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Credulous coverage of AI slop on Wikipedia (awful.systems)

submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Everybody loves Wikipedia, the surprisingly serious encyclopedia and the last gasp of Old Internet idealism!

(90 seconds later)

We regret to inform you that people write credulous shit about "AI" on Wikipedia as if that is morally OK.

Both of these are somewhat less bad than they were when I first noticed them, but they're still pretty bad. I am puzzled at how the latter even exists. I had thought that there were rules against just making a whole page about a neologism, but either I'm wrong about that or the "rules" aren't enforced very strongly.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Counterpoint: I get to complain about whatever I want.

I could write a lengthy comment about how a website that is nominally editable by "anyone" is in practice a walled garden of acronym-spouting rules lawyers who will crush dissent by a thousand duck nibbles. I could elaborate upon that observation with an analogy to Masto reply guys and FOSS culture at large.

Or I could ban you for fun. I haven't decided yet. I'm kind of giddy from eating a plate of vegan nacho fries and a box of Junior Mints.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

acronym-spouting rules lawyers

That's pretty much the response I got offering even extremely mild dissent from AI spam. Apparently, "WP:MNA" means you can just make shit up as long as industry blog posts rely on that wild fever dream being true, for instance. Handy!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

you realise i'm gonna ask for links to your example of this being misapplied here

[–] [email protected] 3 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

It's deep in the replies to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Prompt_engineering#Neutral_point_of_view. Thanks as well for reinstating the NPOV template, really bothers me that it was unilaterally deleted without any addressing of the problem.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 19 hours ago

So perhaps one alternative way to estimate their quality is to check the number of citations, many have more than 100 citations, which is a sign of quality

Andrew Wakefield's 1998 paper has 457 citations on PubMed

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

acronym-spouting rules lawyers who will crush dissent by a thousand duck nibbles

hey now, my duck nibbling is thoroughly weaponised

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

I could elaborate upon that observation with an analogy to Masto reply guys and FOSS culture at large.

Please do, I wanna see FOSS get raked over the coals