Too many people being rude to eachother, locking it. Lets be better.
& this cannot be abused by Admins with agendas ?
Wiki deletions move articles to an archived status. You can appeal.
You know, I think I’m overdue for a donation to Wikipedia. They honestly might end up being the last bastion of sanity
I downloaded the entirety of wikipedia as of 2024 to use as a reference for “truth” in the post-slop world. Maybe I should grab the 2022 version as well just in case…
Why would wikipedia of all things be your go to for that?
This guy is a troll and he’s going to keep asking questions as long as people keep answering them.
I’m just going to block him and move on; got no time to suffer fools like this any more.
Man, you people really loath anyone who doesn’t just shut up and agree.
Wikipedia is the most accurate encyclopedia to date; its perceived unreliability as to its correctness is largely a misunderstanding that arose from misconceptions as to why one can’t (or shouldn’t, depending on case) cite it in academia. People think that it can’t be cited because of its unreliability but in reality it’s simply because it’s a third hand source; i.e. a resource.
Wikipedia is built near-purely on second hand sources, which is how all encyclopedias are intended to be constructed. As long as one ensures the validity of the second hand source used, encyclopedias are great resources.
Wikipedia is the most accurate encyclopedia to date
How did you determine that?
Wikipedia is built near-purely on second hand sources, which is how all encyclopedias are intended to be constructed. As long as one ensures the validity of the second hand source used, encyclopedias are great resources.
True, but basically nobody does check that the sources are valid, and they often aren’t.
How do you know they often aren’t? I’m an academic and regularly use wikipedia to find citations for sources. I’ve have yet to come across any citations that were wrong.
Because I see the things they’re getting from Wikipedia and I am them, and they admit they didn’t actually check the sources.
I’ve have yet to come across any citations that were wrong.
How would you determine that a cited source was wrong?
I’ll click on them and then read them.
Here are two pages I’ve gone through a lot I can verify have correct citations in them. In fact, one of the citations in one of these is my research! which I know for certain was cited correctly.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_software
I’ll click on them and then read them.
And how will that allow you to know if they’re right or not?
How would you determine that a cited source was wrong?
Subject matter experts do still exist. They’re dying off, and it’s unclear how many more we intend to create. But we do still have some.
You can’t be a subject matter expert on everything though?
For anything that is not politically contentious, it’s very good. Even the politically contentious stuff tries to give the most “balanced”/“mainstream” interpretation usually.
There are communities of people which hyperfixate on certain topics. Think dinosaurs and trains. If a serious Dino-head sees a mistake about the length of Diplodocus, they are going to drop everything and fix it immediately.
I routinely check wiki sources - I’ve taught a lot of college kids that as a way to quickly find sources for papers. Most of the time, topics I know a lot about from my own educational background match what I see on wiki and cite the same kinds of sources I would use.
It’s not perfect - there’s the infamous story of an American teenager writing all of Scots Wikipedia without knowing any Scots - but you have to respect the fact that there are a lot of people who are obsessed with certain topics and will watch their pet articles like a hawk.
NATOpedia is a great resource if you go in with an assumption of a pro-western bias, but a source of truth lmao.
Someone is mad their sources got removed for not being credible.
What a shock that someone who pretends to be an anarchist would go to bat to defend the reliablity of far right western propaganda outlets like Radio Free Asia, the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, and the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. Remember, if it doesn’t’ have the Western Neo-liberal seal of approval, it’s not credible and should be removed, that’s the anarchist way!
What in the fuck are you talking about
I’m talking about how unsurprising it is to me that a western pseudo-anarchist treats far right propaganda outlets as gospel truth, so long as they’re laundered though something like wikipedia.
A lot of western liberals really do treat it like the Holy Scripture. Any intelligence agencies would just have to pay a few admins and higher some people to sculpt the list of “reliable sources” that Wikipedia uses and they can basically fully control what hundreds of millions of neoliberals believe.
And they have.
Well you’re free to submit sources that are credible and challenge that old ones aren’t.
I tried that once, a bunch of power users got together and tried to dox me
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Lol. Reality isn’t what you wanted it to be, so you’re just going to deny it.
You’re just salty that the russian and chinese propaganda edits are thrown out as soon as they pop up lol
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It’s very easy to just spit out rote strawman that don’t resemble anything I actually said, rather than actually engage with what I said.
See? You’ve just straight up given up the game, immediately disregarding any pretense that you ever cared about reliable sources or honestly, and just straight up admit that it’s only about politics alliegence. You will believe anything Wikipedia tells you, even if it openly comes from western propaganda outlets like the Victims of Communism Foundation or Radio Free Asia, because they agree with your politics.
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Yessir, i do believe that the information on Wikipedia resembles the truth a lot more than anything that comes from lemmy.ml, lemmygrad.ml or hexbear.net.
Yes, I do: because it confirms the things you already believed
Because Wikipedia gives me sources i can read up and decide myself if that’s bullshit or not
And do you? Do you read all those books from Anne Applebaum and similar right wing pundits? Do you read all the reports from far right think tanks like Australian Strategic Policy Institute? Do you read claims of not just the publications, but the save individual people, who have consistently repeated every verified lie to come out of the US state department, from WMDS in Iraq to babies in ovens in Gaza? How exactly are you “deciding for yourself” if that’s bullshit?
And also because Wikipedia leaves politics aside as good as they can
They really don’t. Not that it’s even possible to “leave politics aside” when talking about things that are political. Thinking they do is basically admition that you consider your politics “the default”.
if your perception of reality has anything to with what the world at large has agreed on, but there i lost ya, didn’t i?
You really want to commit the argument “it’s true because it agrees with the average political position of westerners?” (because by “the world at large”, you, naturally, where only talking about westerners.)
I’m not using the conservative pedia.
Oh for fuck’s sake…
I’d not considered this was happening (people submitting AI wiki articles)
Isn’t Wikipedia where AI gets like half of its information from anyway?
Reddit seems to be a substantial source if the many bits of questionable advice that google famously offered are any indication
reddit allows GOOGLE to scrape it for its AI, because google allows them to use thier v3captcha for thier moderation and banning purposes.
Do you think these people surreptitiously submitting articles written by AI are gonna be capable of validating what they’re submitting is even true? Particularly if the (presumably effective) Wikipedia defense for this is detecting made up citations?
This kind of thing makes something valuable to everyone, like Wikipedia, ultimately a less valuable resource, and should be resisted and rejected by anyone with their head screwed on
Oh, I think this is a good move by Wikipedia. I just hate to imagine the disaster that ouroboros of AI citing AI generated Wikipedia articles would come up with.
If anyone has specific questions about this, let me know, and I can probably answer them. Hopefully I can be to Lemmy and Wikimedia what Unidan was to Reddit and ecology before he crashed out over jackdaws and got exposed for vote fraud.
Well now I want to know about jackdaws and voter fraud
what about the jackdaws thing?
unzips
How do I get started on contributing to new articles (written by a human) for my language? I always wanted to help out but never found an easy way to do so.
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.
Both. How do I get started creating a new article, and how do I contribute to them, or other articles?
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. You’d have to keep in mind that the target language may have standards not followed on the English Wikipedia.
- 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.
Is there a danger that unscrupulous actors will try and build out a Wikipedia edit history with this and try to mass skew articles with propaganda using their “trusted” accounts?
Or what might be the goal here? Is it just stupid and bored people?
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 without this criterion. 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.
Thank you for your answer, I really feel happy that Wikipedia is safe then. Stuff happening nowadays makes me always think of the worst.
Do you think your problem is similar to open-source developers fighting AI pull requests? There it was theorised that some people try to train their models by making them submit code changes and abuse the maintainers’ time and effort to get training data.
Is it possible that this is an effort to steal work from Wikipedia editors to get you to train their AI models?
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.
How frequently are images generated/modified by diffusion models uploaded to Wikimedia Commons? I can wrap my head around evaluating cited sources for notability, but I don’t know where to start determining the repute of photographs. So many images Wikipedia articles use are taken by seemingly random people not associated with any organization.
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.
How would you know if an image is AI generated? That was easy to do in the past, but have you seen what they are capable of now?
Unidan was a legend, he will be missed.
The headline reflects a sensible move by Wikipedia to protect content quality. AI-generated articles often include errors or fake citations, so giving admins the authority to quickly delete such content helps maintain accuracy and credibility. While there’s some risk of overreach, the policy targets misuse, not responsible AI-assisted editing, and aligns with Wikipedia’s existing standards for removing low-quality material.
Did you generate this comment with a LLM for irony?
Ha, fair question! But no irony here—I actually wrote it myself. That said, it’s kind of funny how quickly we’ve reached the point where any well-written, balanced take sounds like it could be AI-generated. Maybe that’s part of the problem we’re trying to solve!
But no irony here—I actually wrote it myself.
I see that em dash I know what you’re doing
Either LLM or quality trolling
It really is crazy how predictable it is.
Even saying fair question set off alarms. At this point saying anything good about a response at the start is immediate red flag.
These lists of red flags make me feel like I must be a replicant. I wrote a comment just like that one, em dash and all, on a different site just the other day, with my own organic brain!
My first instinct was to use an em dash instead of that last comma, but it seemed too on the nose.
I’ve started to drop using emdashes because AI ruined them–bastards.
Honestly I don’t think dropping them is a particular loss. I use them in work writing and then in more casual writing if I happen to be using the keyboard I use for that work since I have a key binding for it, but that’s all. The distinction of dash length (or of dashes from hyphens) doesn’t bring anything useful to our writing in my opinion
Username does not check out.
It always feels weird when people write an essay as if this is their final quarter project for high school. Too neat, thoughts too organized, much flowery proses.
I do that on almost all these posts now. And I’ve stopped leaving in em dashes.
Nice one
It’s a step. Why wouldn’t they default to not accepting any AI generated content, and maybe have a manual approval process? It would both protect the content and discourage LLM uses where llms suck.
Why wouldn’t they default to not accepting any AI generated content
If you can accurately detect what content is AI generated, you’ll have a company worth billions overnight
Manual approval process would kill the site I think, there’s just so much content on it that gets updated constantly it would just grind it all to a halt
Right, and by manual approval it just would be the absolute lowest priority. Kind of like the automated message “we’re expecting higher than normal call volumes” as companies gently tell us their margins are more important than their customers.
They call the rule “LLM-generated without human review”. The specific criteria are mistakes that LLMs frequently make.
common wikipedia w
Wikipedia certainly doesn’t need AI to fuck up their articles.
Plenty of biased, incorrect stuff done by themselves.Link the incorrect stuff
This has since been corrected, but there is a great video by BadEmpanada about the state of the Holodomor’s page:
Wikipedia has a giant article regurgitating the false claims from the extremist Falun Gong cult that China is stealing their organs.
Why have two people replied to my request for a link with something other than a link
Here you go, Would you like me to cut your food for you too?
Thanks!
This looks to be a page about the accusations and the counterarguments to said accusations, not a page claiming to the truth
Falun Gong is a Chinese qigong discipline involving meditation and a moral philosophy rooted in Buddhist tradition. The practice rose to popularity in the 1990s in China, and by 1998, Chinese government sources estimated that as many as 70 million people had taken up the practice.[42][43] Perceiving that Falun Gong was a potential threat to the Party’s authority and ideology, Communist Party leader Jiang Zemin initiated a nationwide campaign to eradicate the group in July 1999.[44]
The above paragraph is from the page, and it is claiming truth.
So you’re just lying, you never actually wanted evidence, you were just trying to waste peoples time by asking them to provide it even when you will just ignore it and lie when they provide it.
More to the point, they don’t have pages for other false claims that just “about the accusations and the counterarguments to said accusations, not a page claiming to the truth”. There’s nothing like this for Pizzagate or Birtherism.
Did you copy and paste the wrong quote? That doesn’t say anything about organ harvesting.
Also
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11_conspiracy_theories
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizzagate_conspiracy_theory
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_citizenship_conspiracy_theories
Link or gtfo, let people check the sources themselves
Here you go, Would you like me to cut your food for you too?
“Here’s a thing I believe in”
“I would like proof it is a thing”
“What are you, stupid? Don’t ask me for proof.”
Do you need me to send you a recording of me physically reading the text for you before it counts? Or are you a big enough boy to read it one your own? Were you actually asking in good faith because you genuinely wanted to know? Or were you just trying to be as oblique as possible to waste my time?
I read most this article and don’t see how any of it is false or misinformation. Literally the first word in the page is “alleged”, and it’s full of arguments with linked citations from both sides
Falun Gong is a Chinese qigong discipline involving meditation and a moral philosophy rooted in Buddhist tradition. The practice rose to popularity in the 1990s in China, and by 1998, Chinese government sources estimated that as many as 70 million people had taken up the practice.[42][43] Perceiving that Falun Gong was a potential threat to the Party’s authority and ideology, Communist Party leader Jiang Zemin initiated a nationwide campaign to eradicate the group in July 1999.[44]
If you cannot see any problems with the above paragraph, which does not say anything about “alleged”, by the way, then I don’t know what to tell you.
If you think that taking far right propaganda outlets like The Victims or Communism Memorial Foundation (which is a covid truther organization, among other things), then I don’t know what to tell you.
Other than the fact that you don’t actually want reliable information, you want information that confirms what you already believed.
Clearly we’re the sheeple for accepting sources and citations and they’re the only one who can see the truth between the lines of how his favorite nation is actually misunderstood.
How unsurprising that a self-described “anarchist” is willing to treat far fight extremists like the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and the Falun Gong cult as infallible sources of truth so long as it lets them attack the geopolitical enemies of their country.
80% of political stuff or with political importance.
I clicked all the words in your comment but none of them opened a browser window
not interested in doing work for others.
There have been plenty instances of manipulation over the years and shady practices in the organisation itself.
Unbelievable there are still so many gullible people still thinking it’s a reputable source.
if you love it so much for some reason then keep using it.
garbage in, garbage outOh so you’re a “do your own research” kind of commenter
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Wait, how is you providing evidence to back up your argument “doing work for others”?
JK we all know the answer … 🤡
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When you make claims, you give proof. That’s how things work in reality.
Unless those claims are against China though, right? That’s you’re position.
