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Comment on Wikimedia Foundation's plans to introduce AI-generated summaries to Wikipedia

barsoap@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

It really depends on what you’re looking at. The history section of some random town? Absolutely bog-standard prose. I may sure I’m probably missing lots of implications as I’m no historian but at least I understand what’s going on. The article on transitive relations? Good luck getting your mathematical literacy from wikipedia all the maths articles require you to already have it, and that’s one of the easier ones.

Or let’s take Big O notation. Short overview, formal definition, examples… not practical, but theoretical, then infinitesimal asymptotics, which is deep into the weeds. You know what that article actually needs? After the short overview, have an intuitive/hand-wavy definition, then two well explained “find an entry in a telephone book”, examples, two different algorithms: O(n) (naive) and O(log n) (divide and conquer). Then, with the basics out of the way, one to demonstrate that the notation doesn’t care about multiplicative factors.Then, directly afterwards, the “orders of common functions” table but make sure to have examples that people actually might be acquainted with. Then talk about amortisation, and how you don’t always use hash tables “because they’re O(1) and trees are not”. Then get into the formal stuff, that is, the current article.

And, no, LLMs will be of absolutely no help doing that. What wikipedia needs is a didactics task force giving specialist editors a slap on the wrist because xkcd 2501.

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antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
As I said in an another comment, I find that traditional encyclopedias fare better than Wikipedia in this respect. Wikipedians can muddle even comparatively simple topics, e.g. linguistic purism is described like this:

Linguistic purism or linguistic protectionism is a concept with two common meanings: one with respect to foreign languages and the other with respect to the internal variants of a language (dialects). The first meaning is the historical trend of the users of a language desiring to conserve intact the language’s lexical structure of word families, in opposition to foreign influence which are considered ‘impure’. The second meaning is the prescriptive[1] practice of determining and recognizing one linguistic variety (dialect) as being purer or of intrinsically higher quality than other related varieties.

This is so hopelessly awkward, confusing and inconsistent. (I hope I’ll get around to fixing it, btw.) Compare it with how the linguist RL Trask defines it in his Language and Linguistics: The Key Concepts:

[Purism] The belief that words (and other linguistic features) of foreign origin are a kind of contamination sullying the purity of a language.

Bam! No LLMs were needed for this definition.

So here’s my explanation for this problem: Wikipedians, specialist or non-specialist, like to collect and pile up a lot of cool info they’ve found in literature and online. When you have several such people working simultaneously, you easily end up with chaotic texts with no head or tails, which can always be expanded further and further with new stuff you’ve found because it’s just a webpage with no technical limits. When scholars write traditional encyclopedic texts, the limited space and singular viewpoint force them to write something much more coherent and readable.

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