Jimmy Wales Says Wikipedia Could Use AI. Editors Call It the 'Antithesis of Wikipedia'

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• ramsay@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

  I will stop donating to Wikipedia if they use AI

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  • Corn@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

    Wikipedia already has a decades operating cost of savings.

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• brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Whale’s quote isn’t nearly as bad as the byline makes it out to be:

  Wales explains that the article was originally rejected several years ago, then someone tried to improve it, resubmitted it, and got the same exact template rejection again.

  “It’s a form letter response that might as well be ‘Computer says no’ (that article’s worth a read if you don’t know the expression),” Wales said. “It wasn’t a computer who says no, but a human using AFCH, a helper script […] In order to try to help, I personally felt at a loss. I am not sure what the rejection referred to specifically. So I fed the page to ChatGPT to ask for advice. And I got what seems to me to be pretty good. And so I’m wondering if we might start to think about how a tool like AFCH might be improved so that instead of a generic template, a new editor gets actual advice. It would be better, obviously, if we had lovingly crafted human responses to every situation like this, but we all know that the volunteers who are dealing with a high volume of various situations can’t reasonably have time to do it. The templates are helpful - an AI-written note could be even more helpful.”

  That being said, it still wreaks of “CEO Speak.” And trying to find a place to shove AI in.

  More NLP could absolutely be useful to Wikipedia, especially for flagging spam and malicious edits for human editors to review. This is an excellent task for dirt cheap, small and open models, where an error rate isn’t super important. And it’s a huge existing problem that needs solving.

  …Using an expensive, proprietary API to give error prone yet “pretty good” sounding suggestions to new editors is not.

  This is the problem. Not natural language processing itself, but the seemingly contagious compulsion among executives to find some place to shove it when the technical extend of their knowledge is typing something into ChatGPT.

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  • frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    This is another reason why I hate bubbles. There is something potentially useful in here. It needs to be considered very carefully. However, it gets to a point where everyone’s kneejerk reaction is that it’s bad.

    I can’t even say that people are wrong for feeling that way. The AI bubble has affected our economy and lives in a multitude of ways that go far beyond any reasonable use. I don’t blame anyone for saying “everything under this is bad, period”. The reasonable uses of it are so buried in shit that I don’t expect people to even bother trying to reach into that muck to clean it off.

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    • brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      This bubble’s hate is pretty front-loaded though.

      Dotcom was, well, a useful thing. I guess valuations were nuts, but it looks like the hate was mostly the enshittified aftermath that would come.

      Crypto is a series of bubbles trying to prop up flavored pyramid schemes for a neat niche concept, but people largely figured that out after they popped.

      Machine Learning is a long running, useful field, but ever since ChatGPT caught investors eyes, the cart has felt so far ahead of the horse. The hate started, and got polarized, waaay before the bubble popping.

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    • peoplebeproblems@midwest.social ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      So… I actually proposed a use case for NLP and LLMs in 2017. I don’t actually know if it was used.

      But the usecase was generating large sets of fake data that looked real enough for performance testing enterprise sized data transformations. That way we could skip a large portion of the risk associated with using actual customer data. We wouldn’t have to generate the data beforehand, we could validate logic with it, and we could just plop it in the replica non-prodiction environment.

      At the time we didn’t have any LLMs. So it didn’t go anywhere. But it’s always funny when I see all this “LLMs can do x” because I always think about how my proposal was to use it… For fake data.

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  • Pringles@sopuli.xyz ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    That being said, it still wreaks of “CEO Speak.”

    I think you mean reeks, which means to stink, having a foul odor.

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    • cygnus@lemmy.ca ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Those homophones have reeked havoc for too long!

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    • brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Waves hands “You didn’t see anything.”

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    • heavyboots@lemmy.ml ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Thank you. Glad to know I am not the only one that got triggered, lol.

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• carotte@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  jimmy wales is also the president and co-founder of fandom

  to give you an idea of who that guy is

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  • hr_@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

    I mean, the Wikipedia page does say it was sold in 2018. Not sure how it was before but it’s not surprising that it enshittified by now.

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  • Devmapall@lemmy.zip ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Oh gross

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    • Agent641@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Why?

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  • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Oh yeah that website’s pretty great It has really in depth wiki about games like fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Caesar's_Legion

    So I guess you mean that Wales guy is pretty great then

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• Alphane_Moon@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Why is leadership always so vapid and disconnected from reality?

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  • captainastronaut@seattlelunarsociety.org ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Because this is one of the rare times he sat down at the keyboard to do the real work being done by people in this organization and he realized that it’s hard and he wants a shortcut. He sees his time as more valuable and sees this task as wasting his time, but it is their primary task and one they do as volunteers because they are passionate about it. He’s not going to get a lot of traction with them telling them the thing they do for free because they love it isn’t worth anyone’s time.

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    • ronigami@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

      I swear these people have never been around a cathedral and thought about how it was built.

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    • Aatube@kbin.melroy.org ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I think commenters here don't actually do Wikipedia. Wales was instrumental in Wikipedia's principles and organization besides the first year of Sanger. He handpicked the first administrators to make sure the project would continue its anarchistic roganization and prevent a hierarchy from having a bigger say in content matters.

      I would characterize Wales as a long-retired leader rather than leadership.

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  • Storm@slrpnk.net ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Because that’s what being in a position of power does to a mf

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• Carvex@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Remember you can download all of Wikipedia in your language and safely store it on a drive buried in your backyard, for after they rewrite history and eliminate freedom of speech.

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  • TommySoda@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Already got it downloaded. It’s only like 100 - 150 gigabytes or something like that. Got it on my PC, my laptop, and my external hard drive. I don’t trust the powers that be to keep it intact anymore so I’d rather have my own copy, even if outdated.

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  • Engywuck@lemmy.zip ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Some people can’t really stop seeing conspiracies everywhere.

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    • FarraigePlaisteach@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      As long as billionaires are campaigning to destroy it, there is no place for that comment you made.

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    • ThrowawayPermanente@sh.itjust.works ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I don’t think an existing conspiracy is necessary, it’s just a cheap way to help protect yourself and others against something that could happen one day.

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• cupcakezealot@piefed.blahaj.zone ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  if jimmy wales puts ai in wikipedia i stg imma scream

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• iopq@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Honestly, translating the good articles from other languages would improve Wikipedia immensely.

  For example, the Nanjing dialect article is pretty bare in English and very detailed in Mandarin

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  • echodot@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

    You can do that that’s fine. As long as you can verify and accurate translation, you need to know the subject matter and the language.

    But you could probably also have used Google translate and then just fine tune the output yourself. Anyone could have done that at any point in the last 10 years.

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  • SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

    I recently have edited a small wiki page that was obviously written by someone that wasn’t proficient in English. I used AI to just reword what was already written and then I edited the output myself. It did a pretty good job. It was a page about some B-list Indonesian actress that I just stumbled upon and I didn’t want to put time and effort into it but the page really needed work done.

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• logicbomb@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  The problem with LLMs and other generative AI is that they’re not completely useless. People’s jobs are on the line much of the time, so it would really help if they were completely useless, but they’re not. Generative AI is certainly not as good as its proponents claim, and critically, when it fucks up, it can be extremely hard for a human to tell, which eats away a lot of their benefits, but they’re not completely useless. For the most basic example, give an LLM a block of text and ask it how to improve grammar or to make a point clearer, and then compare the AI generated result with the original, and take whatever parts you think the AI improved.

  Everybody knows this, but we’re all pretending it’s not the case because we’re caring people who don’t want the world to be drowned in AI hallucinations, we don’t want to have the world taken over by confidence tricksters who just fake everything with AI, and we don’t want people to lose their jobs. But sometimes, we are so busy pretending that AI is completely useless that we forget that it actually isn’t completely useless. The reason they’re so dangerous is that they’re not completely useless.

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  • ag10n@lemmy.world ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    It’s almost as if nuance and context matters.

    How much energy does a human use to write a Wikipedia article? Now also measure the accuracy and completeness of the article.

    Now do the same for AI.

    Objective metrics are what is missing, because much of what we hear is “phd-level inference” and it’s still just a statistical, probabilistic generator.

    pcmag.com/…/with-gpt-5-openai-promises-access-to-…

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  • spankmonkey@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    It is completely useless as presented by the major players who atrocities trying to jam models that are trying to everything at the same time and that is what we always talk about when discussing AI.

    We aren’t talking about focused implementations that are Wikipedia to a certain set of data or designed for specific purposes. That is why we don’t need nuance, although the reminder that we aren’t talking about smaller scale AI used by humans as tools is nice once in a while.

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• pelespirit@sh.itjust.works ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  They’re trying to get rid of Wikipedia by saying they’re shit and doing things you’ll hate. Fight for no AI if that’s your thing, but read very carefully what’s happening. Wikipedia can NOT go away.

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• SlartyBartFast@sh.itjust.works ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  WikipedAI

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• rivr@lemmy.world ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  ok jimmy boy, will that ai also beg for donations? /s

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