What if in fact a large proportion of articles were bot-written, but only the unverifiable ones were bad enough to be detected?
But it looks like Pangram is a text classifying NN trained using a technique where they get a human to write a body of text on a subject, and then get various LLMs to write a body of text on the same subject, which strikes me as a good way to approach the problem. Not that I'm in anyway qualified to properly understand ML.
More details here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.14873
Its not even unique to Wikipedia. Its really not difficult to find very misleading statements cited through a citation that doesn't even support the claim when you check the original.
From https://grokipedia.com/page/Spain#terrain-and-landforms > Spain's peninsular terrain is dominated by the Meseta Central, a vast interior plateau covering about two-thirds of the country's land area, with elevations ranging from 610 to 760 meters and averaging around 660 meters
Segovia is at 1.000 meters, and so is most of the top half of the "Meseta". https://en-gb.topographic-map.com/map-763q/Spain/?center=41....
I still stand on not trusting any of what AI spits out, be it code or text. And it takes me usually longer to check that everything is ok than doing it myself, but my brain is enticed by the "effort shortcut" that AI promised.
The nice thing about grokipedia is that if you have counter examples like that you can provide it as evidence to change it and it will rewrite the article to be more clear.
Meseta Central mean central tableland. Segovia is on the edge of the mountain range that surrounds that tableland, but often referred to as part of it. This is fuzzy though.
Wikipedia says: The Meseta Central (lit. 'central tableland', sometimes referred to in English as Inner Plateau) is one of the basic geographical units of the Iberian Peninsula. It consists of a plateau covering a large part of the latter's interior.[1]
Looking at the map you linked the flat part is between 610 to 760 meters.
Finally, when speaking about the Iberian Peninsula Wikipedia itself includes this:
> "About three quarters of that rough octagon is the Meseta Central, a vast plateau ranging from 610 to 760 m in altitude."[2]
Encyclopedia Britannica (the website not the printed book) is the main competitor to Wikipedia and gets an order of magnitude more traffic than grokipedia. Right now grokipedia is the new kid on the block. It has yet to be seen if its just a novelty or if it has staying power but either way it still has a ways to go before its Wikipedia's primary competitor.
This has been a rampant problem on Wikipedia always. I can't seem to find any indicator that this has increased recently? Because they're only even investigating articles flagged as potentially AI. So what's the control baseline rate here?
Applying correct citations is actually really hard work, even when you know the material thoroughly. I just assume people write stuff they know from their field, then mostly look to add the minimum number of plausible citations after the fact, and then most people never check them, and everyone seems to just accept it's better than nothing. But I also suppose it depends on how niche the page is, and which field it's in.
[1]: https://changelog.com/podcast/668#transcript-265
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Eugen_Rochko&diff...
> Applying correct citations is actually really hard work, even when you know the material thoroughly.
Why do you find it hard? Scholarly references can be sources for fundamental claims, review articles are a big help too.
Also, I tend to add things to Wikipedia or other wikis when I come across something valuable rather than writing something and then trying to find a source (which also is problematic for other reasons). A good thing about crowd-sourcing is that you don't have to write the article all yourself or all at once; it can be very iterative and therefore efficient.
It's more like, a lot of stuff in Wikipedia articles is somewhat "general" knowledge in a given field, where it's not always exactly obvious how to cite it, because it's not something any specific person gets credit for "inventing". Like, if there's a particular theorem then sure you cite who came up with it, or the main graduate-level textbook it's taught in. But often it's just a particular technique or fact that just kind of "exists" in tons of places but there's no obvious single place to cite it from.
So it actually takes some work to find a good reference. Like you say, review articles can be a good source, survey articles or books. But it can take a surprising amount of effort to track down a place that actually says the exact thing. I literally just last week was helping a professor (leader in their field!) try to find a citation during peer review for their paper for an "obvious fact" in the field, that was in their introduction section. It was actually really challenging, like trying to produce a citation for "the sky is blue".
I remember, years ago, creating a Wikipedia article for a particular type of food in a particular country. You can buy it at literally every supermarket there. How the heck do you cite the food and facts about it? It just... is. Like... websites for manufacturers of the food aren't really citations. But nobody's describing the food in academic survey articles either. You're not going to link to Allrecipes. What do you do? It's not always obvious.
It's a big blind spot among the editors as well. When this problem was brought up here in the past, with people saying that claims on Wikipedia shouldn't be believed unless people verify the sources themselves, several Wikipedia editors came in and said this wasn't a problem and Wikipedia was trustworthy.
It's hard to see it getting fixed when so many don't see it as an issue. And framing it as a non-issue misleads users about the accuracy of the site.
Hope that helps you understand.
This happens a lot on Wikipedia. I'm not sure why, but it does and you can see its traces through the Internet as people post the mistaken information around.
One that took me a little work to fix was pointed out by someone on Twitter: https://x.com/Almost_Sure/status/1901112689138536903
When I found the source, the twitter poster was correct! Someone had decided to translate "A hundred years ago, people would have considered this an outrage. But now..." as "this function is an outrage" which honestly is ironically an outrageous translation. What the hell dude.
But it takes a lot of work to clean up stuff like that! https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Weierstrass_funct...
I had to go find the actual source (not the other 'sources' that repeated off Wikipedia or each other) and then make sure it was correct before dealing with it. A lie can travel halfway around the world...
It seems to deflect, even gaslight TFA.
> For most of the articles Pangram flagged as written by GenAI, nearly every cited sentence in the article failed verification.
So why deflect that into convenient other pedantry (surely not under the guise tech forums often do so)?
WSo why the discomfort for part of HN at an assertion AI is being used for nefarious purposes and creation of alternate 'truths'?
ColinWright•7h ago
Far more insidious, however, was something else we discovered:
More than two-thirds of these articles failed verification.
That means the article contained a plausible-sounding sentence, cited to a real, relevant-sounding source. But when you read the source it’s cited to, the information on Wikipedia does not exist in that specific source. When a claim fails verification, it’s impossible to tell whether the information is true or not. For most of the articles Pangram flagged as written by GenAI, nearly every cited sentence in the article failed verification.
dang•6h ago
I agree, that's interesting, and you've aptly expressed it in your comment here.
the_fall•5h ago
I'm not saying that AI isn't making it worse, but bad-faith editing is commonplace when it comes to hot-button topics.
mjburgess•5h ago
mmooss•4h ago
I think accepting that gets us to the starting line. Then we need to apply a lot of critical thought to sometimes difficult judgments.
IMHO quality newspapers do an excellent job - generally better than any other category of source on current affairs, but far from perfect. I remember a recent article for which they intervied over 100 people, got ahold of secret documents, read thousands of pages, consulted experts .... That's not a blog post or Twitter take, or even a HN comment :), but we still need to examine it critically to find the value and the flaws.
abacadaba•3h ago
citation needed
tbossanova•2h ago
the_fall•4h ago
snigsnog•4h ago
chr15m•2h ago
Thank you for publishing this work. Very useful reminder to verify sources ourselves!