Wikipedia has a new initiative called WikiProject AI Cleanup. It is a task force of volunteers currently combing through Wikipedia articles, editing or removing false information that appears to have been posted by people using generative AI.

  • dependencyinjection@discuss.tchncs.de
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    2 months ago

    People didn’t allow you to use it as a source in school because those rules were made by people that just didn’t understand technology.

    As for it now being filled with shit, that’s just ignorant. It’s not like they accept edits and publish them from anybody that submits one, they’re reviewed and stuff that is well known or not up for debate is as accurate as can be.

    How does it differ from Encarta 98 which we used in school? Or any encyclopaedia?

    • notceps [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      2 months ago

      Wikipedia has some good pages and some horrifically bad pages, we all know the one where some american teen made all the scots pages even though he literally didn’t speak a word of scots but there’s tons of other pages that are questionable at best and wrong at worst. The main contributors after decades are still like 80% men and most of them are in a STEM field which again shows in pages that go outside of that narrow niche. I at one point edited some wiki pages myself and you’ll literally have some guy do a fucking edit war because he thinks Somatotypes are real and you have to fight for months because you don’t have the clout of a math nerd.

      And this isn’t even looking at the serious Nazi problem wiki has.

      Wikipedia had decades to get their act together, they didn’t I doubt they will anytime in the future because of how their whole shitty system works.

    • Aatube@kbin.melroy.org
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      2 months ago

      As an editor, Wikipedia is a good source, but you should not be citing it. Cite what Wikipedia cites.

      Pending changes (the review you mean) is a form of protection placed on vandalized pages. Most vandalism is reverted by editors who patrol the recent changes.

    • GenderIsOpSec [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      2 months ago

      It wasnt allowed to be used in school because everyone can edit, and thus the sources can be “It came to me in a dream.”

      All encyclopedias can be bad if you cannot recognize the bias that is inherit in everything that was made to contain knowledge. Natopedia is filled with liberal freaks sitting on their little pages like their personal fiefdoms they do not allow edits, no matter how western your source is, and use sources by historians widely disparaged or they leave things out to form a narrative that suits them.

      In early November 2015, you will find K.e.coffman in “20 July plot,” an article about the failed plan by German officers to assassinate Hitler. A sentence has jumped out at her. It says that some of the conspirators came to see the plot as “a grand, if futile gesture” that would save “the honour of themselves, their families, the army and Germany.” The claim isn’t supported by any sources. It’s conjecture, hearsay. And to her it seems strangely flattering.

      Coffman navigates over to the Wikipedia article about one of the conspirators—Arthur Nebe, a high-ranking member of the SS. Apart from his role in the plot, Nebe’s main claim to notability is that he came up with the idea of turning vans into mobile gas chambers by piping in exhaust fumes. The article acknowledges both of these facts, along with the detail that Nebe tested his system on the mentally ill. But it also says that he worked to “reduce the atrocities committed,” going so far as to give his bloodthirsty superiors inflated death totals.

      Coffman will recall that she feels “totally disoriented.” She cannot believe that an innovator in mass murder would have tried to protect the Jews and other supposed subhumans his troops rounded up. She checks the footnotes. The claim is attributed to War of Extermination, a compendium of academic essays originally published in 1995.

      Coffman knows the book is legit, because she happens to have a copy on loan from the library. When she goes to the cited page, she finds a paragraph that appears to confirm all the Wikipedia article’s wild claims. But then she reads the first sentence of the next paragraph: “This is, of course, nonsense.”

      from here