Isn't Wikipedia where AI gets like half of its information from anyway?
Wikipedia editors adopt a policy giving admins the authority to quickly delete AI-generated articles that meet certain criteria, like incorrect citations
a year ago by Pro to c/technology
Tollana1234567 15 points a year ago
reddit allows GOOGLE to scrape it for its AI, because google allows them to use thier v3captcha for thier moderation and banning purposes.
9point6 6 points a year ago
Do you think these people surreptitiously submitting articles written by AI are gonna be capable of validating what they're submitting is even true? Particularly if the (presumably effective) Wikipedia defense for this is detecting made up citations?
This kind of thing makes something valuable to everyone, like Wikipedia, ultimately a less valuable resource, and should be resisted and rejected by anyone with their head screwed on
BrainInABox -85 points a year ago
Why would wikipedia of all things be your go to for that?
NiHaDuncan 43 points a year ago
Wikipedia is the most accurate encyclopedia to date; its perceived unreliability as to its correctness is largely a misunderstanding that arose from misconceptions as to why one can’t (or shouldn’t, depending on case) cite it in academia. People think that it can’t be cited because of its unreliability but in reality it’s simply because it’s a third hand source; i.e. a resource.
Wikipedia is built near-purely on second hand sources, which is how all encyclopedias are intended to be constructed. As long as one ensures the validity of the second hand source used, encyclopedias are great resources.
BrainInABox -42 points a year ago
Wikipedia is the most accurate encyclopedia to date
How did you determine that?
Wikipedia is built near-purely on second hand sources, which is how all encyclopedias are intended to be constructed. As long as one ensures the validity of the second hand source used, encyclopedias are great resources.
True, but basically nobody does check that the sources are valid, and they often aren't.
crash_thepose 28 points a year ago
How do you know they often aren't? I'm an academic and regularly use wikipedia to find citations for sources. I've have yet to come across any citations that were wrong.
andros_rex 11 points a year ago
For anything that is not politically contentious, it’s very good. Even the politically contentious stuff tries to give the most “balanced”/“mainstream” interpretation usually.
There are communities of people which hyperfixate on certain topics. Think dinosaurs and trains. If a serious Dino-head sees a mistake about the length of Diplodocus, they are going to drop everything and fix it immediately.
I routinely check wiki sources - I’ve taught a lot of college kids that as a way to quickly find sources for papers. Most of the time, topics I know a lot about from my own educational background match what I see on wiki and cite the same kinds of sources I would use.
It’s not perfect - there’s the infamous story of an American teenager writing all of Scots Wikipedia without knowing any Scots - but you have to respect the fact that there are a lot of people who are obsessed with certain topics and will watch their pet articles like a hawk.
haloduder 26 points a year ago
This guy is a troll and he's going to keep asking questions as long as people keep answering them.
I'm just going to block him and move on; got no time to suffer fools like this any more.
BrainInABox -27 points a year ago
Man, you people really loath anyone who doesn't just shut up and agree.
Alcoholicorn -19 points a year ago
NATOpedia is a great resource if you go in with an assumption of a pro-western bias, but a source of truth lmao.
eugenevdebs 11 points a year ago
Someone is mad their sources got removed for not being credible.
BrainInABox -11 points a year ago
What a shock that someone who pretends to be an anarchist would go to bat to defend the reliablity of far right western propaganda outlets like Radio Free Asia, the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, and the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. Remember, if it doesn't' have the Western Neo-liberal seal of approval, it's not credible and should be removed, that's the anarchist way!
BrainInABox -24 points a year ago
A lot of western liberals really do treat it like the Holy Scripture. Any intelligence agencies would just have to pay a few admins and higher some people to sculpt the list of "reliable sources" that Wikipedia uses and they can basically fully control what hundreds of millions of neoliberals believe.
And they have.
a_wild_mimic_appears 14 points a year ago
You're just salty that the russian and chinese propaganda edits are thrown out as soon as they pop up lol
eugenevdebs 8 points a year ago
Well you're free to submit sources that are credible and challenge that old ones aren't.
AmidFuror 60 points a year ago
The headline reflects a sensible move by Wikipedia to protect content quality. AI-generated articles often include errors or fake citations, so giving admins the authority to quickly delete such content helps maintain accuracy and credibility. While there's some risk of overreach, the policy targets misuse, not responsible AI-assisted editing, and aligns with Wikipedia’s existing standards for removing low-quality material.
antonim 40 points a year ago
Ha, fair question! But no irony here—I actually wrote it myself. That said, it's kind of funny how quickly we've reached the point where any well-written, balanced take sounds like it could be AI-generated. Maybe that's part of the problem we're trying to solve!
MisterFrog 2 points a year ago
Either LLM or quality trolling
DeathByBigSad 9 points a year ago
It always feels weird when people write an essay as if this is their final quarter project for high school. Too neat, thoughts too organized, much flowery proses.
TheTechnician27 53 points a year ago
If anyone has specific questions about this, let me know, and I can probably answer them. Hopefully I can be to Lemmy and Wikimedia what Unidan was to Reddit and ecology before he crashed out over jackdaws and got exposed for vote fraud.
AwesomeLowlander 22 points a year ago
Well now I want to know about jackdaws and voter fraud
TheTechnician27 16 points a year ago
path: 0 18641439 18642213 18643190, hotness: undefined, score: 16, children: 2
ComicalMayhem 2 points a year ago
what about the jackdaws thing?
TheTechnician27 8 points a year ago
path: 0 18641439 18642213 18643190 18647262 18647395, hotness: undefined, score: 8, children: 0
HK65 8 points a year ago
Is there a danger that unscrupulous actors will try and build out a Wikipedia edit history with this and try to mass skew articles with propaganda using their "trusted" accounts?
Or what might be the goal here? Is it just stupid and bored people?
TheTechnician27 22 points a year ago
So Wikipedia has three methods for deleting an article:
- Proposed deletion (PROD): An editor tags an article explaining why they think it should be uncontroversially deleted. After seven days, an administrator will take a look and decide if they agree. Proposed deletion of an article can only be done once, even this can be removed by anyone passing by who disagrees with it, and an article deleted via PROD can be recreated at any time.
- Articles for deletion (AfD): A discussion is held to delete an article. Pretty much always, this is about the subject's notability. After the discussion (a week by default), a closer (almost always an administrator, especially for contentious discussions) will evaluate the merits of the arguments made and see if a consensus has been reached to e.g. delete, keep, redirect, or merge. Articles deleted via discussion cannot be recreated until they've satisfied the concerns of said discussion, else they can be summarily re-deleted.
- Speedy deletion: An article is so fundamentally flawed that it should be summarily deleted at best or needs to be deleted as soon as possible at worst. The nominating editor will choose one or more of the criteria for speedy deletion (CSD), and an administrator will delete the article if they agree. Like a PROD, articles deleted this way can be recreated at any time.
This new criterion has nothing to do with preempting the kind of trust building you described. The editor who made it will not be treated any differently than without this criterion. It's there so editors don't have to deal with the bullshit asymmetry principle and comb through everything to make sure it's verifiable. Sometimes editors will make these LLM-generated articles because they think they're helping but don't know how to do it themselves, sometimes it's for some bizarre agenda (e.g. there's a sockpuppet editor who's been occasionally popping up trying to push articles generated by an LLM about the Afghan–Mughal Wars), but whatever the reason, it just does nothing but waste other editors' time and can be effectively considered unverified. All this criterion does is expedite the process of purging their bullshit.
I'd argue meticulously building trust to push an agenda isn't a prevalent problem on Wikipedia, but that's a very different discussion.
HK65 5 points a year ago
Thank you for your answer, I really feel happy that Wikipedia is safe then. Stuff happening nowadays makes me always think of the worst.
Do you think your problem is similar to open-source developers fighting AI pull requests? There it was theorised that some people try to train their models by making them submit code changes and abuse the maintainers' time and effort to get training data.
Is it possible that this is an effort to steal work from Wikipedia editors to get you to train their AI models?
TheTechnician27 8 points a year ago
Is it possible that this is an effort to steal work from Wikipedia editors to get you to train their AI models?
I can't definitively say "no", but I've seen no evidence of this at all.
baltakatei 7 points a year ago
How frequently are images generated/modified by diffusion models uploaded to Wikimedia Commons? I can wrap my head around evaluating cited sources for notability, but I don't know where to start determining the repute of photographs. So many images Wikipedia articles use are taken by seemingly random people not associated with any organization.
TheTechnician27 8 points a year ago
So far, I haven't seen all that many, and the ones that are are very obvious like a very glossy crab at the beach wearing a Santa Claus hat. I definitely have yet to see one that's undisclosed, let alone actively disguising itself. I also have yet to see someone try using an AI-generated image on Wikipedia. The process of disclaiming generative AI usage is trivialized in the upload process with an obvious checkbox, so the only incentive not to is straight-up lying.
I can't say how much this will be an issue in the future or what good steps are to finding and eliminating it should it become one.
TheTechnician27 5 points a year ago
I'm going to write this from the perspective of the English Wikipedia, but most specifics should have some analog in other Wikipedias. By "contribute to new articles", do you mean create new articles, contribute to articles which are new that you come across, or contribute to articles which you haven't before (thus "new to you")? Asking because the first one has a very different – much more complicated – answer from the other two.
TheTechnician27 6 points a year ago
The short answer is that I really, really suggest you try other things before trying to create your first article. This isn't just me; every experienced editor will tell you that creating a new article is one of the hardest things any editor can do, let alone a newer one. It's why the task center lists it as being appropriate for "advanced editors". Finding an existing article which interests you and then polishing and expanding it is almost always more rewarding, more useful, easier, and less stressful than creating an article from scratch. And if creating articles sounds appealing, expanding existing stub articles is great experience for that.
The long answer is "you can", but it's really hard:
- New editors are subject to Articles for Creation, or AfC, when creating an article. The article sits in a draft state until the editor flags it for review. The backlog is very long, and while reviewers can go in any order they want, they usually prioritize the oldest articles out of fairness and because most AfC submissions are about equal in urgency and time consumption. "Months" is the expected waiting time.
- If you're not using the English Wikipedia, you can try translating over a well-established article from English. There's no rule that says sources have to be in the language of the Wikipedia they're on, although it's still considered a big plus if sources are in the same language. You'd have to keep in mind that the target language may have standards not followed on the English Wikipedia.
- Wikipedia's notability guidelines are predicated on you understanding other policies and guidelines like "reliable sources" and "independent sources". They're also intentionally fuzzy so people don't play lawyer and follow the exact letter without considering the spirit of the guideline.
- The English Wikipedia currently has over 7 million articles. There are still a lot of missing articles (mostly in taxonomy, where notability is almost guaranteed), but you really need to know where to look.
- When choosing an article subject, it's extremely important to avoid COI.
- Assuming you have a subject you think meets criteria, now you have to go out and find reliable, independent sources with substantial coverage of the subject to confirm your hypothesis.
- Now you need to start the article, and you need to do this in a manner which:
- Is verifiable (all claims are cited)
- Is not original research (i.e. nothing you say can be based on "because I know it")
- Is reliable (all citations are to reliable sources)
- Is neutral (you've minimized bias as much as you can, let the sources speak for themselves, and made sure your source selection isn't biased)
- Is stylistically correct (there's a manual of style, but just use your best judgment, and small mistakes can be copy-edited out by people familiar with style guidelines)
- If the article is nominated for deletion, you have to keep your cool and argue based solely on guidelines (not on perceived importance of the subject) that the article should be kept.
- New articles are almost always given more scrutiny than articles which have been around; this isn't a cultural problem as much as it is a heuristic one.
- An article deleted feels much more personal than edits reverted (despite the fact that subject notability is 100% out of your control).
Some of these apply to normal editing too, but working within an article others have worked on and might be willing to help with is vastly easier than building one from scratch. If you want specific help in picking out, say, an article to try editing and are on the English Wikipedia, I have no problem acting like bowling bumpers if you're afraid your edits won't meet standards.
Faceman2K23 1 point a year ago
Unidan was a legend, he will be missed.
OsrsNeedsF2P 15 points a year ago
Why wouldn’t they default to not accepting any AI generated content
If you can accurately detect what content is AI generated, you'll have a company worth billions overnight
JustARaccoon 6 points a year ago
Manual approval process would kill the site I think, there's just so much content on it that gets updated constantly it would just grind it all to a halt
pdxfed 1 point a year ago
Right, and by manual approval it just would be the absolute lowest priority. Kind of like the automated message "we're expecting higher than normal call volumes" as companies gently tell us their margins are more important than their customers.
cupcakezealot 16 points a year ago
common wikipedia w
Vupware 3 points a year ago
This has since been corrected, but there is a great video by BadEmpanada about the state of the Holodomor’s page:
BrainInABox -2 points a year ago
Wikipedia has a giant article regurgitating the false claims from the extremist Falun Gong cult that China is stealing their organs.
BrainInABox -8 points a year ago
Here you go, Would you like me to cut your food for you too?
OsrsNeedsF2P 5 points a year ago
Link or gtfo, let people check the sources themselves
BrainInABox -9 points a year ago
Here you go, Would you like me to cut your food for you too?
Bloomcole -12 points a year ago
not interested in doing work for others.
There have been plenty instances of manipulation over the years and shady practices in the organisation itself.
Unbelievable there are still so many gullible people still thinking it's a reputable source.
if you love it so much for some reason then keep using it.
garbage in, garbage out
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Oh for fuck's sake...
I'd not considered this was happening (people submitting AI wiki articles)
save