Wikipedia Says AI Is Causing a Dangerous Decline in Human Visitors
8 months ago by Tony Bark to c/technology
Archive: https://archive.is/lP0lT
Itโs funny that MAGA and ml tankies both think that Wikipedia is the devil.
There's a lot of problems with Wikipedia, but in my years editing there (I'm extended protected rank), I've come to terms that it's about as good as it can be.
In all but one edit war, the better sourced team came out on top. Source quality discussion is also quite good. There's a problem with positive/negative tone in articles, and sometimes articles get away with bad sourcing before someone can correct it, but this is about as good as any information hub can get.
Thank you for your service ๐ซก
I remeber an article form a decade or more ago which did some research and said that basically, yes there are inaccuracies on Wikipedia, and yes there are over-simplifications, but** no more than in any other encyclopaedia**. They argued that this meant that it should be considered equally valid as an academic resource.
It was about whether Bitcoin Cash was referred to as "Bcash" or not.
I forget the semantics, but there were a lot of sources calling it Bcash, but then there were equally reliable sources saying that was only the name given by detractors. The war was something about how Bcash should be referenced in the opening paragraph
There was a hilarious one in the human anus article, about the picture being used in said article
I remember in the past few years that I've had to switch to non-American or non-British versions of Wikipedia just in order to find the answer I was looking for.
We need to remind Americans and Britains that knowledge on Wikipedia doesn't stop with their languages. We need to do a better job of gathering knowledge from non-English sources and translating those into English. Same goes vice versa for English sources and pages into languages that other people can understand.
There's still a lot of work to be done with Wikipedia to make it truly a universal knowledge repository. But it is one of the best we have
It's worth checking out the contribs and talk regarding articles that can be divisive. People acting with ulterior motives and inserting their own bias are fairly common. They also make regular corrections for this reason. I still place more faith and trust in Wikipedia as an info source more than most news articles.
Wikipedia has an imperfect process, but it is open to review and you can see how the sausage is made. It isn't perfect, but the best we have.
Luv u Wiki
MAGA and tankies are pretty much the same except MAGA votes while tankies whine.
Red hat vs red coat fascists
Tankies don't think Wikipedia is the devil. You could call me a tankie from my political views, and I very much appreciate Wikipedia and use it on a daily basis. That is not to say it should be used uncritically and unaware of its biases.
Because of the way Wikipedia works, it requires sourcing claims with references, which is a good thing. The problem comes when you have an overwhelming majority of available references in one topic being heavily biased in one particular direction for whatever reason.
For example, when doing research on geopolitically charged topics, you may expect an intrinsic bias in the source availability. Say you go to China and create an open encyclopedia, Wikipedia style, and make an article about the Tiananmen Square events. You may expect that, if the encyclopedia is primarily edited by Chinese users using Chinese language sources, given the bias in the availability of said sources, the article will end up portraying the bias that the sources suffer from.
This is the criticism of tankies towards Wikipedia: in geopolitically charged topics, western sources are quick to unite. We saw it with the genocide in Palestine, where most media regardless of supposed ideological allegiance was reporting on the "both sides are bad" style at best, and outright Israeli propaganda at worst.
So, the point is not to hate on Wikipedia, Wikipedia is as good as an open encyclopedia edited by random people can get. The problem is that if you don't specifically incorporate filters to compensate for the ideological bias present in the demographic cohort of editors (white, young males of English-speaking countries) and their sources, you will end up with a similar bias in your open encyclopedia. This is why us tankies say that Wikipedia isn't really that reliable when it comes to, e.g., the eastern block or socialist history.
One would think that leftists, socialists, communists, tankies, and/or others would come up with supplementary wikis such as Conservapedia or RationalWiki that are good.
and, FWIW:
Category:Wikidebates
https://en.wikiversity.org/...
e.g.
Is capitalism sustainable?
https://en.wikiversity.org/...
It's sad how little news there is relatively little news in Wikinews ( https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page ).
supplementary wikis
We have them, e.g. ProleWiki, but good luck trying to explain to the average western Wikipedia user that for certain geopolitical topics they might be worth checking out and contrasted with Wikipedia. My problem isn't the lack of alternatives, my problem is the anticommunist and pro-western bias in Wikipedia, the most used encyclopedia, in geopolitically charged topics.
That instance is fucking bananas
The site engages in holocaust denial, apologia for wehrmacht, and directly collaborates with western governments. On the talk pages users will earnestly tell you that mentioning napalm can stick to objects when submerged in water constitutes "unnecessary POV", and third-degree burns are painless because they destroy nerve tissue (don't ask how the tissue got destroyed, and they will not be banned for this so get used to it). Jimmy Wales is a far-right libertarian. It might be a reliable source of information for reinforcing your own worldview, but it's not a project to create the world's encyclopedia. Something like that would at least be less stingy about what a "notable sandwich" is.
Citation needed.
As a Wikipedia editor I can comfirm - we regularly say that napalm sticking to objects in water is POV. I do it at least twice a week. I'll try making a bot to do it automatically so I'll have more time for holocaust denial.
I have been editing Wikipedia since 2004, and my very first edit was to deny a clearly POV edit to a sticky napalm article. Itโs kind of a point of pride for me.
As a fellow Wikipedia editor I have confirmed that you are in fact the intern who kept making edits directly from the Capitol without even using a VPN.
Ah yes, you were personally insulted and now discredit the biggest collection of knowledge the world has ever had. Fuck you, you fool.
WRONG. You are thinking of the Quran ๐๐ป๐คฒ๐ป
This is a very low-quality reply. Try making more high-quality replies to contribute to discussions here on Lemmy. Thanks!
FWIW,
wp:Talk:Napalm#Burns_under_water?
โ
wp:Talk:Burn/Archive 1#Burn pain
This page was last edited on 20 February 2024, at 12:50 (UTC).
โ
Wales defended his comments in response to backlash from supporters of Gamergate, saying that "it isn't about what I believe. Gg is famous for harassment. Stop and think about why."[125]
...
Wales labeled himself a libertarian, qualifying his remark by referring to the Libertarian Party as "lunatics", and citing "freedom, liberty, basically individual rights, that idea of dealing with other people in a manner that is not initiating force against them" as his guiding principles.[10] In a 2014 tweet, he expressed support for open borders.[104]
...
Wales has lived in London since 2012,[146] and became a British citizen in 2019.[147]
Yeah endless waves of attempted edits to tone down war crimes is the tip of the iceberg, a subject I will circle back to in the coming days. This is a bizarre comment on several levels. So is he less right-wing because he is British? It doesn't matter if you enjoy particular sects of Ayn Rand worshippers, it makes no difference to me. The Gamergate business is the typical damage control response you see out of any site owner amenable to Nazis. Exactly like reddit admins. "We don't take sides against the right-wing โ๏ธ๐ค they broke site rules fair and square." Typical bs. Nerds think everyone else is as singlemindedly gullible as them, invariably. Unfortunately the legal system demands people adhere to it
Nope, we all misunderstood what they meant. Wikipedia is not an authoritative source, it is a derivative work. However, you can use the sources provided by the Wikipedia article and use the article itself to understand the topic.
Wikipedia isn't and was never a primary source of information, and that is by design. You don't declare information in encyclopedias, you inventory information.
Fair enough, I'm not old enough to remember those days of Wikipedia, my memory starts in roughly 2010 wrt Wikipedia use ๐
We homeschool our daughter. Saw a cool history through film course that taught with an example movie every week to grow interest... nothing in the itinerary said they'd play a video of Columbus by PragerU. They refused the refund, as it was 2 weeks in, and said it was used to foment conversation, but no other video was being offered or no questions were prepared to challenge the children. I worded my letter to call out the facts about Columbus vs the video, and the lack of accreditation of the source. I tried not to be the "lib", but I very much got the gist that's their opinion of me, and how they brushed me off. That fucking site is a plague on common sense, decency, and truth. Still fired up, and it was last month. We pulled her out of the course immediately after the video.
I can't imagine homeschooling. Not that I think it's bad but that it has to be so hard to do. And harder still to do it right.
Glad you pulled out of that course. PragerU is hot garbage and I hate how my autocorrect apparently knows PragerU and didn't try to change it to something else.
How hard do you find it to homeschool? How many hours do you reckon it takes a day?
If this is only 6 weeks ago now then you can still most likely do a credit card charge back if you paid that way
Not to trust wiki as a format? Or did you mean Wikipedia specifically?
Who would've thought??
How ironic that school teachers spent decades lecturing us about not trusting Wikipedia... and now, the vast majority of them seem to rely on Youtube and ChatGPT for their lesson plans. Lmao
Unfortunately the current head of Wikipedia is pro-AI which has contributed to this lack of trust.
One thing I donโt get: why the fuck LLMโs donโt use wikipedia as a source of info? Would help them coming up with less bullshit. I experimented around with some, even perplexity that searches the web and gives you links, but it always has shit sources like reddit or SEO optimized nameless news sites
Perplexity is okay with more academic topics at the least, albeit pretty shallow (usually isn't that different to google). There might be a policy not to include encyclopedias, but it would be an improvement over SEO garbage for sure.
Yeah, I use it instead of search, as that has gone to shit years ago due to all the SEO garbage, and now itโs even worst with AI generated SEO garbage.
At least this way I get fast results, and mostly accurate on the high level. But I agree that if I try to go deeper, it just makes up stuff based on 9 yrs old reddit posts.
I wish somebody built an AI model that prioritized trusted data, like encyclopedias, wiki, vetted publication, prestige news portals. It would be much more useful, and could put Google out of business. Unfortunately, Perplexity is not that
It's not that AI don't or cannot use Wikipedia they do actually, but AI can't properly create a reliable statement in general. It halucinates so goddamn much, and that can never, ever, be solved, because it is at the end of the day just arranging tokens based on statistical approximation of things people might say. It has been proven that modern LLMs can never approach even close to human accuracy with infinite power and resources.
That said, if an AI is blocked from using Wikipedia then that would be because the company realized Wikipedia is way more useful than their dumb chatbot.
Will cut the AI results out of your google searches by switching the browser's default to the web api..
I cannot tell you how much I love it.
Yes! Startpage rocks hard. I wish Safari would let it be the default search engine (FF does with a simple plug in).
Startpage! No shit. Used to be Ixquick, and I used that for years. Great site - thank you for reminding me it's still there. :)
FWIW, wp:Startpage.
For Firefox on Android (which TenBlueLinks doesn't have listed) add a new search engine and use these settings:
Name: Google Web
Search string URL: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14
as @Saltarello@lemmy.world learned before I did, strip the number 25 from the string above so it looks more like this:
www .google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14
Edit: Lemmy/Voyager formats this string with 25 at the end. Remove the 25 & save it as a browser search engine
EDIT: There's got to a Markdown option for disabling markdwon auto-formatting links, right?? The escape backslash seems to not be working for this specifically.
EDIT II: Found a nasty hack that does the trick!
https[]()://www.example.com/search?q=%s
appears as:
https://www.example.com/search?q=%s
Lemmy also does code markup with `text`
https://www.google.com/search?q=%25s&udm=14
Indeed, @SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone, like so!:
Edit, oh is it buggy with parameters per downthread? Interesting
Oh thank you Iโve been looking for this
I would like to say Google is still better at finding search results with more than one word. For example, if somebody searches "santa claus porn" then DuckDuckGo or Ecosia will probably return images of porn or images of santa claus instead of images of santa claus porn.
However that is no longer true either, because google search continues to get worse all the time. So it's like there isn't any good search engines anymore.
Yeah switching search links will help but itโs a band-aid. AI has stolen literally everyoneโs work without any attempt at consent or remuneration and the reason is now your search is 100 times faster, comes back with exactly something you can copy & paste and you never have to dig through links or bat away confirmation boxes to find out it doesnโt have what you need.
Itโs straight up smash-n-grab. And itโs going to work. Just like everybody and their grandma gave up all their personal information to facebook so will your searches be done through AI.
The answer is to regulate the bejesus out of AI and ensure they havenโt stolen anything. That answer was rendered moot by electing trump.
I donโt know about you, but my results have been wrong or outdated at least a quarter of the time. If you flip two coins and both are heads, your information is outright useless. Whatโs the point in looking something up to maybe find the right answer? Weโre entering a new dark age, and I hate it.
Iโve been asking a bunch of next-to-obvious questions about things that donโt really matter and itโs been pretty good. It still confidently lies when it gives instructions but a fair amount of time it does what I asked it for.
Iโd prefer to not have it, because itโs ethically putrid. But it converts currency and weights and translates things as well as expected and in half the time iโd spend doing it manually. Plus I kind of hope using it puts them out of business. Itโs not like Iโd pay for it.
I refuse to believe that it's in any way better or faster at unit and currency conversion than plain Google or DuckDuckGo. Literally type "100 EUR to USD" and you'll get an almost instant answer. Same with units: "100 feet to meters".
And if you're using it, you're helping their business. It's as simple as that.
100%. Unit conversion is a solved problem, and it is impossible for an AI to be faster or more accurate than any of the existing converters.
I do not need an AI calculator, because I have no desire to need to double check my calculator.
But it converts currency and weights and translates things as well as expected and in half the time iโd spend doing it manually
So does qalc, and it can also do arithmetic and basic calculus quickly and (gasp) correctly!
Curious what and how you're prompting. I get solid results, but I'm only asking for hard facts, nothing that could have opinion or agenda inserted. Also, I never go past the first prompt. There be dragons that way.
Niche history and mineralogy topics. Just looking for threads to tug. I found that it offered me threads but they often did not lead anywhere relevant or outright did not exist. Which is fine, but kinda removes my need for AI. If I have a general purpose question, I check certain websites. I already know how to serve myself everyday information. AIโs just not helpful for my use case.
Overall, Itโs time neutral. But it raises my blood pressure when it hallucinates, and dying of a stroke is undesirable for me.
I eat out and lately overhearing some people in other tables talking about how they find shit with ChatGPT, and it's not a good sign.
They stopped doing research as it used to be for about 30 years.
I was chatting with some folks the other day and somebody was going on about how they had gotten asymptomatic long-COVID from the vaccine. When asked about her sources her response was that AI had pointed her to studies and you could viscerally feel everybody else's cringe.
asymptomatic long-COVID
The hell even is that? Asymptomatic means no symptoms. Long-COVID isn't a contagious thing, it's literally a description of the symptoms you have from having COVID and the long term effects.
God that makes my freaking blood boil.
Damn @BigBenis@lemmy.world that was a hell of a conversation you we having.
Assuming this AI shit doesn't kill us all and we make it to the conclusion that robots writing lies on websites perhaps isn't the best thing for the internet, there's gonna be a giant hole of like 10 years where you just shouldn't trust anything written online. Someone's gonna make a bespoke search engine that automatically excludes searching for anything from 2023 to 2035.
I can't really fault them for it tbh. Google has gotten so fucking bad over the last 10 years. Half of the results are just ads that don't necesarily have anything to do with your search.
Sure, use something else like Duckduckgo, but when you're already switching, why not switch to something that tends to be right 95% of the time, and where you don't need to be good at keywords, and can just write a paragraph of text and it'll figure out what you're looking for. If you're actually researching something you're bound to look at the sources anyway, instead of just what the LLM writes.
The ease of access of LLMs, and the complete and utter enshittyfication of Google is why so many people choose an LLM.
I believe DuckDuckGo is just as bad. I think they changed their search to match Google. Iโm not sure if you are allowed to exclude search terms, use quotes, etc.
I had a song intermittently stuck in my head for over a decade, couldn't remember the artist, song name, or any of the lyrics. I only had the genre, language it was in, and a vague, memory-degraded description of a music video. Over the years I'd tried to find it on search engines a bunch of times to no avail, using every prompt I could think of. ChatGPT got it in one. So yeah, it's very useful for stuff like that. Was a great feeling to scratch that itch after so long. But I wouldn't trust an LLM with anything important.
LLM are good at certain things, especially involving language (unsurprisingly). They're tools. They're not the be-all-end-all like a lot of tech bros proselytize them as, but they are useful if you know their limitations
If you use them properly, they can be a valuable addition to one's search for information. The problem is that I don't think most users use them properly.
They stopped doing research as it used to be for about 30 years.
Was it really "like that" for any length of time? To me it seems like most people just believed whatever bullshit they saw on Facebook/Twitter/Insta/Reddit, otherwise it wouldn't make sense to have so many bots pushing political content there. Before the internet it would be reading some random book/magazine you found, and before then it was hearsay from a relative.
I think that the people who did the research will continue doing the research. It doesn't matter if it's thru a library, or a search engine, or Wikipedia sources, or AI sources. As long as you know how to read the actual source, compare it with other (probably contradictory) information, and synthesize a conclusion for yourself, you'll be fine; if you didn't want to do that it was always easy to stumble upon misinfo or disinfo anyways.
One actual problem that AI might cause is if the actual scientists doing the research start using it without due diligence. People are definitely using LLMs to help them write/structure the papers ยน. This alone would probably be fine, but if they actually use it to "help" with methodology or other content... Then we would indeed be in trouble, given how confidently incorrect LLM output can be.
I think that the people who did the research will continue doing the research.
Yes, but that number is getting smaller. Where I live, most households rarely have a full bookshelf, and instead nearly every member of the family has a "smart" phone; they'll grab the chance to use anything that would be easier than spending hours going through a lot of books. I do sincerely hope methods of doing good research are still continually being taught, including the ability to distinguish good information from bad.
Internet (via your smartphone) provides you with the ability to find any book, magazine or paper on any subject you want, for free (if you're willing to sail under the right flag), within seconds. Of course noone has a full bookshelf anymore, the only reason to want physical books nowadays is sentimentality or some very specific old book that hasn't been digitized yet (but in that case you won't have it on your bookshelf and will have to go to the library anyway). The fastest and most accurate way of doing research today is getting a gist on Wikipedia, clicking through the source links and reading those, and combing through arxiv and scihub for anything relevant. If you are unfamiliar with the subject as a whole, you download the relevant book and read it. Of course noone wants to comb through physical books anymore, it's a complete waste of time (provided of course they have been digitized).
If this AI stuff weren't a bubble and the companies dumping billions into it were capable of any long term planning they'd call up wikipedia and say "how much do you need? we'll write you a cheque"
They're trying to figure out nefarious ways of getting data from people and wikipedia literally has people doing work to try to create high quality data for a relatively small amount of money that's very valuable to these AI companies.
But nah, they'll just shove AI into everything blow the equivalent of Wikipedia's annual budget in a week on just electricity to shove unwanted AI slop into people's faces.
Because they already ate through every piece of content on wikipedia years and years ago. They're at the stage where they've trawled nearly the entire internet and are running out of content to find.
So now the AI trawls other AI slop, so it's essentially getting inbred. So they literally need you to subscribe to their AI slop so they can get new data directly from you because we're still nowhere near AGI.
But nah, they'll just shove AI into everything blow the equivalent of Wikipedia's annual budget in a week on just electricity to shove unwanted AI slop into people's faces.
You're off my several order of magnitude unfortunately. Tech giants are spending the equivalent of the entire fucking Apollo program on various AI investments every year at this point.
(pasting a Mastodon post I wrote few days ago on StackOverflow but IMHO applies to Wikipedia too)
"AI, as in the current LLM hype, is not just pointless but rather harmful epistemologically speaking.
It's a big word so let me unpack the idea with 1 example :
- StackOverflow, or SO for shot.
So SO is cratering in popularity. Maybe it's related to LLM craze, maybe not but in practice, less and less people is using SO.
SO is basically a software developer social network that goes like this :
- hey I have this problem, I tried this and it didn't work, what can I do?
- well (sometimes condescendingly) it works like this so that worked for me and here is why
then people discuss via comments, answers, vote, etc until, hopefully the most appropriate (which does not mean "correct") answer rises to the top.
The next person with the same, or similar enough, problem gets to try right away what might work.
SO is very efficient in that sense but sometimes the tone itself can be negative, even toxic.
Sometimes the person asking did not bother search much, sometimes they clearly have no grasp of the problem, so replies can be terse, if not worst.
Yet the content itself is often correct in the sense that it does solve the problem.
So SO in a way is the pinnacle of "technically right" yet being an ass about it.
Meanwhile what if you could get roughly the same mapping between a problem and its solution but in a nice, even sycophantic, matter?
Of course the switch will happen.
That's nice, right?.. right?!
It is. For a bit.
It's actually REALLY nice.
Until the "thing" you "discuss" with maybe KPI is keeping you engaged (as its owner get paid per interaction) regardless of how usable (let's not even say true or correct) its answer is.
That's a deep problem because that thing does not learn.
It has no learning capability. It's not just "a bit slow" or "dumb" but rather it does not learn, at all.
It gets updated with a new dataset, fine tuned, etc... but there is no action that leads to invalidation of a hypothesis generated a novel one that then ... setup a safe environment to test within (that's basically what learning is).
So... you sit there until the LLM gets updated but... with that? Now that less and less people bother updating your source (namely SO) how is your "thing" going to lean, sorry to get updated, without new contributions?
Now if we step back not at the individual level but at the collective level we can see how short-termist the whole endeavor is.
Yes, it might help some, even a lot, of people to "vile code" sorry I mean "vibe code", their way out of a problem, but if :
- they, the individual
- it, the model
- we, society, do not contribute back to the dataset to upgrade from...
well I guess we are going faster right now, for some, but overall we will inexorably slow down.
So yes epistemologically we are slowing down, if not worst.
Anyway, I'm back on SO, trying to actually understand a problem. Trying to actually learn from my "bad" situation and rather than randomly try the statistically most likely solution, genuinely understand WHY I got there in the first place.
I'll share my answer back on SO hoping to help other.
Don't just "use" a tool, think, genuinely, it's not just fun, it's also liberating.
Literally.
Don't give away your autonomy for a quick fix, you'll get stuck."
originally on https://mastodon.pirateparty.be/...
I honestly think that LLM will result in no progress made ever in computer science.
Most past inventions and improvements were made because of necessity of how sucky computers are and how unpleasant it is to work with them (we call it "abstraction layers"). And it was mostly done on company's dime.
Now companies will prefer to produce slop (even more) because it will hope to automate slop production.
As an expert in my engineering field I would agree. LLMs has been a great tool for my job in being better at technical writing or getting over the hump of coding something every now and then. Thatโs where I see the future for ChatGPT/AI LLMs; providing a tool that can help people broaden their skills.
There is no future for the expertise in fields and the depth of understanding that would be required to make progress in any field unless specifically trained and guided. I do not trust it with anything that is highly advanced or technical as I feel I start to teach it.
Most importantly, the pipeline from finding a question on SO that you also have, to answering that question after doing some more research is now completely derailed because if you ask an AI a question and it doesnโt have a good answer you have no way to contribute your eventual solution to the problem.
Maybe SO should run everyone's answers through a LLM and revoke any points a person gets for a condescending answer even if accepted.
Give a warning and suggestions to better meet community guidelines.
It can be very toxic there.
Edit: I love the downvotes here. OP - AI is going to destroy the sources of truth and knowledge, in part because people stopped going to those sources because people were toxic at the sources. People: But I'll downvote suggestions that could maybe reduce toxicity, while having no actual impact on the answers given.
I guess I'm a bit old school, I still love Wikipedia.
I use Wikipedia when I want to know stuff. I use chatGPT when I need quick information about something that's not necessarily super critical.
It's also much better at looking up stuff than Google. Which is amazing, because it's pretty bad. Google has become absolute garbage.
To get a decent result on Google, you have to wade through 2 pages of ads, 4 pages of sponsored content, and maybe the first good result is on page 10.
ChatGPT does a good job at filtering most of the bullshit.
I know enough to not just accept any shit from the internet at face value.
Yep, that an occasionally Wiktionary, Wikidata, and even Rationalwiki.
You're right bro but I feel comfortable searching the old fashioned way!
Same but with Encyclopedia Brittanica
Well that's kind of reassu.. oh
AI will inevitably kill all the sources of actual information. Then all we're going to be left with is the fuzzy learned version of information plus a heap of hallucinations.
What a time to be alive.
AI just cuts pastes from the websites like Wikipedia. The problem is when it gets information that's old or from a sketchy source. Hopefully people will still know how to check sources, should probably be taught in schools. Who's the author, how olds the article, is it a reputable website, is there a bias. I know I'm missing some pieces
You replied to OP while somehow missing the entire point of what he said lol
Much of the time, AI paraphrases, because it is generating plausible sentences not quoting factual material. Rarely do I see direct quotes that don't involve some form of editorialising or restating of information, but perhaps I'm just not asking those sorts of questions much.
Man, we hardly did that shit 20 years ago. Ain't no way the kids doing that now.
At best they'll probably prompt AI into validating if the text is legit
I've been meaning to donate to those guys.
I use their site frequently. I love it, and it can't be cheap to keep that stuff online.
โWith fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers may grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors may support this work.โ
I understand the donors aspect, but I don't think anyone who is satisfied with AI slop would bother to improve wiki articles anyway.
The idea that there's a certain type of person that's immune to a social tide is not very sound, in my opinion. If more people use genAI, they may teach people who could have been editors in later years to use genAI instead.
Eh, people said the exact same thing about Wikipedia in the early 2000's. A group of randos on the internet is going to "crowd source" truth? Absurd! And the answer to that was always, "You can check the source to make sure it says what they say it says." If you're still checking Wikipedia sources, then you're going to check the sources AI provides as well. All that changes about the process is how you get the list of primary sources. I don't mind AI as a method of finding sources.
The greater issue is that people rarely check primary sources. And even when they do, the general level of education needed to read and understand those sources is a somewhat high bar. And the even greater issue is that AI-generated half-truths are currently mucking up primary sources. Add to that intentional falsehoods from governments and corporations, and it already seems significantly more difficult to get to the real data on anything post-2020.
But Wikipedia actually is crowd sourced data verification. Every AI prompt response is made up on the fly and there's no way to audit what other people are seeing for accuracy.
Alternative for DuckDuckGo:
https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=%25s
Edit: Lemmy/Voyager formats this string with 25 at the end. Remove the 25 & save it as a browser search engine
I ran into the same issue and after some digging around found this nasty looking hack that seems to work at preventing the auto-formatting of links in markdown (still looks a bit wonky on mobile like Jerboa tho):
https[]()://noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=%s
appears as:
Mudd explains that he broke out of prison, stole a spaceship, crashed on this planet, and was taken in by the androids. He says they are accommodating, but refuse to let him go unless he provides them with other humans to serve and study. Mudd informs Kirk that he and his crew are to serve this purpose and can expect to spend the rest of their lives there.
because people are just reading AI summarized explanation of your searches, many of them are derived from blogs and they cant be verified from an official source.
Or the ai search just rips off Wikipedia.
That is too bad. Wikipedia is important.
all websites should block ai and bot traffic on principle.
The problem is many no longer identify as bots and come from hundreds if not thousands of IPs.
Voight-Kampff them.
FWIW:
Wikipedia:Bot policy#Bot requirements
RationalWiki:Bots
I am kinda a big hater on AI and what danger it represents to the future of humanity
But. as a hobby programmer, I was surprised at how good these llms can answer very technical questions and provide conceptual insight and suggestions about how to glue different pieces of software together and which are the limitations of each one. I know that if AI knows about this stuff it must have been produced by a human. but considering the shitty state of the internet where copycat website are competing to outrank each other with garbage blocks of text that never answer what you are looking for. the honest blog post is instead burried at the 99 page in google search. I can't see how old school search will win over.
Add to that I have found forums and platforms like stack overflow to be not always very helpful, I have many unanswered questions on stackoverflow piled-up over many years ago. things that llms can answer in details in just seconds without ever being annoyed at me or passing passive aggressive comments.
Hobby programmer her as well. I know you I've spent a lot of time searching for solutions or hints for, especially when it's about edge cases. So using AI as an alt. to a search engine have saved me sooo much time!
Another thing with the approach. I read somewhere that it require about 10 times as much energy to ask an AI instead of doing a web search and spending a little time looking through the result. So it's something I try to think of to motivate myself with, to do as many usual web searches as possible, saving AI queries for when it matters more.
I would say it's more like 1000 times more energy. Trillions of matrix math computations for a handful of tokens at max speed and CPU/GPU usage, compared to a 10 millisecond database query (or in wiki's case, probably mostly just easy direct edge node cache with no processing involved.)
I know that if AI knows about this stuff it must have been produced by a human.
For now. Maybe.
It won't be long before these LLMs will start ingesting the output from other LLMs, biases, confidently wrong answers, hallucinations and all.
Yet I still have to go to the page for the episode lists of my favorite TV shows because every time I ask AI which ones to watch it starts making up episodes that either don't exist or it gives me the wrong number.
This will be unpopular, but hear me out. Maybe the decline in visitors is only a decline in the folks who are simply looking for a specific word or name and the forgot. Like, that one guy who believed in the survival of the fittest. Um. Let me try to remember. I think he had an epic beard. Ah! Darwin! I just needed a reminder, I didn't want to read the entire article on him because I did that years ago.
Look at your own behaviors on lemmy. How often do you click/tap through to the complete article? What if it's just a headline? What if it's the whole article pasted into the body of the post? Click bait headlines are almost universally hated, but it's a desperate attempt to drive traffic to the site. Sometimes all you need is the article synopsis. Soccer team A beats team B in overtime. Great, that's all I need to know..unless I have a fantasy team.
Half my visits to Wikipedia are because I need to copy and paste a Unicode character and thatโs always the highest search result with a page I can easily copy and paste the exact character from.
Em dash? Wikipedia.
Nice-looking quotes? Wikipedia.
Accented uppercase letters? Wikipedia.
(Yeah, I know. The last one can only be understood by Italian speakers; or speakers of other languages with stupid keyboard layouts)
If you don't check their name - Darwin - on Wikipedia, where do you check it? A random AI? When you're on Facebook, their AI? When you're on Reddit, their AI? How trustworthy are they? What does that mean for general user behavior in the short and long term?
When you're satisfied with a soccer match score from a headline, fair enough. Which headline do you refer to, though? Who provides it? Who ensures it is correct?
Wikipedia is an established and good source for many things.
The point is that people get their information elsewhere now. Where it may be incomplete, wrong, or maliciously misrepresenting or lying. Where discovering more related information is even further away. Instead of the next paragraph or a scroll or index nav list jump away, no hyperlink, no information.
Personally, I regularly explore and verify sources.
I doubt most of those visits to Wikipedia were as shallow as finding just one name or term. Maybe one piece of information. Which may already go deeper than shallow term finding, and cross references and notes may spark interests or relevant concerns.
You have a lot of good points and I may have missed the intent of the article, but a knee jerk reaction of "lower traffic = AI is bad" is not helpful either. My point is that I frequently find myself hitting a page just to check a reference, quote or remember something. AI search results can be useful here. It's no different than how DuckDugkGo has a sidebar if the results are from StackOverflow. It's nice to get quick answers. I would like to see a fair solution to the content creators being able to stay in business.
I think that you did not understand OC correctlyโฆ
What OC is talking about, is that the person searching for the lost word is verification enough. Meaning as soon as the word is seen, the remember is triggered to where the searching person knows the information already.
I mean, there's levels to this. If I'm looking for information, having a summary rather than a highly technical primary source can be very useful. Wikipedia cites its sources, and (ideally) has summaries made by groups of people familiar with the subject and following consistent and detailed publicly available style guides. Wikipedia isn't running ads, and is not for profit.
When an AI summarizes these primary sources, or even summarizes Wikipedia, you get none of that. AI does not reliably cite sources (ones not made for it will just generate a convincing looking response, making up sources whole cloth. Ones made to cite sources will often not actually cite the ones they used, and still can make up sources more rarely). It can't reliably summarize things accurately, as it doesn't understand anything, especially not terms that have different meanings depending on the technical context. There's no group of people reviewing and revising. There's no incredibly detailed style guide. All these AI are explicitly for profit (the amount of self hosted out there is negligible and those are much less of a problem), and almost every one of the companies running them have openly spoken about future plans to try and seamlessly weave advertisements into them. Most importantly, there's no guarantee that what it gives you will even be true.
I'm part of the problem. I now use Le Chat instead of search engines because AI destroyed search engines, thanks to all the content mills that make slop. I wish search engines just worked, and it's a classic example of capitalism creating problems to justify new technology.
And I wonder if it's just AI. I know some people moved to backing up pre-2025 versions of Wikipedia via Kiwix out of fear that the site gets censored. I know now that I've done that, it's a no-brainer to just do my Wikipedia research without using bandwidth.
Search engines will still give Wikipedia results at the top for relevant searches. Heck, you can search Wikipedia itself directly!
Both Ecosia and DuckDuckGo support some form of "bangs", if I tack !w onto my search it'll immediate go through to Wikipedia.
DuckDuckGo has even introduced an AI image filter, which is not perfect but still pretty good.
Bangs are helpful, but my problem is that I previously used search engines to find informative articles and product suggestions beyond the scope of Wikipedia, and so much of that is AI slop now. And if it's not that, Reddit shows up disproportionately in search results and Google is dominated by promoted posts.
Search engines used to be really good at connecting people to reliable resources, even if you didn't have a specific website in mind, if you were good with keywords/boolean and had a discerning eye for reliable content, but now the slop-to-valuable-content ratio is too disproportionate. So you either need to have pre-memorized a list of good websites, rely on Chatbots, or take significantly longer wading through the muck.
I'm surprised no-one has asked an LLM to produce a plausible version and just released that, claiming it's a leak.
There are indirect benefits to visitors, though. Yes, most people are a drain on resources because they visit strictly to read and never to contribute. The minority that do contribute, though, are presumably people who used Wikipedia and liked it, or people who enjoy knowing that other people are benefiting from their contributions. I'm not sure people will donate or edit on Wikipedia if they believe no one is using it.
That makes sense. It is interesting to read the original blog post from Wikimedia:
https://diff.wikimedia.org/...
and what they say you can do if you want to help:
"Active volunteers can further help meet this moment by working with Wikimedia Foundation teams to test out new experiences and tools on Wikipedia. As the internet changes rapidly, this is a moment to consider what parts of Wikipedia should change (and what parts should not), while staying true to the promise of human-centered, free knowledge for the world.
A specific area where volunteers can help is with our new readers teams. We welcome you to review the current experiments we are running and help us answer key questions about what will most help readers. Please join the readers teams on their talk page and sign up for their newsletter to share your thoughts and learn more about their work. Weโll also be reaching out to communities soon with both live and on-wiki ways to talk about these trends, and what they mean for the Wikimedia projects."
I'd make a cash donation right now if I could.
I got you fam. Iโve been making a decent monthly donation for years. Consider one of those on your behalf!
yeah, i drop a $20-25 donation yearly.
Surly it can't be because of the decline in quality because of deposit admins defending their own personal fiefdoms.
It used to be that the first result to a lot of queries, was a link to the relevant Wikipedia article. But that first result has now been replaced by an ai summary of the relevant Wikipedia article. If people don't need more info than that summary, they don't click through. That Ai summary is a layer of abstraction that wouldn't be able to exist without the source material that it's now making less viable to exist. Kinda like a parasite.
It's a layer of dependency and a barrier to entry. AI is not a servant to our interests but censor, preacher and teacher and cult speaker who works for psychopaths who would happily re-enslave the human race.
Oh I didn't mean change the current setup. Create a standalone tool that better uses the wiki framework so people can access it in a different way, that's all.
Maybe the humans are going outside and the library?
They would be better if they were funded better.
It's called: playing in the real world.
It's good for your health to be disconnected from the brain rot internet
I sympathize with Wikipedia here because I really like the platform. That being said, modernize and get yourself a new front end. People don't like AI because of it's intrusiveness. They want convenience. Create "Knowledge-bot" or something similar that is focused on answering questions in a more meaningful way.
The last thing Wikipedia should do is change the look. Modernizing is a waste of resources when it works just fine all to just to give idiots a new dopamine hit.
Capitalism is the problem not wikipedia. Plus the reference desk exists, its just not instant.
Wikipedia Says AI Is Causing a Dangerous Decline in Human Visitors
FWIW:
Wikipedia:Reference desk
Interesting. I had never heard about this. Could still use a lot of sprucing up.
IIRC, they expect people to first try to find the answers themselvesโperhaps they could check out a few WP articlesโno "Who's the Secretary of the Department of Interior" or similar questions;
though my big (perhaps only) problem is that a question only stands for a whileโmaybe a few days or week or soโbefore it's archived. In some of the forums (non-WP) of about 20 years ago, one could answer questions asked months, maybe years, earlier that are still relevant.
Still, I've gotten a few good answers to the few questions I posted on it.
Such a disingenuous take.
That link clearly states they have no intention of replacing human content with AI.
It goes on to say they plan to use AI for moderation detection and flagging things for human review. Thatโs not a problem at all.
Oh and accountable Britannica has an entire forward facing AI for users to directly get misinformed by. https://www.britannica.com/chatbot (itโs just a wrapper for ChatGPT).
Not all AI use is bad, and it sounds to me like you didn't read that article itself. They have no desire or intention to use AI in a way that directly effects the information on the site, how it's presented to visitors or to use it in a way that would manipulate how articles are edited.
The only potential note is translation, but translation is such a massive undertaking that by providing a means to discuss and interact between languages, the information becomes more broadly available and open to correction as needed by native speakers.
Also, Britannica does employ the use of AI within their own system as well, even providing a chatbot by which to ask questions and search for information. It is, in this way, more involved than Wikipedia's goals.
They have no desire or intention to use AI in a way that directly effects the information on the site, how itโs presented to visitors or to use it in a way that would manipulate how articles are edited.
To be fair in June they tried to introduce AI-generated "simple summaries" to articles, but the editor community was so vehemently against it, that in the end they shelved the idea.
Fair enough. I missed this push amidst every other AI related enshittification tactict at the time I guess. That said, this is how it should work. An organization proposes a change and the change is withdrawn or halted after the userbase is able to weigh in. I'm pleased that they didn't barrel ahead with it despite the outcry.
I feel for the Wikimedia foundation right now. They're under mounting pressure to compete with corporations that hold a monopoly on how people access their sites and subsequently the information on them. The goal is to provide open information, but that information is no less open to the AI that aims to scrape, rehost, and re-use the work of individuals who have volunteered their time to it.
I think it would have been easy for them to effectively do what Reddit did, and lock down the access to the site and its content in order to develop their own AI tools to perform similar tasks trained on their dataset exclusively. Instead, they've listened and I hope they continue to listen to their dedicated members who believe in the foundation's original goals.
Agreed, despite its faults, Wikipedia/Wikimedia is one of the most ethical organisations I know of, to a large degree because of how much average users can take part in its various decision-making processes. Most of its bureaucratic processes happen in the open - I sometimes enjoy reading through 15-years-old discussions about why/if a certain page should be deleted or a certain user banned.
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Wikipedia, is becoming one of few places I trust the information.
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