledge through areas like: 1. Fact-checking and sourcing 2. Drafting new pages 3. Editing and refining wordin…

I like to idea of using AI to make Wikipedia better. There are many small tasks simple AI agents could handle. For example: Go to every article in the English Wikipedia of a Spanish city. Check data like inhabitants, major, etc. and compare them to the Spanish Wikipedia article. (The assumption here is that the Spanish Wikipedia will be more up-to-date for Spanish cities than the English Wikipedia.) Double-check what…

Definitely, this kind of processes will be AI-driven completely
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