TheTechnician27

@TheTechnician27@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Meet the AI vegans: They are choosing to abstain from using artificial intelligence for environmental, ethical and personal reasons. Maybe they have a point⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  You’re hereby invited to /c/vegan, as you appear to be a Northern Hemisphere vegan.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Wikipedia editors adopt a policy giving admins the authority to quickly delete AI-generated articles that meet certain criteria, like incorrect citations⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ 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.
  • 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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We are mainstream now🔥⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I really wanted to give Lemmy a try, but I’ll be returning to the whiteboard in my office for organic, sophisticated discussion.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's 2025, the year we decided we need a widespread slur for robots⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Ratchet: “I’ll just call you… ***** for short.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Wikipedia editors adopt a policy giving admins the authority to quickly delete AI-generated articles that meet certain criteria, like incorrect citations⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ 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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Wikipedia editors adopt a policy giving admins the authority to quickly delete AI-generated articles that meet certain criteria, like incorrect citations⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  reddit.com/…/unidan_gets_mad_about_crows_and_jack…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Wikipedia editors adopt a policy giving admins the authority to quickly delete AI-generated articles that meet certain criteria, like incorrect citations⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ 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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Wikipedia editors adopt a policy giving admins the authority to quickly delete AI-generated articles that meet certain criteria, like incorrect citations⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidan

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Wikipedia editors adopt a policy giving admins the authority to quickly delete AI-generated articles that meet certain criteria, like incorrect citations⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ 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 before. 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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Wikipedia editors adopt a policy giving admins the authority to quickly delete AI-generated articles that meet certain criteria, like incorrect citations⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ 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.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Wikipedia editors adopt a policy giving admins the authority to quickly delete AI-generated articles that meet certain criteria, like incorrect citations⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  If anyone has specific questions about this, let me know, and I can probably answer them. Hopefully I can be to Lemmy and Wikipedia what Unidan was to Reddit and ecology before he crashed out over jackdaws and got exposed for vote fraud.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Indonesian Government Declares One Piece Flag a Symbol of Treason⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  OP, when talking about stuff this serious, can you use a better source than some slop mill called “Otaku Heart”? The South China Morning Post is the closest thing I can find to a credible source on this topic, and it says nothing about “treason”. This article you’ve posted doesn’t cite its source(s) at all.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Title of your s*x tape⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  OP, you can say “sex”. Your parents aren’t going to put you in time-out.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ice cream⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Häagen-Dogs

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Who's got the morbs?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Bart Simpson’s classroom throwing up their hands and exclaiming “Yay!”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨No low balling⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I saw the word “pickup” and had a brain fart. Yup, you’re right. I’m 99% sure anyway that their pickup trucks in 2006 would’ve been Dodge RAMs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨No low balling⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  The joke is that this is The Onion parodying an obituary, where you remember someone’s life and the people close to them. So instead of saying “he leaves behind [family member(s)]”, they turn it into a Craigslist-style ad for his pickup truck.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨WrestleMania was running wild on you⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  most of the money on things that are Wikipedia

  Assuming you meant “aren’t Wikipedia”, there are a few aspects to this.

  • These are the Wikimedia Foundation’s 2024 financial statements.
  • You can see how it’s organized here.
  • Here’s a table of salaries. CEO Katherine Maher’s salary is about $790,000, which is very average for this role. Other salaries look average as well.
  • I permanently hide donation drive banners in my preferences and so can’t speak to how they’ve been lately (read: last 8-ish years). I remember them being terrible. Genuinely hated them.
  • Wikimedia is a lot bigger than just the English Wikipedia; it’s a movement, and one that’s been highly successful in a way it couldn’t have been just through volunteer work. For example, I heavily encourage you to check out Wikipedia’s sister projects sometime. Not all of them are created equal, but Wiktionary for example to me is the best single dictionary in the world. I wish many of these received similar levels of appreciation to Wikipedia. And far from being tacked-on side projects, most of these factor into a coherent ecosystem in their own way.
  • The WMF’s legal team in my eyes especially has been phenomenal. The movement I volunteer so many hours for would be heavily fractured and probably dead in the water if it weren’t for them.
  • On top of obvious things like developing MediaWiki, I actively want the WMF to be doing outreach through programs like grants. If the WMF just sits by and coasts on hosting costs and maybe MediaWiki bug fixes, it will die. Figuring out how to make editing more inviting, more accessible, and more efficient is crucial not just to keeping Wikipedia alive but its sister projects and even to improving other non-WMF wikis.

  In summary, I don’t like the banners but have seen zero issue with how they handle finances. The money donated that’s used beyond maintaining a skeleton crew and keeping the lights on is profoundly useful to me as an editor and directly helps me write the articles that the people donating expect their money to go to.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨WrestleMania was running wild on you⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Some of it’s going to be down to a major news org like the BBC being much more careful to make sure he’s really dead. With Wikipedia, that’s a fuck-up, but almost anyone can make it, and it can easily be undone. With the BBC, that kind of fuck-up would haunt them for years. I’ve also read that Sky News may have been the first to confirm his death. Looking at that edit, the editor didn’t mention a source; they just "was"d him. Bad practice by Wikipedia’s standards but worked out in the end.

  I think it’s a point of pride that we can be so up-to-date, but as a tertiary source, we rely on the credibility of secondary sources like the BBC to have any semblance of usability and order. I think we’re running different races, and we couldn’t run ours if they didn’t run theirs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨WrestleMania was running wild on you⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t have a specific favorite singular edit. If I did, it’d have to be the time I nominated ‘David Joyner (business executive)’ for deletion shortly after the killing of Brian Thompson. Whereas I could’ve waited for things to cool down, I didn’t want to politick. This circulated around BlueSky, well-meaning people who didn’t understand how we handle article inclusion brigaded the discussion, and some moron writing for Gizmodo accused me personally of being a paid CVS shill conspiring to hide Joyner’s name (despite the fact that Joyner’s name was proudly displayed on CVS’ website as the first result in a search engine). The situation was just so stupid.

  Favorite series of edits? Definitely the time in 2021 I started a good article review for the article ‘Marjorie Taylor Greene’ and it got so out-of-hand that I ended up overhauling the entire thing because I kept finding problems (well outside the scope of a GA review). I thought it was really good by the time I was done, and it was really satisfying reading an article where MTG bitched at some local rally about her Wikipedia article – a sign I’d done something right.

  These two examples aren’t representative of my edits at all.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨WrestleMania was running wild on you⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m going to refer you to Wikipedia’s newspaper The Signpost, but if there’s jargon in there that makes no sense, I can clarify. The TL;DR is that the skin Vector (2022) (an update from Vector (2010)) made the interface more flexible to stuff like this, logged-out users could now have preferences, and Wikipedia’s design was all over the place after 20 years of largely decentralized development.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨WrestleMania was running wild on you⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Sometimes you’d think so. It’s actually more delayed than you’d think; major celebrities are often several minutes between major article publication and edit, when theoretically you could speedrun that kind of edit with a source in about two minutes from time of reading the article.

  You might’ve seen this, but the editor who changed Henry Kissinger to “was” became such a social media phenomenon that day that her talk page was flooded with “congratulations”. An administrator (being responsible, tbf) had to step in and remove gravedancing, my own included.

  Shame this kind of edit isn’t consistent or “Was%” would be a really fun speedrun.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨WrestleMania was running wild on you⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If anyone deserves credit for saving the comm, it’d be @Sunshine@lemmy.ca. She doesn’t post there anymore owing to disagreements with .world (now posting in other vegan comms), but for a long time, she was the beating heart of /c/vegan.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨WrestleMania was running wild on you⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  They’re based on edit count and not something meant to be taken seriously. I don’t get any money.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨WrestleMania was running wild on you⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Wikipedia senior here to answer your dumbest Wikipedia-related questions.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Toxic community⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You just don’t know when to stop lying.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Everybody gets one [choose wisely]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Props for finding one that isn’t generated.

  SpongeBob fish pointing and saying “that’s what we’ve been waiting for”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Toxic community⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Imagine how fucking slimy you’d have to be to say being or becoming pregnant ~85% of the time isn’t “constantly pregnant”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Everybody gets one [choose wisely]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  A GPT that doesn’t destroy the climate by creating digital pollution?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Itch.io apologise for "frustration and confusion" after delisting thousands of NSFW projects⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  rather than reading an article talking about it

  Good as a supplement, but the RPS article gives context itch.io is too much of a cowardly little bitch to include like: “Collective Shout describe themselves as a “grassroots campaigns movement against the objectification of women and the sexualisation of girls”, but are associated with outspokenly homophobic and anti-abortion Christian conservative groups, according to a now-deleted Vice article.”