Comment on Elon Musk wants to rewrite "the entire corpus of human knowledge" with Grok
aaron@infosec.pub 3 weeks agoWikipedia is not a trustworthy source of information for anything regarding contemporary politics or economics.
Wikipedia is not a trustworthy source of information for anything regarding contemporary politics or economics.
Wikipedia presents the views of reliable sources on notable topics. The trick is what sources are considered “reliable” and what topics are “notable”, which is why it’s such a poor source of information for things like contemporary politics in particular.
A bit more than fifteen years ago I was burned out in my very successful creative career, and decided to try and learn about how the world worked.
I noticed opposing headlines generated from the same studies (published in whichever academic journal) and realised I could only go to the source: the actual studies themselves. This is in the fields of climate change, global energy production, and biospheric degradation. The scientific method is much degraded but there is still some substance to it. Wikipedia no chance at all.
Books are not immune to being written by LLMs spewing nonsense, lies, and hallucinations, which will only make more traditional issue of author/publisher biases worse. The asymmetry between how long it takes to create misinformation and how long it takes to verify it has never been this bad.
Media literacy will be very important going forward for new informational material and there will be increasing demand for pre-LLM materials.
Yes I know books are not immune to llm’s. The classics are all already written - I would suggest peple start with them.
Wikipedia presents the views of reliable sources on notable topics
Absolutely nowhere near. This is why America is fucked.
Again, read the rest of the comment. Wikipedia very much repeats the views of reliable sources on notable topics - most of the fuckery is in deciding what counts as “reliable” and “notable”.
And again. Read my reply. I refuted this idiotic. take.
You allowed yourselves to be dumbed down to this point.
So what would you consider to be a trustworthy source?
TheGreenWizard@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
Wikipedia gives lists of their sources, judge what you read based off of that. Or just skip to the sources and read them instead.
InputZero@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Just because Wikipedia offers a list of references doesn’t mean that those references reflect what knowledge is actually out there. Wikipedia is trying to be academically rigorous without any of the real work. A big part of doing academic research is reading articles and studies that are wrong or which prove the null hypothesis. That’s why we need experts and not just an AI to regurgitate information. Wikipedia is useful if people understand it’s limitations, I think a lot of people don’t though.
TheGreenWizard@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
For sure, Wikipedia is for the most basic subjects to research, or the first step of doing any research (they could still offer helpful sources) . For basic stuff, or quick glances of something for conversation.
Warl0k3@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
This very much depends on the subject, I suspect. For math or computer science, wikipedia is an excellent source, and the credentials of the editors maintaining those areas are formidable to say the least.
aaron@infosec.pub 3 weeks ago
Yeah because 1. obviously this is what everybody does. And 2. Just because sources are provided does not mean they are in any way balanced.
The fact that you would waste my time with this sort of response probably indicates how weak wikipedia is.