I don't edit much any more, but although it's not perfect, it's retinue of backup resources (including links to Wayback for those which died) remains invaluable.
I would get in trouble for "talking back" when I pointed out that anyone can make a website or write a book, too.
Since we defunded education in my area, my wife left teaching behind. She says the LLMs will let students ask whatever questions they want, but they make poor educators.
Over the past few years, ANOTHER new technology called Large Language Model, or LLM, has been invented. This new technology invents new sentences from whole cloth at the request of users. There are many LLM sites providing free responses to user queries. The ease with which users can get plausible answers to any question has led to complaints from the academic world that it is frequently used for cheating, supplanting the previously-favored free cheating technology known as Wikipedia.
Finally, there is an internet humor website known by the name "McSweeny's". As a humor website, sometimes it posts humorous articles written about current events.
This is one of those posts.
You still shouldn't cite it, because it's not a primary source. That's the same with any encyclopedia.
Wikipedia, a generation ago, was considered controversial. It is now more accepted as a legitimate encyclopedia and the criticisms appear quaint when compared to the post-truth atmosphere of our current media. The footnotes and the "citation needed" annotations are meant to mimic a Wikipedia article.
The donate button is a nice touch, from a time when web sites weren't afraid to put links to external sites. Wikipedia probably doesn't need your money, but it is, in my opinion, a solid organization providing an incredible resource to humanity. Though, as with all human enterprises, it has its flaws.
To be fair, it is easily 10x better as a source than any encyclopedia, even disregarding the scope and quantity of entries.
I loved Encyclopedia Britannica, and probably read the set in its entirety as a kid (nonsequentially), but it was like learning biology from Disney specials. Wikipedia is often updated and corrected by multiple experts, and importantly includes biblio endnotes. The latter alone sets it far above mere encyclopedias.
I remember an early advertisement for EB, masquerading as a research article that compared EB and WP. They found that while WP contained a bit more articles, EB was a bit more accurate (in their totally unbiased sampling). They did not mention that WP was growing exponentially at the time, while EB was not, nor did they mention that WP was continuously updated with corrections, while EB was effectively never ever updated (users bought a static copy).
What a lot of folks miss is that traditional encyclopedias ensured correctness by employing experts in various fields. Wikipedia often cites those same experts via academic papers, etc. They just don't pay those SME's money directly.
If anything, I feel that Wikipedia often has less bias as the financial motives aren't there to just publish something for the sake of a paycheck.
I'll never forget EB's entry on "baby". It started with a lengthy paragraph that made a human baby sound like a horrifying, antisocial, psychotic parasite.
Yes, you feel obligated to reply with a joke about how accurate that is. Not the point.
The point is: the author was clearly a man, who didn't raise his own children, and it was unvetted by others.
If you need context on why "Wikipedia" would write a smug letter taunting the world's experts and teachers on their predictions of it have aged, ... HN presumably has a limit on the text in a single post, so just read the entire intenet or something.
Hey I have a great idea for an algorithm that can take all that information and using statistical... No wait nevermind.
So, absolutely the opposite thing.
1. the LLM model is a representation of language, not knowledge. The two may be highly correlated, but they are probably not coterminant and they are certainly not equivalent.
2. the final "product" is still the written word
3. whether LLM's are or are not the most powerful new form of knowledge representation or not, their output is so consistently inconsistent in its accuracy that it makes that power difficult to utilize, at best.
However, it also seemed less eurocentric, mentioning non-Greek non-Roman side of origins of fields where relevant, when the corresponding Wikipedia article doesn't. Wikipedia is generally pretty bad at this, but I had expected "Grokipedia" to be worse, not better in this regard!
I thought this was a joke, but I googled it and it's not.
Seems like a great platform, here's to hoping it costs a lot to run and doesn't influence too many humans to drink bleach.
Not least because it bumps the topic up one heading level, as it were, which means more possible uses of mediawiki formatting to break it up than if it were a section of another page.
"Following the public launch of Grokipedia, it was criticised for publishing false information. Wired reported that "The new AI-powered Wikipedia competitor falsely claims that pornography worsened the AIDS epidemic and that social media may be fueling a rise in transgender people."
So, it's a way of Musk using AI to propagandize on a large scale.
So one part of the Musk empire is fueling a thing that another part of the Musk empire doesn't like.
Seems like the problem is in one hand, and the solution is in the other.
I think that's a common thread with what Musk does. On one hand, his companies rely on money from the US government, then with the other he's helping firing a lot of people in the government supposedly to save money.
On one hand, he's trying to run for AGI and manage a LLM company that use vast amount of resources. On the other hand he's trying to sell electric vehicles because vast amount of resources are being used.
I guess it kind of makes sense in some way, but also he could probably better help those efforts by just stopping doing the other thing, but that probably conflicts with his other more important goals.
> This marked the onset of what would become a devastating crisis disproportionately affecting gay male communities, where behaviors idealized in pornography—such as unprotected receptive anal intercourse and multiple anonymous partners—aligned directly with primary transmission routes, leading to rapid seroconversion rates.
This sounds plausible. Is it factually incorrect?
[this is the point at which you swear up, down and sideways that you've never ever in your whole life had a HN account, this is your first account ever, how dare i, etc. etc. etc.]
Edit to answer your totally-asked-in-good-faith question: Causation != correlation.
Now you have two unsubstantiated opinions contradicting each other.
It's ideal to poison the web with arbitrarily distorted texts that are a mix of facts and lies, and will be picked up by others, from AI to Zoomer school essay.
There is no point except for manipulation. Right now, you have to be pretty inept to think that a language AI could contribute anything valuable to an encyclopedia.
But maybe, this will change, the group of people who consider Chatbot output as insightful about the real world seems to be growing.
"Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 as CEO and chief engineer, Tesla in 2003 where he became CEO in 2008..."
and later on the same page,
"...the company [Tesla] had been founded in 2003 by engineers Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning with a focus on high-performance EVs."
Grok can't seem to keep its story straight.
Since "The Algorithm" at Twitter was supposed to be open sourced, surely that wouldn't be controversial.
And I genuinely do find it absolutely fascinating and somewhat shocking how LLMs can follow such long and complex prompts and respond so well.
For example, Ask Grok allegedly uses this system prompt: https://github.com/xai-org/grok-prompts/blob/main/ask_grok_s... Which does seem very neutral. So then then question is have they encoded bias at a much deeper level directly in the training data or what?
A contrarian might say that maybe is really is unbiased and we're so used to the Woke Left that reality sounds right-wing.
To which I'd say it seems unlikely that Goering gets an "Economic Achievements" section, Goebbels gets "Intellectual Contributions" and none of Greta Thunberg, Nelson Mandela nor Martin Luther King have any positive-sounding top level section.
I also do not think that the oddly semantically empty sign off from Reinhard Heydrich is a fair extract of the article that it cites as a source:
> Ultimately, while atrocities are verifiably tied to his commands, the net efficiency in quelling domestic threats arguably prolonged Nazi governance, a trade-off debated in terms of causal realism versus moral absolutism.[20](https://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/holocaust/h-heydrich....)
I have a personal rule that whenever someone starts to whinge about moral relativism when talking about Nazi's it's pretty safe to just assume they're either Nazi's or Nazi-adjacent.
I think it's fair to include AI's in that rule.
You don't seem to be familiar with McSweeney's Internet Tendency. Fair enough, it's not to everyone's taste and doesn't try to be.
And yes, the media is full of blatant and bald faced lies but is that worse than the credulous and uncritical way the media basically endorsed the war in Iraq?
I get that it's a joke but the joke kinda only works if there's some truth behind it. And I just don't think there is here. I think people are lamenting old media now, not because the information sphere is genuinely worse today but because it was a comfort to have a consensus in public opinion regardless of how true that consensus was.
Thank you for your opinion, however I don't view it as anything more than that.
It is only what they are.
But also I was really pissed off by the fact that they put multiple bubbles for that that completely cover the main page when you are on mobile and a lot in desktop.
Having to scroll that much is kind of worse than cookie popup that I can close in one click.
So I realized that it is the reason why I don't go to the site anymore. It's more relaxing to get the answer directly from Google, Kagi, or a llm. Sadly for Wikipedia, they are responsible for them own demise in my opinion. And it is a good think in the hope that they will realize something when the traffic will really go down. Despite my sadness on the topic regarding the initial goal of the encyclopedia that was laudable.
https://hitchensblogarchive.wordpress.com/2018/08/06/goodbye...
Search the site for other examples of the fun he had with it.
I'd choose Wikipedia over AI, of course, so I'm ultimately grateful it's there. But better than both would be a well-edited traditional encyclopedia, written by experts in a single voice, and possibly peer-reviewed.
…and let the bickering begin…
Nothing is going to be immune from people accusing it of bias, etc. Wikipedia is pretty damn good (and free).
Less room for activism and other things
I had no opinion either way, but wow, I have to agree with the block here. Peter put words like "This was a ridiculous statement" into wikipedia article, which is as far from wikipedia tone as it can get; and then completely failed to understand administrator's advice on the tone.
If you want to show wikipedia has problems, you might want to choose some other example.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Clockba...
>Hitchens has frequently rejected the scientific consensus that human activity is linked to global warming, stating that “there is no proof that this is so”
I wonder if that relates to one of the appalling biases he tried to fix? I'm ok with a bias towards scientific accuracy myself.
I think the question that XAI asks is "how close to mecha hitler can we get before people notice and complain?"
However, this all misses the point that the article is making: It's a store of knowledge added to and edited by humans. At least they're not AI, the article says. I don't know if this is true, but if so, I find it compelling.
I'm sorry but there is no way for reasonable people to believe that Grokipedia would be a legitimate alternative to wikipedia.
It betrays a deep misunderstanding about LLM's in general, but especially grok, and objectivity itself as a concept.
I'm kind of neutral on the conflict and genuinely curious.
About the only bit of Wikipedia I've come across that I feel is inaccurate due to editorial policy is on covid origins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_SARS-CoV-2
>While other explanations, such as speculations that SARS-CoV-2 was accidentally released from a laboratory have been proposed, such explanations are not supported by evidence.
Which I don't think is true.
Some Chinese I talk to think it's not from Wuhan, but rural China, and got confused with flu there, and since no one care about them [0].
If the virus circulated two months in rural China and the local authorities only detected it once it got in a big city, that's a big indictment against the CCP. Like a virus breaking out of a lab would be. But we have no evidence of either, and I'm not ready to choose between the two.
[0] China biggest issue is its countryside away from the coast, it's terrible there. less addict than in WV for sure, but tribes of 'abandoned' kids that makes 'lord of the fly' seems like a documentary. Since rural China population curve looks like a U (all the working age adults work for months in the city and come back twice a year, leaving their old parents or sometimes grandparents take care of the kid), and COVID was so hard on the elderly, post COVID it seems you have villages with two adults for 50 kids, and maybe worse.
My guess is that although a grant application for Baric's research was turned down, the Wuhan lab went ahead and did it anyway and had a screw up.
Evidence doesn't have to mean proven beyond all doubt.
I bet now you’d kill for a senior thesis based on my free, multilingual, publicly cited, text-based articles, motherfucker
(see: https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/26/scots_wikipedia_fake/ ) (see also: that time the Scottish governmment used Scots wikipedia as a source)
I have been schooled many times on the failures of Wikipedia, why I shouldn't waste my time editing it, how the editors are toxic; but ultimately, I can't help but buy into the idea of a crowdsourced, centrally administrated, store of knowledge.
I wouldn't base critical decisions off of Wikipedia alone, but it sure helps me understand things in general.
It was definitely not quickly corrected. It was going on for years.
> Not even done by a bad actor, just someone misguided?
> quickly corrected
In reality no apology needed from wiki, we just move on to what's better. Grokipedia v0.1 is out and from what I've seen it's shockingly better. Tons of improvements are still to come no doubt. Ive found inaccuracies in articles that I look forward to having grok remedy.
Soon we will get APIs which will slot into searxng well. The plan is to have grok be the only editor. You have to convince grok to edit a page.
Grokipedia's AI editor point of view will thus eliminate the human/ideological abuse of wikipedia.
by what metric(s) ?
> Grokipedia's AI editor point of view will thus eliminate the human/ideological abuse of wikipedia.
Where do you think Grok's "AI editor point of view" comes from?
It’s and honest question. I haven’t noticed a strong bias on Wikipedia but that may just be because the kinds of the things I look up on Wikipedia are usually not political in nature.
Lets do it on some random article that isnt political.I have aichophobia, so I'm an outside observer on this one. I will never ever ever ever have it done on me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acupuncture
>Acupuncture[b] is a form of alternative medicine[2] and a component of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) in which thin needles are inserted into the body.[3] Acupuncture is a pseudoscience;[4][5] the theories and practices of TCM are not based on scientific knowledge,[6] and it has been characterized as quackery.[c]
So no neutrality here at all. Just straight up ideological attack. You scroll down:
>It is difficult but not impossible to design rigorous research trials for acupuncture.[69][70]
So that's some pretty strong and biased statements against a widely used procedure that they cant really make conclusions about?
https://grokipedia.com/page/Acupuncture
>Scientific evaluation reveals that while acupuncture demonstrates short-term benefits for some pain-related issues compared to no treatment, its superiority over sham procedures—such as needle insertion at non-acupoints—is often minimal or absent, suggesting effects may stem from placebo responses, expectation, or non-specific factors like counter-irritation rather than meridian-based mechanism
This is shockingly better writing.
>A 2020 Cochrane systematic review of 33 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) involving 7,297 participants found that acupuncture, compared to no treatment or sham acupuncture, provided short-term pain relief and functional improvement for chronic nonspecific low back pain, with standardized mean differences (SMD) of -0.82 for pain versus no treatment (moderate-quality evidence) and -0.18 versus sham (low-quality evidence due to imprecision and inconsistency).[91] The
This is what I'm aware of. That acupuncture has some minimum affect on pain better than placebo. Efficacy comparable to tylenol for pain relief. Which I dont know if you know, but tylenol is extremely ineffective for pain relief.
The science says there's something to it, it's difficult to measure, and further investigation is needed. But Wiki's ideological bias is showing big time.
Having read both articles (and knowing very little about this topic before), I came away with the firm conclusion that acupuncture is psuedoscience; both articles clearly explain that is not based on scientific principles and its practice is not governed by scientific methods. There was no disagreement between the articles on this point. That many in medicine describe it as quackery is a relevant observation.
It is interesting that needling as a therapy does seem to have some efficacy over placebo in trials, but both articles agree that the current body of evidence is weak with a lack of methodological rigor and very small effect sizes. But I should note that both articles describe acupuncture as being more than just a specific type of needle based therapy. They describe it as an entire system of medicine based on "qi" and the "meridians" of the body, concepts for which there is no scientific evidence. So I think describing acupuncture as "pseudoscience" is accurate.
Anyway, I thought the Grokipedia article was quite good, but also didn't find the Wikipedia article to be particularly biased.
I dont think most disagrees on this. As I said, I'm not interested in it at all, even if it did work. The science however is not saying it's pseduoscience. It's saying that the Qi and meridians and that sort of stuff is wrong. Whereas the actual needles are scientifically based as providing pain relief in a small and short term effect.
It's a complex topic that doesn't have good conclusions and I chose it because I knew it would show their ideological bias. There's absolutely no reason to call it qwackery when it's not a settled subject. Perhaps even finish defining what it is before going on the attack.
>Anyway, I thought the Grokipedia article was quite good, but also didn't find the Wikipedia article to be particularly biased.
That's completely fair to come to the conclusion. My guess would be that you tend to also align with the ideology that wiki is written for.
This is the basically the same evidence that says if I set you on fire you'll stop complaining about a cough, right?
> qwackery
Quackery has a 'u'. Maybe you need Grammarly.
> Which I dont know if you know, but tylenol is extremely ineffective for pain relief.
Try not to source all your opinions from the guy who suggested people drink bleach.
You seem to be conflating the concepts acupuncture and needling as well as the concepts of science and efficacy. Qi and Meridians are a part of acupuncture and it is entirely fair to point at that these systems are unscientific. The Grokipedia entry certainly considers qi and meridians to be parts of acupuncture.
Also, for something to be scientific, it has to be based on scientific methods. If acupuncture wants to be a science, it needs to discard all the baseless qi, meridians, and yin-yang explanations and there needs to be more widespread and rigorous investigation of the therapies.
I am an avid yoga practitioner (I do yoga 4 or 5 days a week) and I think it has all kinds of health benefits. That doesn't mean that yoga is "scientific." Indeed, if someone described yoga as pseudoscience I would probably agree (though it varies a lot between studios), because it is not uncommon for teachers to go off on unscientific explanatory tangents involving "chakra," "energy," "detoxification" and so on. Is yoga beneficial by various benchmarks? Yes. Is it based on and further developed by scientific inquiry? Not so much.
So it seems to me like you've misinterpreted a sentence in the wikipedia article. It is actually stating something like: "the acupuncture system is unscientific." You've interpreted it to mean something like: "needling therapy is ineffective." And from that misinterpretation, you've drawn lots of invalid conclusions.
I'm not yet decided on StackOverflow. I won't bother posting there, since every question there nowadays is flagged as offtopic. But I will prefer a stackoverflow answer from a living being, direct and on topic, rather than anything from all those GPTs.
Without those sources Wikipedia would have relatively little value, except to quote and cite to web pages
In many (most) fieds, web pages are not a substitute for scientific journals or books from academic publishers
marcellus23•8h ago
As far as this particular article goes, it just comes off as kind of cringeworthy to me. This is a style of internet humor that went out of fashion about 10 years ago.
btilly•8h ago
zozbot234•7h ago
Keeping volunteers editors around is also a harder problem today than it was a decade ago or so, as purely passive consumption use of the Internet has exploded and overtaken the former model of a largely volunteer-run network. Wikipedia is just about managing it today with its current resources; if it had more, it could do better and launch a greater amount of technically compelling projects that would ultimately further its mission. (Already today, Wikidata, one of the more recently-created projects, is getting more edits over time than the largest Wikipedia and acting as a much-needed "hub" of the Semantic Web and Linked Data, which sees much use by the largest tech companies.)
mapontosevenths•7h ago
You know what else has happened in the last 10 years? People got stupid.
Between 2017 and 2023, the percentage of U.S. adults at the lowest levels of illiteracy increased from 19% to 28%. Some studies show that the US's peak literacy was around 2015 and has been decreasing ever since.
unethical_ban•7h ago
mapontosevenths•7h ago
https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/08/02/us-literacy-rate/
georgefrowny•7h ago
Perhaps it also includes people who can read other languages, but not very well in English.
marcellus23•7h ago
mapontosevenths•7h ago
marcellus23•7h ago
radley•7h ago
That's because reality trumped satire.
qingcharles•5h ago