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Wikipedia, is becoming one of few places I trust the information.
It’s funny that MAGA and ml tankies both think that Wikipedia is the devil.
It’s worth checking out the contribs and talk regarding articles that can be divisive. People acting with ulterior motives and inserting their own bias are fairly common. They also make regular corrections for this reason. I still place more faith and trust in Wikipedia as an info source more than most news articles.
Wikipedia has an imperfect process, but it is open to review and you can see how the sausage is made. It isn’t perfect, but the best we have.
Luv u Wiki
The site engages in holocaust denial, apologia for wehrmacht, and directly collaborates with western governments. On the talk pages users will earnestly tell you that mentioning napalm can stick to objects when submerged in water constitutes “unnecessary POV”, and third-degree burns are painless because they destroy nerve tissue (don’t ask how the tissue got destroyed, and they will not be banned for this so get used to it). Jimmy Wales is a far-right libertarian. It might be a reliable source of information for reinforcing your own worldview, but it’s not a project to create the world’s encyclopedia. Something like that would at least be less stingy about what a “notable sandwich” is.
FWIW,
wp:Talk:Napalm#Burns_under_water?
wp:Talk:Burn/Archive 1#Burn pain
This page was last edited on 20 February 2024, at 12:50 (UTC).
Wales defended his comments in response to backlash from supporters of Gamergate, saying that “it isn’t about what I believe. Gg is famous for harassment. Stop and think about why.”[125]
…
Wales labeled himself a libertarian, qualifying his remark by referring to the Libertarian Party as “lunatics”, and citing “freedom, liberty, basically individual rights, that idea of dealing with other people in a manner that is not initiating force against them” as his guiding principles.[10] In a 2014 tweet, he expressed support for open borders.[104]
…
Wales has lived in London since 2012,[146] and became a British citizen in 2019.[147]
Yeah endless waves of attempted edits to tone down war crimes is the tip of the iceberg, a subject I will circle back to in the coming days. This is a bizarre comment on several levels. So is he less right-wing because he is British? It doesn’t matter if you enjoy particular sects of Ayn Rand worshippers, it makes no difference to me. The Gamergate business is the typical damage control response you see out of any site owner amenable to Nazis. Exactly like reddit admins. “We don’t take sides against the right-wing ☝️🤓 they broke site rules fair and square.” Typical bs. Nerds think everyone else is as singlemindedly gullible as them, invariably. Unfortunately the legal system demands people adhere to it
Show me. That’s a simple request.
Ah yes, you were personally insulted and now discredit the biggest collection of knowledge the world has ever had. Fuck you, you fool.
WRONG. You are thinking of the Quran 🙏🏻🤲🏻
No it doesn’t
This is a very low-quality reply. Try making more high-quality replies to contribute to discussions here on Lemmy. Thanks!
I don’t care what that is, you post too much on here. I’m blocking and supplanting you.
Supplanting?
You’ll have to use smaller words for me, boss.
Try not making shit up
Citation needed.
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As a Wikipedia editor I can comfirm - we regularly say that napalm sticking to objects in water is POV. I do it at least twice a week. I’ll try making a bot to do it automatically so I’ll have more time for holocaust denial.
I have been editing Wikipedia since 2004, and my very first edit was to deny a clearly POV edit to a sticky napalm article. It’s kind of a point of pride for me.
As a fellow Wikipedia editor I have confirmed that you are in fact the intern who kept making edits directly from the Capitol without even using a VPN.
MAGA and tankies are pretty much the same except MAGA votes while tankies whine.
Red hat vs red coat fascists
They are scared of facts.
Tankies don’t think Wikipedia is the devil. You could call me a tankie from my political views, and I very much appreciate Wikipedia and use it on a daily basis. That is not to say it should be used uncritically and unaware of its biases.
Because of the way Wikipedia works, it requires sourcing claims with references, which is a good thing. The problem comes when you have an overwhelming majority of available references in one topic being heavily biased in one particular direction for whatever reason.
For example, when doing research on geopolitically charged topics, you may expect an intrinsic bias in the source availability. Say you go to China and create an open encyclopedia, Wikipedia style, and make an article about the Tiananmen Square events. You may expect that, if the encyclopedia is primarily edited by Chinese users using Chinese language sources, given the bias in the availability of said sources, the article will end up portraying the bias that the sources suffer from.
This is the criticism of tankies towards Wikipedia: in geopolitically charged topics, western sources are quick to unite. We saw it with the genocide in Palestine, where most media regardless of supposed ideological allegiance was reporting on the “both sides are bad” style at best, and outright Israeli propaganda at worst.
So, the point is not to hate on Wikipedia, Wikipedia is as good as an open encyclopedia edited by random people can get. The problem is that if you don’t specifically incorporate filters to compensate for the ideological bias present in the demographic cohort of editors (white, young males of English-speaking countries) and their sources, you will end up with a similar bias in your open encyclopedia. This is why us tankies say that Wikipedia isn’t really that reliable when it comes to, e.g., the eastern block or socialist history.
One would think that leftists, socialists, communists, tankies, and/or others would come up with supplementary wikis such as Conservapedia or RationalWiki that are good.
and, FWIW:
Category:Wikidebates
https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Category:Wikidebates
e.g.
Is capitalism sustainable?
https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Is_capitalism_sustainable%3F
It’s sad how little news there is relatively little news in Wikinews ( https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page ).
supplementary wikis
We have them, e.g. ProleWiki, but good luck trying to explain to the average western Wikipedia user that for certain geopolitical topics they might be worth checking out and contrasted with Wikipedia. My problem isn’t the lack of alternatives, my problem is the anticommunist and pro-western bias in Wikipedia, the most used encyclopedia, in geopolitically charged topics.
Hmmm,
Let’s see:
Wikipedia is an imperialist propaganda outlet and disinformation website presenting itself as an encyclopedia launched in 2001 by bourgeois libertarians Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. Wikipedia is maintained by a predominantly white male population, of which about 1% are responsible for 80% of edits. It has also been linked to corporate and governmental manipulation and imperialist agendas, including the U.S. State Department, World Bank,[1] FBI, CIA, and New York Police Department.[2][3]
Wow. 😁🙂
and while I’m at it:
Wikipedia, is an online wiki-based encyclopedia hosted and owned by the non-profit organization Wikimedia Foundation and financially supported by grants from left-leaning foundations plus an aggressive annual online fundraising drive.[1] Big Pharma pushes its agenda and profits by paying anonymous editors to smear its opponents there, while others are moronic internet trolls who include teenagers and the unemployed.[2] As such, it projects a liberal—and, in some cases, even socialist, Communist, and Nazi-sympathizing—worldview, which is totally at odds with conservative reality and rationality.[3]
pw:Communist Party of Peru – Shining Path
The party organized its own militia, the People’s Guerrilla Army and claimed to have begun a protracted people’s war against the bourgeois government of Peru since 1980, with the intention of establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat.[1] Throughout its period of highest activity, the party frequently engaged in terrorist tactics, and has committed brutal and violent attacks on peasants, including children.[2] The class composition of the party consisted in mostly petty-bourgeois intellectuals, and the growth of the party was closely linked with student movements in universities.[3]
My problem isn’t the lack of alternatives, my problem is the anticommunist and pro-western bias in Wikipedia, the most used encyclopedia, in geopolitically charged topics.
and I suppose the supplements are a way, however their effectiveness/ineffectiveness.
You may disagree with the first statement on being an imperialist propaganda outlet, but the rest of information is relevant.
I don’t get your point of posting the article on the Shining Path, though
So very much on-script though
That instance is fucking bananas
There’s a lot of problems with Wikipedia, but in my years editing there (I’m extended protected rank), I’ve come to terms that it’s about as good as it can be.
In all but one edit war, the better sourced team came out on top. Source quality discussion is also quite good. There’s a problem with positive/negative tone in articles, and sometimes articles get away with bad sourcing before someone can correct it, but this is about as good as any information hub can get.
Any chance you remember what that one edit war was about?
There was a hilarious one in the human anus article, about the picture being used in said article
It was about whether Bitcoin Cash was referred to as “Bcash” or not.
I forget the semantics, but there were a lot of sources calling it Bcash, but then there were equally reliable sources saying that was only the name given by detractors. The war was something about how Bcash should be referenced in the opening paragraph
Thank you very much!
I’m glad it was at least about something fairly trivial.
Thank you for your service 🫡
I remeber an article form a decade or more ago which did some research and said that basically, yes there are inaccuracies on Wikipedia, and yes there are over-simplifications, but** no more than in any other encyclopaedia**. They argued that this meant that it should be considered equally valid as an academic resource.
growing up I got taught by teachers not trust Wiki bc of misinformation. times have changed
Nope, we all misunderstood what they meant. Wikipedia is not an authoritative source, it is a derivative work. However, you can use the sources provided by the Wikipedia article and use the article itself to understand the topic.
Wikipedia isn’t and was never a primary source of information, and that is by design. You don’t declare information in encyclopedias, you inventory information.
Wikipedia was not then what it is now. You’re spot on with all that, spot on, but in the early days it wasn’t nearly as trustworthy.
Fair enough, I’m not old enough to remember those days of Wikipedia, my memory starts in roughly 2010 wrt Wikipedia use 😅
You can check old versions of any article by clicking ‘history’. And yeah, the standards used to be pretty low.
“Nope” to what exactly? you regurgitated what I said - but told us how you misunderstood it
Not to trust wiki as a format? Or did you mean Wikipedia specifically?
subject at hand was wikipedia, but it applies to any wiki format I guess - just check sources.
Now in some states, you can’t trust teachers not to be giving you misinformation.
We homeschool our daughter. Saw a cool history through film course that taught with an example movie every week to grow interest… nothing in the itinerary said they’d play a video of Columbus by PragerU. They refused the refund, as it was 2 weeks in, and said it was used to foment conversation, but no other video was being offered or no questions were prepared to challenge the children. I worded my letter to call out the facts about Columbus vs the video, and the lack of accreditation of the source. I tried not to be the “lib”, but I very much got the gist that’s their opinion of me, and how they brushed me off. That fucking site is a plague on common sense, decency, and truth. Still fired up, and it was last month. We pulled her out of the course immediately after the video.
I can’t imagine homeschooling. Not that I think it’s bad but that it has to be so hard to do. And harder still to do it right.
Glad you pulled out of that course. PragerU is hot garbage and I hate how my autocorrect apparently knows PragerU and didn’t try to change it to something else.
How hard do you find it to homeschool? How many hours do you reckon it takes a day?
You’ve gotta keep in mind that in a regular school your kid is one of 20-30 for the teacher and they are lucky if they get five minutes of individual help/instruction. Everything else is just lecture, reading, and assignments.
It doesn’t have to be onerous. We homeschooled until around 3rd grade. Even so, the other kids they are in school with are academically… not stellar. My youngest (13) has a reading disability and she struggles to pass classes. She still frequently finds herself helping out other students because they are even worse off.
I’m not anti-public education, but whether it’s Covid or just republicans gutting the system, public education is in a state right now. I figure funding needs to increase by 30-50%. Kids need more resources than they are getting. And until they do, homeschooling isn’t an unreasonable option. But it’s not for everyone, of course. One parent has to work (or not) from home or odd hours.
I’m not exactly qualified to speak on the issue, but I think it’s also important to focus on where the money gets spent. Anecdotally it seems like a lot is spent on classroom tech (“smart boards”, Chromebooks, iPads), which while nice, has abysmal value in terms of returns on cost.
Personally, I think the most important things are basic supplies, school lunches, and teacher salaries.
If this is only 6 weeks ago now then you can still most likely do a credit card charge back if you paid that way
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How ironic that school teachers spent decades lecturing us about not trusting Wikipedia… and now, the vast majority of them seem to rely on Youtube and ChatGPT for their lesson plans. Lmao
Who would’ve thought??
Unfortunately the current head of Wikipedia is pro-AI which has contributed to this lack of trust.
One thing I don’t get: why the fuck LLM’s don’t use wikipedia as a source of info? Would help them coming up with less bullshit. I experimented around with some, even perplexity that searches the web and gives you links, but it always has shit sources like reddit or SEO optimized nameless news sites
Perplexity is okay with more academic topics at the least, albeit pretty shallow (usually isn’t that different to google). There might be a policy not to include encyclopedias, but it would be an improvement over SEO garbage for sure.
Yeah, I use it instead of search, as that has gone to shit years ago due to all the SEO garbage, and now it’s even worst with AI generated SEO garbage.
At least this way I get fast results, and mostly accurate on the high level. But I agree that if I try to go deeper, it just makes up stuff based on 9 yrs old reddit posts.
I wish somebody built an AI model that prioritized trusted data, like encyclopedias, wiki, vetted publication, prestige news portals. It would be much more useful, and could put Google out of business. Unfortunately, Perplexity is not that
It’s not that AI don’t or cannot use Wikipedia they do actually, but AI can’t properly create a reliable statement in general. It halucinates so goddamn much, and that can never, ever, be solved, because it is at the end of the day just arranging tokens based on statistical approximation of things people might say. It has been proven that modern LLMs can never approach even close to human accuracy with infinite power and resources.
That said, if an AI is blocked from using Wikipedia then that would be because the company realized Wikipedia is way more useful than their dumb chatbot.
This will be unpopular, but hear me out. Maybe the decline in visitors is only a decline in the folks who are simply looking for a specific word or name and the forgot. Like, that one guy who believed in the survival of the fittest. Um. Let me try to remember. I think he had an epic beard. Ah! Darwin! I just needed a reminder, I didn’t want to read the entire article on him because I did that years ago.
Look at your own behaviors on lemmy. How often do you click/tap through to the complete article? What if it’s just a headline? What if it’s the whole article pasted into the body of the post? Click bait headlines are almost universally hated, but it’s a desperate attempt to drive traffic to the site. Sometimes all you need is the article synopsis. Soccer team A beats team B in overtime. Great, that’s all I need to know…unless I have a fantasy team.
Half my visits to Wikipedia are because I need to copy and paste a Unicode character and that’s always the highest search result with a page I can easily copy and paste the exact character from.
Em dash? Wikipedia.
Nice-looking quotes? Wikipedia.
Accented uppercase letters? Wikipedia.
(Yeah, I know. The last one can only be understood by Italian speakers; or speakers of other languages with stupid keyboard layouts)
That is too bad. Wikipedia is important.
I guess I’m a bit old school, I still love Wikipedia.
Same but with Encyclopedia Brittanica
I use Wikipedia when I want to know stuff. I use chatGPT when I need quick information about something that’s not necessarily super critical.
It’s also much better at looking up stuff than Google. Which is amazing, because it’s pretty bad. Google has become absolute garbage.
Yep, that an occasionally Wiktionary, Wikidata, and even Rationalwiki.
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To get a decent result on Google, you have to wade through 2 pages of ads, 4 pages of sponsored content, and maybe the first good result is on page 10.
ChatGPT does a good job at filtering most of the bullshit.
I know enough to not just accept any shit from the internet at face value.
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Why the fuck are you defending google so hard lmao.
Google will absolutely put bad information front and center too.
And by using Google you make Google richer. In fact you get served far more ads using Google products than chatGPT.
What’s your fucking point lmao.
I think you missed a part of their comment:
Block ads and use a different search engine?
Both Ecosia and DuckDuckGo have served me pretty well. Kagi also seems somewhat interesting.
Ecosia is working with Qwant on their own index, the first version of which has already gone online I believe. So they’re no longer exclusively relying on Bing/Google for their back-end.I have yet to use an alternate search engine for any length of time (and i’ve tried a few) and think “ah yes, this was the kind of results I expected from my search”, they’re systematically worse than google, which is an incredible achievement, considering how absolute garbage google is nowadays.
Brave, which i’m using now, is atrocious with that. The amount of irrelevant bullshit it throws at you before getting to the stuff you are actually looking for is actually incredible.
Why the fuck are you defending google so hard lmao.
Ah yes, when I said “use a different search engine” as a solution to Google having issues I’m certainly defending Google! What an endorsement right? “Use a completely different service” is free publicity for Google!
Other search engines are even worse than Google lmao. Brave consistently provide literally the worst results. Duck duck go same.
Are you actually serious.
You’re right bro but I feel comfortable searching the old fashioned way!
Maybe the humans are going outside and the library?
Oh I hope not.
I do not want us to return to the days of people getting limited information from outdated books from a state ran facility.
It’s called: playing in the real world.
It’s good for your health to be disconnected from the brain rot internet
They would be better if they were funded better.
all websites should block ai and bot traffic on principle.
FWIW:
Wikipedia:Bot policy#Bot requirements
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bot_policy#Bot_requirements
RationalWiki:Bots
The problem is many no longer identify as bots and come from hundreds if not thousands of IPs.
Voight-Kampff them.
all websites should block ai and bot traffic on principle.
Increasing numbers do.
But there is no proof that the LLM trawling bots are willing to respect those blocks.
Surly it can’t be because of the decline in quality because of deposit admins defending their own personal fiefdoms.
There’s a certain irony in a website that caused a decline in visitors to primary sources complaining about something new causing a decline in visitors to its tertiary sources
I mean, there’s levels to this. If I’m looking for information, having a summary rather than a highly technical primary source can be very useful. Wikipedia cites its sources, and (ideally) has summaries made by groups of people familiar with the subject and following consistent and detailed publicly available style guides. Wikipedia isn’t running ads, and is not for profit.
When an AI summarizes these primary sources, or even summarizes Wikipedia, you get none of that. AI does not reliably cite sources (ones not made for it will just generate a convincing looking response, making up sources whole cloth. Ones made to cite sources will often not actually cite the ones they used, and still can make up sources more rarely). It can’t reliably summarize things accurately, as it doesn’t understand anything, especially not terms that have different meanings depending on the technical context. There’s no group of people reviewing and revising. There’s no incredibly detailed style guide. All these AI are explicitly for profit (the amount of self hosted out there is negligible and those are much less of a problem), and almost every one of the companies running them have openly spoken about future plans to try and seamlessly weave advertisements into them. Most importantly, there’s no guarantee that what it gives you will even be true.
Yeah switching search links will help but it’s a band-aid. AI has stolen literally everyone’s work without any attempt at consent or remuneration and the reason is now your search is 100 times faster, comes back with exactly something you can copy & paste and you never have to dig through links or bat away confirmation boxes to find out it doesn’t have what you need.
It’s straight up smash-n-grab. And it’s going to work. Just like everybody and their grandma gave up all their personal information to facebook so will your searches be done through AI.
The answer is to regulate the bejesus out of AI and ensure they haven’t stolen anything. That answer was rendered moot by electing trump.
I don’t know about you, but my results have been wrong or outdated at least a quarter of the time. If you flip two coins and both are heads, your information is outright useless. What’s the point in looking something up to maybe find the right answer? We’re entering a new dark age, and I hate it.
I’ve been asking a bunch of next-to-obvious questions about things that don’t really matter and it’s been pretty good. It still confidently lies when it gives instructions but a fair amount of time it does what I asked it for.
I’d prefer to not have it, because it’s ethically putrid. But it converts currency and weights and translates things as well as expected and in half the time i’d spend doing it manually. Plus I kind of hope using it puts them out of business. It’s not like I’d pay for it.
I refuse to believe that it’s in any way better or faster at unit and currency conversion than plain Google or DuckDuckGo. Literally type “100 EUR to USD” and you’ll get an almost instant answer. Same with units: “100 feet to meters”.
And if you’re using it, you’re helping their business. It’s as simple as that.
100%. Unit conversion is a solved problem, and it is impossible for an AI to be faster or more accurate than any of the existing converters.
I do not need an AI calculator, because I have no desire to need to double check my calculator.
Well spotted. I retract my notion that unit conversion was convenient. Clearly I should have switched to another tab to do the thing that is solved.
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But it converts currency and weights and translates things as well as expected and in half the time i’d spend doing it manually
So does qalc, and it can also do arithmetic and basic calculus quickly and (gasp) correctly!
Curious what and how you’re prompting. I get solid results, but I’m only asking for hard facts, nothing that could have opinion or agenda inserted. Also, I never go past the first prompt. There be dragons that way.
Niche history and mineralogy topics. Just looking for threads to tug. I found that it offered me threads but they often did not lead anywhere relevant or outright did not exist. Which is fine, but kinda removes my need for AI. If I have a general purpose question, I check certain websites. I already know how to serve myself everyday information. AI’s just not helpful for my use case.
Overall, It’s time neutral. But it raises my blood pressure when it hallucinates, and dying of a stroke is undesirable for me.
I’ve been meaning to donate to those guys.
I use their site frequently. I love it, and it can’t be cheap to keep that stuff online.
Not me. I value Wikipedia content over AI slop.
I sympathize with Wikipedia here because I really like the platform. That being said, modernize and get yourself a new front end. People don’t like AI because of it’s intrusiveness. They want convenience. Create “Knowledge-bot” or something similar that is focused on answering questions in a more meaningful way.
The last thing Wikipedia should do is change the look. Modernizing is a waste of resources when it works just fine all to just to give idiots a new dopamine hit.
Capitalism is the problem not wikipedia. Plus the reference desk exists, its just not instant.
Wikipedia Says AI Is Causing a Dangerous Decline in Human Visitors
FWIW:
Wikipedia:Reference desk
Interesting. I had never heard about this. Could still use a lot of sprucing up.
IIRC, they expect people to first try to find the answers themselves—perhaps they could check out a few WP articles—no “Who’s the Secretary of the Department of Interior” or similar questions;
though my big (perhaps only) problem is that a question only stands for a while—maybe a few days or week or so—before it’s archived. In some of the forums (non-WP) of about 20 years ago, one could answer questions asked months, maybe years, earlier that are still relevant.
Still, I’ve gotten a few good answers to the few questions I posted on it.
Unfortunately, it’s gonna get bad before it gets worse.
Well that’s kind of reassu… oh
Will cut the AI results out of your google searches by switching the browser’s default to the web api…
I cannot tell you how much I love it.
For Firefox on Android (which TenBlueLinks doesn’t have listed) add a new search engine and use these settings:
Name: Google Web
Search string URL: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14
as @Saltarello@lemmy.world learned before I did, strip the number 25 from the string above so it looks more like this:www .google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14Edit: Lemmy/Voyager formats this string with 25 at the end. Remove the 25 & save it as a browser search engineEDIT: There’s got to a Markdown option for disabling markdwon auto-formatting links, right?? The escape backslash seems to not be working for this specifically.EDIT II: Found a nasty hack that does the trick!
https[]()://www.example.com/search?q=%sappears as:
Lemmy also does code markup with `text`
https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14Indeed, @SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone, like so!:
Edit, oh is it buggy with parameters per downthread? Interesting
Oh thank you I’ve been looking for this
Or better yet, ditch Google altogether.
I switched to Startpage, an EU-based search engine.
Yes! Startpage rocks hard. I wish Safari would let it be the default search engine (FF does with a simple plug in).
FWIW, wp:Startpage.
Not EU based, and not free, but I’ve been loving Kagi.
Seconding Kagi, it’s worth every penny.
Well, I’m glad. That being said, Startpage is a search engine located in the Netherlands that you can start using now. Just go to the site. Kagi is paid.
Startpage! No shit. Used to be Ixquick, and I used that for years. Great site - thank you for reminding me it’s still there. :)
I’ve been using startpage, but doesn’t it still rely on google results somehow?
Thank you.
I would like to say Google is still better at finding search results with more than one word. For example, if somebody searches “santa claus porn” then DuckDuckGo or Ecosia will probably return images of porn or images of santa claus instead of images of santa claus porn.
However that is no longer true either, because google search continues to get worse all the time. So it’s like there isn’t any good search engines anymore.
What?!? That’s crazy!!!
I’m surprised no-one has asked an LLM to produce a plausible version and just released that, claiming it’s a leak.
