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Credulous coverage of AI slop on Wikipedia
(awful.systems)
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this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2025
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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The prompt engineering article has 61 sources. Why should it not exist? What’s your source for that?
If the vibe coding article violates the rules, nominate it for deletion and cite the rules then.
Please acquaint yourself with the definition of the word latter on your way to the egress.
OP says about “write credulous shit about ‘AI’” implying that both articles are non-credulous. The former article is thoroughly cited.
OP clearly doesn’t want either article to exist. I’m simply asking what’s the source that goes against the existing article and its citations.
no thx, nobody came here for you to assign them tedious homework
Its fine if you don't want to do the 'homework,' but op doesn't get to complain about the rules not being enforced on the notoriously democratic editable-by-anyone wikipedia and refuse to take up the trivial 'homework' of starting the rule violation procedure. The website is inherently a 'be the change you want to see in the world' platform.
Counterpoint: I get to complain about whatever I want.
I could write a lengthy comment about how a website that is nominally editable by "anyone" is in practice a walled garden of acronym-spouting rules lawyers who will crush dissent by a thousand duck nibbles. I could elaborate upon that observation with an analogy to Masto reply guys and FOSS culture at large.
Or I could ban you for fun. I haven't decided yet. I'm kind of giddy from eating a plate of vegan nacho fries and a box of Junior Mints.
hey now, my duck nibbling is thoroughly weaponised
Please do, I wanna see FOSS get raked over the coals
That's pretty much the response I got offering even extremely mild dissent from AI spam. Apparently, "WP:MNA" means you can just make shit up as long as industry blog posts rely on that wild fever dream being true, for instance. Handy!
you realise i'm gonna ask for links to your example of this being misapplied here
It's deep in the replies to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Prompt_engineering#Neutral_point_of_view. Thanks as well for reinstating the NPOV template, really bothers me that it was unilaterally deleted without any addressing of the problem.
Andrew Wakefield's 1998 paper has 457 citations on PubMed
there’s something fucking hilarious about you and your friend coming here to lecture us about how Wikipedia works, but explaining the joke to you is also going to be tedious as shit and I don’t have any vegan nacho fries or junior mints to improve my mood
The "trivial" procedure for suggesting that an article be deleted was evidently written by the kids who liked programming their parents' VCR.
Wikipedia rules make more sense when you understand they are entirely to keep the most pedantic nerds on earth from fighting
oh yeah, I’m waiting for David to wake up so he can read the words
and promptly explode, cause fielding deletion requests from people like our guests who don’t understand wikipedia’s rules but assume they’re, ah, trivial, is probably a fair-sized chunk of his workload
my lethal weapon is my WP:WTF
Calling for the obvious action in response to a complaint is not homework. It’s Wikipedia, it can be edited by anyone who is willing to deal with the process.
If you or OP doesn’t want to do it, someone else will - and they already have, it seems.
For posterity: English Wikipedia is deletionist, so your burden of proof is entirely backwards. I know this because I quit English WP over it; the sibling replies are from current editors who have fully internalized it. English WP's notability bar is very high and not moved by quantity of sources; it also has suffered from many cranks over the years, and we should not legitimize cranks merely because they publish on ArXiv.
i'm more frustrated that NPOV has been forced into secondary positions behind reliable sources. just because a reliable source has said something does not justify its inclusion in an article where its inclusion would disturb the NPOV.
This is, in fact, exactly what I pointed out. The former article is thoroughly cited, so it would be likely included.
The latter article is poorly cited and likely violates some rule, so it should be nominated for deletion (and it has been).
The number of sources isn't really the issue; many of those are industry advertisements, such as blog posts on product pages, for instance. Out of the few that are papers, almost all are written exclusively by industry research teams — while that doesn't on its own invalidate their results, it does mean that there's a strong financial interest in the non-consensus view (in particular, that LLMs can be "programmed"). The few papers that have been peer-reviewed have extreme methodological flaws, such that there's essentially almost no support for the article's bombastic and extreme non-consensus claims.