Comment on i hate ai i hate ai i hate ai

• Zachariah@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  I think it was before 2010, I saw an article that said Wikipedia was already more accurate than traditional encyclopedias.

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  • OozingPositron@feddit.cl ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    I suppose you don’t need to buy a whole 5 kg of Wikipedia each year to keep up with the latest updates.

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• Dave@lemmy.nz ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  It pretty much always was?

  It’s a tertiary source, so not appropriate for citing in your essays, but that isn’t a comment on the accuracy.

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  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    There’s a wide number of critiques in how Wikipedia aggregates, edits, and presents information that isn’t worth going into here.

    I think what has become remarkable is the number of failed attempts to outcompete Wikipedia, corrupt it’s contents, or poison people into not using/trusting it.

    Like, it’s less that Jimmy Wales landed on the secret sauce his first try and more that nobody (in any Western nation anyway) seems capable of marshalling the resources or labor necessary to cobble together a project that’s functioned half as well over as long a time period.

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  • Truscape@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Especially considering the sources are always listed at the end of the article and most include internet archive links.

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    • kuberoot@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Are supposed to, and generally are, but there is a risk of somebody making unsourced changes and you seeing the article before it’s caught. Not a big deal for popular articles, but there are a lot of niche topics.

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    • NuclearDolphin@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Tons of cited links are utter bunk, just in ways that don’t blatantly violate Wikipedia’s guidelines. So many references to slop (in the pre-AI sense) books written by people with no real subject matter authority. Actually looking at the sources section makes it a lot more apparent how flawed Wikipedia is for anything that is not cut and dry.

      More websites should archive their linked content. Great practice in general.

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• KaRunChiy@fedia.io ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  I mean, you have an unlimited amount of contributors from academic and hyper-fixated autistic backgrounds, so at some point it has to be accurate from just the massive number of eyes looking over it

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  • restingOface@quokk.au ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    The hypothetical issue is that those eyes cannot be on every single update at all times. Pages tend to get fixed quickly, but it’s not perfect. At any point that you go to read an article, there is a chance that the article had been defaced recently with misinformation and one of those benevolent eyes has just not gotten around to fixing it yet. Nowadays, with all the automated systems in place, it is a fairly rare likelihood that something like that would happen, but it’s still possible.

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    • nickhammes@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Wikipedians are terrifyingly fast at getting out some updates. If someone dies, their article moves to the past tense often within 10 minutes of their death being known, assuming they were at all prominent.

      You should always be a bit skeptical, sometimes really arcane subjects’ articles are written by one of the handful of people who understand them, sometimes they’re very subtly wrong but not prominent enough to get the right attention. If something seems off, Wikipedia has tools like the Talk page, and looking at Edit history, that can allow you to glean information in-platform about what might be happening. Edit wars, vandalism, disagreements among editors, maybe a negotiated agreement about a way to represent something controversial, all can become clearer by looking at those resources. You can also check its sources, to see if they agree with what felt off to you, or if there isn’t a good source on that claim.

      It’s not perfect, any system can fail, but at least it has reasonable tools to figure out why it says what it says, and dig further.

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  • BewareOfIdiot@nord.pub ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    “anyone can write anything they want, so you know you’re getting the best possible information” - Michael “World’s best boss” Scott

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• Rampsquatch@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Wikipedia isn’t a source, but Wikipedia’s source might be worth checking. Any line on Wikipedia that doesn’t have a citation is as good as making it up yourself, and some of their citations aren’t much better.

  But checking sources am is hard, so just make shit up and feign superiority like John Internet intended when he made the internet.

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