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Credulous coverage of AI slop on Wikipedia (awful.systems)
submitted 1 month ago by blakestacey@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
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Everybody loves Wikipedia, the surprisingly serious encyclopedia and the last gasp of Old Internet idealism!

(90 seconds later)

We regret to inform you that people write credulous shit about "AI" on Wikipedia as if that is morally OK.

Both of these are somewhat less bad than they were when I first noticed them, but they're still pretty bad. I am puzzled at how the latter even exists. I had thought that there were rules against just making a whole page about a neologism, but either I'm wrong about that or the "rules" aren't enforced very strongly.

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[-] self@awful.systems 15 points 1 month ago

no thx, nobody came here for you to assign them tedious homework

[-] BussyGyatt@feddit.org 8 points 1 month ago

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.

[-] blakestacey@awful.systems 24 points 1 month ago

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.

[-] xgranade 6 points 1 month ago

acronym-spouting rules lawyers

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!

[-] dgerard@awful.systems 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

you realise i'm gonna ask for links to your example of this being misapplied here

[-] xgranade 3 points 1 month ago

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.

[-] flaviat@awful.systems 7 points 1 month ago

So perhaps one alternative way to estimate their quality is to check the number of citations, many have more than 100 citations, which is a sign of quality

Andrew Wakefield's 1998 paper has 457 citations on PubMed

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this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2025
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