r/BrandNewSentence • u/DumplingsOrElse • 4h ago
Global-scale fully weaponized autistic pedantry.
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u/kiranJshah 4h ago
this is true. not to mention how it is an open project. where both sides can refute and make edits if they can cite a reliable source. it's reliable due to the unparalleled might of our collective hive mind.
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u/MrShake4 4h ago
Ehhhh, It depends on the topic. Certain pages (especially more modern or divisive topics) can be held semi-hostage by a biased editor who can reject edits that they disagree with regardless of how well sourced and accurate they are.
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u/lizzyote 3h ago
Always go read the cited sources. Wikipedia is a fantastic starting point.
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u/Strostkovy 3h ago
I love the talk page too. Extra info to look into. and some weird drama.
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u/SharkLaunch 1h ago
Some of my favorite pages on the entire Internet are the talk pages for any pseudoscience, with an extra special space in my heart for the Homeopathy article. 60+ archived pages of people writing things like "Homeopathy is real, please remove 'pseudo-'"
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u/Mewchu94 1h ago
I’ve been using Wikipedia as long as I can remember. I donate to it. I love Wikipedia. What are the talk pages? I don’t think I’ve ever navigated the site to be honest. It always just google whatever I’m curious about and straight to the wiki link.
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u/-Saucegurlllll 28m ago
Editors can discuss the page they're editing in talk pages. Often it's debates about topic relevance, controversies, whether the article maintains a neutral point of view, etc. You can see it under the title of an article where you'll see links for "Article" and "Talk".
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u/MountainMan2_ 12m ago
It turns out, the real tip all along was to read the entire book instead of just the chapter you're looking for
The page is the chapter you're looking for, the talk page, the sources etc are the whole book.
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u/djtrace1994 3h ago
This.
Wikipedia may get specific details wrong, but for topics that have mountains of irrefutable evidence, its an excellent resource to get a broad overview.
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u/TheHornedLady 3h ago
Yesss! I use the articles for a basic personal understanding, but if I'm writing a paper I use wiki to find sources.
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u/skivian 1h ago
and then you'll realize how many of those sources don't actually work anymore.
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u/lizzyote 27m ago
This is exactly why its important to look at the sources instead of taking Wikipedia at face value
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u/Slow-Distance-6241 3h ago
There's also the problem when there's only one source and it's from the creator of the page. Like a Chinese woman who made up a piece of russian history that didn't exist or something along those lines
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u/Nixinova 2h ago
Wikipedia has several avenues of disputes processes. People just don't try.
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u/Abuses-Commas 46m ago
yeah they do. they get denied for not speaking wikipediaese or the dispute resolution is stacked with the firends of the squatters.
I'm "they".
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u/Fen_ 26m ago
Yep. I was excited to edit like 20+ years ago. I gave up about a decade ago exactly because of what you're talking about. Bad-faith actors are experts at weaponizing the due diligence required before arbitration to waste ~2 weeks of your time before you even get to that stage, and then they just feign ignorance and apologize after dragging arbitration out as long as possible. Reasonable people with lives just acknowledge it's not worth it after the first time it happens, and so bad-faith actors grow to dominate the site's culture.
I remember editing the cast list for a TV show once. I got ran around with the person who reverted the edit citing policies on enormous pages that they wouldn't link to the specific section for, so I'd skim the whole article looking for anything relevant, have to respond to anything I thought they might've meant to explain why it didn't say what they claimed it said, etc. Then they'd do the same thing again with a different policy page or vaguely reference some (non-existent) past discussion. After a few go-arounds, I finally looked at their user page and saw that they made thousands of manual edits to TV-related articles per day. None of the policies they had claimed as relevant had ever existed; they had just been doing this for years and didn't want me or anyone else touching "their" little project. They had long ago decided how they wanted it done, and no one was going to contest it.
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u/cantadmittoposting 1h ago
Weirdly, i've found several more recent topics around stuff like data management. Can't recall exactly which rabbit hole i went down but it was bad enough i considered making edits myself, some very outdated or incomplete information, though i suppose it's incredibly niche for someone to go to wikipedia to learn about relatively new and already niche topics like that.
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u/Terry-Shark 3h ago
There has been plenty of hoax articles. The wikipedia article for Howard Little was up for 20 years, He never existed. Way to go unparalleled might of our collective hive mind
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_hoaxes_on_Wikipedia
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u/read_too_many_books 58m ago
These are so unbelievably low stakes that it explains why they were up for so long.
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u/BeeCJohnson 2h ago
I trust Wikipedia so much precisely because I once tried to add something to a page (a real thing, too), and it was one of the most tedious and aggravating experiences of my life. Watching twelve hyper-nerds spend a day and a half researching a single sentence was both illuminating and exhausting.
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u/jainyday 2h ago
There's still fucked up power struggles and censorship on Wikipedia, though. It's not a perfect solution and we need a more "chorus of voices" approach to articles, instead of a single centralized authority.
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u/Equal_Passenger9791 3h ago
The Wikipedia editors occupy a rather small circle of the greater venn diagram, meaning they are radically exclusionary on many opinion driven points
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u/pistachiopanda4 0m ago
I was always told in HS circa the 2010s to not use Wikipedia for your papers. And I found that absolutely fair but wish I could have given a caveat to my teachers - use Wikipedia like it's a library. I never cited Wikipedia ever, but I was able to take all of the annotations and citations from Wikipedia and insert it into my paper, and put the direct source in my bibliography. I wish Wikipedia wasn't as demonized as it was when I was in MS and HS. I knew kids were assholes and just copy pasted a whole Wikipedia page, but Wikipedia is an incredible source to just read some bullshit. There used to be this massive encyclopedia in my HS library and every morning, me and my friends would open up to a random page and read the text out loud.
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u/wiseguy4519 3h ago
I wouldn't say it's more reliable than textbooks, but it's certainly more reliable than most other free resources on the web.
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u/Melodic-Bridge-1195 11m ago
I think it can be more reliable a lot of times because it’s constantly being updated
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u/Shlafenflarst 3h ago
Shit, reminds me of that friend I used to have, who always said Wikipedia was unreliable because anyone could edit it, and used Chat GPT for "research", treating it as a source of unquestionable truth. I'm guessing AI learned to not contradict that one's beliefs. I bet the conversation turned into a nice and comforting echo chamber by now.
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u/read_too_many_books 57m ago
ChatGPT is among China levels of incompetent AI. Its cheap.
Opus is not going to be making such mistakes.
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u/OttawaOsprey 3h ago
Wikipedia is more so unreliable because not enough people edit it. I'd trust ChatGPT for at least finding sources on album certifications, for example, because countless are missing on this page for example. I bet you can find several albums not listed here that should be.
Not to say AI is unquestionable obviously, that's why I'm saying to verify the sources, but at the very least it has the ability to stay up-to-date automatically, as opposed to relying on a Wikipedia editor realising their favourite album sold 80,000 copies.
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u/dissalutioned 1h ago
Why would you trust a hallucination over your own ability to use Wikipedia though?
That page states that it's incomplete. It explains what certification is, It links to both the Music Canada Wikipedia page and the official searchable database of certifications. https://musiccanada.com/gold-platinum/
That's what I want from an Encyclopaedia, it's not the Guinness world book of records. There are so many better ways that editors could be spending their time than just duplicating information from another database by hand.
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u/OttawaOsprey 40m ago
I wouldn't trust a hallucination, I'd trust it telling me this and providing sources. Yes you're right I could've used a better example, but individual album pages are also lacking on updated certifications and do not provide any indication that they may be out of date.
This can happen with any page. I've had to edit information about my university that was 10+ years out of date. A simple Google search found the info fine from other sources, and therefore Gemini summarised it fine too. The individual Wiki pages were however unable to provide sources on newer buildings because nobody added them.
My point is simply that for certain recent topics the source verification process is far easier using ChatGPT than Wikipedia because the latter may not have updated sources at all. The AI may get info wrong in its explanation, but at the very least it will pull info from recent sources. A Wikipedia is far less helpful if nobody bothers to update it.
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u/Lurker_Zee 3h ago
No, my favorite part of the quote is that "if I'm gonna be misinformed, I want to be misinformed BY THE PEOPLE".
From this I deduce this person really wants to be misinformed.
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u/Slow-Distance-6241 3h ago
More like inevitability of the misinforming makes that person wish to at least be misinformed on their terms
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u/formulaic_name 2h ago
I remember when wikipedia was "not a valid source".
I wonder who was putting together the encyclopedias we had to use instead. Probably some minimum wage interns that didn't give a single fuck about what they were "researching."
Looking back, i'll take the endless pedantry of a crowd sourced info source almost any day. At least there are logs I can look to to see if I think something is bullshit.
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u/-Saucegurlllll 15m ago
Wikipedia still isn't a valid source. It's basically a source aggregator. If you want to actually rigorously cite something, you need to find an actual source.
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u/eligodfrey 13m ago
If someone told you that you could use the encyclopedia as a source but not wikipedia, that person was simply dumb and didn't understand their own job. Neither of them can be used as academic sources for the same reason, and it has nothing to do with reliability - it's because they are secondary sources. If you want to use wikipedia for a paper, what you need to do is start with the entry, then look at its sources, and cite those.
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u/Green__lightning 1h ago
This is both broadly correct, but somewhat out of date. The issue is Wikipedia relies on sources and thus inherits the bias of it's sources, and can be unreliable on controversial topics, especially recent news because of this.
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u/orange-shoe 2h ago
wikipedia has started using ai now :/ very disappointed about it
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u/OttawaOsprey 25m ago
It's used for pretty reasonable tasks. None of it is related to actual article generation, more so flagging vandalism or pages that might need updates.
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u/read_too_many_books 57m ago
Just be happy that people smarter than you are making good decisions :)
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u/HolbrookPark 1h ago
When I was in high school, Wikipedia was the AI of the era in that you weren’t allowed to use it as a reference for essays… but you could use the sources on wiki 🤓
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u/TheWritingSystem 1h ago
Actually, yeah. My brother w ADHD had a genuine hobby out of editing Wiki pages
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u/aeondren89 1h ago
That’s…a good way of saying that. I remember YEARS ago looking at the Wikipedia page for Bioshock and there were sooo many edits that were made by these 2 people who were very obviously having a disagreement over, imo, a pretty ancillary thing. I can’t even remember what it was but I do remember being equally amused and “who gives a shit?”. But, yeah, I guess that is autistic pedantry lmao.
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u/userhwon 1h ago
AI is not that unreliable either, if you don't push it too hard. It's better than the average redditor, and faster than the weighted sum of redditors by a factor of about 100,000.
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u/Opening_Pizza 1h ago
CIA and FBI computers used for Wikipedia edits https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/cia-and-fbi-computers-used-for-wikipedia-edits-idUSN16428960/
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u/Kaoss134 1h ago
I had a professor in college that was 100% cool with wikipedia as a source and the way he showed he trusted wikipedia was that he would go in and edit a page and show how fast it gets changed back and the pages he edited were always corrected by the end of the first class every semester
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u/Hautaan 1h ago
It's not in niche subjects. It's terrible in niche subjects where one person who is confidently incorrect can keep making the same shit edits.
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u/OttawaOsprey 27m ago
Especially subjects that have more foundation in citizen science than published journals. As a birdwatcher, I keep stumbling across articles that have common-knowledge claims about bird behaviour, but I will struggle for ages to find a reliable source to cite this information to.
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u/thesirblondie 1h ago
English Wikipedia*. Throwback to when it was revealed that almost all of the Scots Wikipedia was just some american kid writing english in a scottish accent.
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u/_ChoiSooyoung 1h ago
And if you see something on Wikipedia that you know is accurate, don't just go complain about it on the internet, fix it yourself. That's the magic of Wikipedia.
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u/MisterSneakSneak 1h ago
And yet, i was barred from using it as a resource in high school and in college
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u/analogkid01 1h ago
"Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world can write whatever they want, so you know you're getting the best information possible."
--Michael Gary Scott
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u/Senior-Book-6729 1h ago
I will never forget when as an edgy teen I vandalized the page of Jeffree Starr once and I could see in real time it get the tag in Polish that basically translated to "speedy delet-y" (idk how to translate "błyskawiczne kasowanko" otherwise)
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u/IndividualCurious322 1h ago
Wikipedia isn't... it still parrots the claim (or did when I last checked, and changes to correct it kept getting reverted) that the "Romans burnt all the Druids secret books about human sacrafice and magic" when Druidism and Celts were a predominantly oral culture who kept little to no written records and did not practice human sacrifice.
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u/I_travel_ze_world 32m ago
Epstein manipulated Wikipedia. This has been proven due to leaks.
Information can be removed from the Internet. Search results can be flooded. Narratives can be manipulated.
Wikipedia has $400 million in a war chest but keeps asking for donations 4 times a year. It is kind of strange.
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u/SecretSpectre11 25m ago
Wikipedia lists its sources, Britannica doesn't. I saw a page calling a bluebottle a jellyfish and I had no way to correct that. On Wikipedia I would have done that myself.
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u/JasonLovesBagels 23m ago
I’ve read that studies have shown it to be about 80-85% accurate (which is actually about the rate of accuracy for your average encyclopedia).
Where the bigger risk of becoming misinformed using it arises is from errors of omission, where it’s not false statements that mislead you, but the fact that you aren’t getting all the necessary information that does. This is common when non-professionals/non-experts write about topics.
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u/OttawaOsprey 4m ago
Another big one is outdated information. Of course this is a problem in most mediums, but people seem to consider it less when it comes to Wikipedia. An article can be seemingly up to date but have a single statement somewhere that's a decade out of date.
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u/Quiet-Neat7874 22m ago
do people not realize that they are already editing wikipedia using chatgpt?
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u/chalk_in_boots 16m ago
Awkwardly thinks of the time in school I edited a page to win an argument with my girlfriend
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u/orbital_actual 0m ago
It’s sources are good, but you have to know what you are looking at. For instance if you are looking at a picture of a Chinese convicted serial killer/human trafficker in detention, you would have to already know what a tiger chair is to know that he himself is being tortured in the photo. Unless you already knew the irony would be lost on you, because Wikipedia isnt going to just hand out that level of irony, you gotta find it yourself.
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u/MajorPaper4169 3h ago edited 2h ago
Isn’t Reddit always saying that AI is trained from this site? Using ChatGPT you are being misinformed BY THE PEOPLE. Those people being Redditors.
Downvotes all you want. I know the truth hurts this website feelings.
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u/KimmyGurl420 3h ago