Hi, it's me, Wikipedia, and I am ready for your apology
mcsweeneys.netYes. I thought of Wikipedia as a forum for annoying socially inept nerds, who'd have millions of pages for pokemons, but delete pages for thing that exist on Earth. Now I have to remember those days with nostalgia.
I'm not yet decided on StackOverflow. I won't bother posting there, since every question there nowadays is flagged as offtopic. But I will prefer a stackoverflow answer from a living being, direct and on topic, rather than anything from all those GPTs.
I still find SO a valuable resource of already-answered questions, with the most useful almost always marked offtopic. It's almost like adding "offtopic" to a SO query finds better results.
Especially relevant today with the release of grokipedia
That references another article "Views of Elon Musk" ... Quite an unusual format, "views of [public figure]". I don't remember seeing anything quite like it on Wikipedia.
Seems there are a couple of pages like that, if you enter "views of" without hitting enter in the Wikipedia search bar, you get some suggestions. Seems there is similar pages for Kanye West, Richard Dawkins and some more. Many of the pages are redirects back to the main page of the person though, so seems they're maybe disappearing or exclusively used for people who are very outspoken about lots of different things.
They are largely used to put the Talk: flamewar in a box, I think, so they can separate out the mundane fact edits from the rest.
That's actually kind of neat, at least for us that don't care much of the political views of celebrities.
I think it makes sense for some politicians, too —- especially politicians who have an extensive life story otherwise.
Not least because it bumps the topic up one heading level, as it were, which means more possible uses of mediawiki formatting to break it up than if it were a section of another page.
Here's the Grokipedia submission (currently censored / flagged):
It seems a bit unfairly flagged. After all the first AI written encyclopedia seems a new and interesting thing.
Someone please enlighten me: what is the point of an AI-generated Wikipedia when we're all now using (Wikipedia-trained) AIs directly instead of Wikipedias?
It makes sense to people who don't know what an encyclopedia or an AI chatbot are, respectively.
It's ideal to poison the web with arbitrarily distorted texts that are a mix of facts and lies, and will be picked up by others, from AI to Zoomer school essay.
There is no point except for manipulation. Right now, you have to be pretty inept to think that a language AI could contribute anything valuable to an encyclopedia.
But maybe, this will change, the group of people who consider Chatbot output as insightful about the real world seems to be growing.
It's Conservapedia, authored by AI, and exists to present the world as seen through the eyes of Mr. Musk. The hope is that through AI it can be comprehensive enough to be useful and if enough people adopt it you can quietly put your thumb on the scale to make truth what you say it is.
Safe space for Musk. He's been upset about Wikipedia for years (I suspect because it refuses to buy into his headcanon that he founded Tesla.)
His own entry in grokpedia [0] says two conflicting things:
"Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 as CEO and chief engineer, Tesla in 2003 where he became CEO in 2008..."
and later on the same page,
"...the company [Tesla] had been founded in 2003 by engineers Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning with a focus on high-performance EVs."
Grok can't seem to keep its story straight.
It reduces a barrier to entry, so less knowledgeable people can access the same information without inputting a prompt and then corrections. Also a person using an LLM directly may accidentally produce a progressive/liberal result, which is not good. So while for now it seems Elonopedia is mostly automated, in the future I foresee that young energetic party members will vet the most popular articles, to follow the party line.
Grok trained on Wikipedia so it could generate a version of Wikipedia that reflected Musk's views that could then be used to train future versions of Grok.
newspeak
Generally the UX could be an advantage, the hypertext format of wikipedia and length is nicer when you want to go on a random knowledge walk compared to LLMs.
Regarding the Wikipedia trained Ouroboros models, you can argue that the Wikipedia training is mostly there to learn to summarize sources and translate, and once you have the original sources the LLM might do a better job than humans
So that new AI models can then be trained on the AI-generated Wikipedia.
From the wikipedia on grokipedia:
"Following the public launch of Grokipedia, it was criticised for publishing false information. Wired reported that "The new AI-powered Wikipedia competitor falsely claims that pornography worsened the AIDS epidemic and that social media may be fueling a rise in transgender people."
So, it's a way of Musk using AI to propagandize on a large scale.
Are these false claims? From Grokipedia:
> This marked the onset of what would become a devastating crisis disproportionately affecting gay male communities, where behaviors idealized in pornography—such as unprotected receptive anal intercourse and multiple anonymous partners—aligned directly with primary transmission routes, leading to rapid seroconversion rates.
This sounds plausible. Is it factually incorrect?
Yes, it is factually incorrect.
Now you have two unsubstantiated opinions contradicting each other.
Why not have the decency to respond with your real HN account, instead of making a new account just to post tedious sealioning?
[this is the point at which you swear up, down and sideways that you've never ever in your whole life had a HN account, this is your first account ever, how dare i, etc. etc. etc.]
Edit to answer your totally-asked-in-good-faith question: Causation != correlation.
It is a genuine question. If you don't want to engage in intellectual curiosity on this topic, please do not respond at all. Thank you.
social media may be fueling a rise in transgender people
So one part of the Musk empire is fueling a thing that another part of the Musk empire doesn't like.
Seems like the problem is in one hand, and the solution is in the other.
> Seems like the problem is in one hand, and the solution is in the other.
I think that's a common thread with what Musk does. On one hand, his companies rely on money from the US government, then with the other he's helping firing a lot of people in the government supposedly to save money.
On one hand, he's trying to run for AGI and manage a LLM company that use vast amount of resources. On the other hand he's trying to sell electric vehicles because vast amount of resources are being used.
I guess it kind of makes sense in some way, but also he could probably better help those efforts by just stopping doing the other thing, but that probably conflicts with his other more important goals.
His behavior only made sense to me after I realized his dynastic wealth came from apartheid-era mines.
Perhaps to muddy future corpora
I would really, really like to see the prompts used for this next to each article.
Since "The Algorithm" at Twitter was supposed to be open sourced, surely that wouldn't be controversial.
And I genuinely do find it absolutely fascinating and somewhat shocking how LLMs can follow such long and complex prompts and respond so well.
> The articles in Grokipedia indicate that they have undergone fact-checking by the Grok model.[3] Visitors to Grokipedia cannot make edits, though they can suggest edits via a pop-up form for reporting wrong information.[5] Musk positioned Grokipedia as an alternative to Wikipedia that would "purge out the propaganda" in the latter.[1] Articles have been described as manipulated to promote right-wing perspectives and Elon Musk's views,[4][7] medical misinformation,[7] and for removing content disfavored by Musk.[8][9] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grokipedia
Seems like a great platform, here's to hoping it costs a lot to run and doesn't influence too many humans to drink bleach.
oh...no.
I thought this was a joke, but I googled it and it's not.
It’s so good. I spent 2 hours reading articles on there last night and the consistency was excellent, although a little verbose at times.
It took me less than a minute on the site to run into factually wrong information, broken citations, etc. Cannot imagine rotting my brain with knowingly bad information for over 2 hours
I’ve run into the exact same set of issues on Wikipedia.
Did you fix them?
This is sometimes hard when the editors keep on reversing edits which attempt to fix those errors. It will be interesting to see how Grokipedia - a bad name, surely they can come up with something better - deals with this.
I often come across out-of-place or clearly ideologically driven content on Wikipedia and normally just leave this alone - I have better things to do with my limited time than to fight edit wars with activist editors. Having said that I did a number of experiments some 5 years ago with editing Wikipedia where I removed clearly ideologically driven sections out of articles where those sections really had no place. One of these experiments consisted of removing sections about ´queer politics and queer viewpoints' from articles about popular cartoon characters. These sections - often spanning several paragraphs - were inserted relatively recently into the articles and were nothing more than attempts to use those articles to push a 'queer' viewpoint on the subject matter and as such not relevant for a general purpose encyclopedia. I commented my edits with a reference to the NPOV rules. My edits were reversed without comment. I reversed the reversion with the remark to either explain the reversion of leave the edits in place and was reversed again, no comments. I reversed again with an invitation to discuss the edits on the Talk pages which was not accepted while my edits were reversed again. This continued for a while with different editors reversing my edits and accusations of vandalism. Looking through the 'contribs' section for the users responsible for adding the irrelevant content showed they were doing this to hundreds of articles. I just checked and noticed the same individuals are still actively adding their 'queer perspectives' to articles where such perspectives are not relevant for a general-purpose encyclopedia.
Do you happen to remember any of the articles where you performed this experiment? I ask because specifically around 5 years ago, I know there were a number of cartoons where the creators intentionally wrote characters with queer representation in mind (She-Ra is the first to come to mind). So, if the sections you were removing had been properly cited and relevant to the actual series, then the removal for being "nothing more than attempts to use those articles to push a 'queer' viewpoint on the subject matter" probably did not represent a neutral viewpoint.
Of course, this depends on you opening up your research to some peer review.
Correct. That's the main reason I dove into reading subjects I was already knowledgeable of to see how it did.
Suggesting that people being able to make mistakes means that there's no qualitative and quantitative difference in how AI makes mistakes is either disingenuous or stupid. I don't know which place you're coming from or what kind of gotcha you think you pulled, but it doesn't create a strong argument either way.
Maybe he meant that the information was consistently incorrect, which was entertaining..
Nevermind the Grok-ness of it, I can't seriously believe a thinking human being would spend 2 hours knowingly reading something written by AI.
It's for the intersection of people who want LLM summarization and people who want an assurance of confirmation of bias explicitly built in. It's not for thinking people.
"A machine which simulates thought for people who don't want to think" is an adequate summation of LLM-generated text.
I decided to read through a subject I already knew a lot about.
I'm unsurprised that a human being would glibly dismiss the utility of the most powerful new form of knowledge representation since the written word, since we are all deeply in the grip of motivated reasoning.
> the most powerful new form of knowledge representation since the written word
1. the LLM model is a representation of language, not knowledge. The two may be highly correlated, but they are probably not coterminant and they are certainly not equivalent.
2. the final "product" is still the written word
3. whether LLM's are or are not the most powerful new form of knowledge representation or not, their output is so consistently inconsistent in its accuracy that it makes that power difficult to utilize, at best.
No one is being glib here, this is a serious concern. Think about it, please. A human being choosing to spend hours of their time reading something produced by something that is an amorphous, unanswerable, unaccountable agglomeration of weights formed not by a human's lived experience, but by a for-profit company's selection of inputs and tuning. It's completely dystopian.
I checked it out based on this comment. It's funny how in some ways it feels like a lazy student-assignment copied from Wikipedia: the subheadings and the structure are exactly the same as the Wikipedia article on the topic, and sometimes it even leaves in the citation numbers as normal text like a careless copy paste.
However, it also seemed less eurocentric, mentioning non-Greek non-Roman side of origins of fields where relevant, when the corresponding Wikipedia article doesn't. Wikipedia is generally pretty bad at this, but I had expected "Grokipedia" to be worse, not better in this regard!
If I was rewriting Wikipedia pages with an LLM I'd maybe use all the different languages' Wikipedias as input.
Of course, it cribbed the best!
If it works, it works.
Yeah, but it doesn't work. It's full of inaccuracies.
Unsupervised Source of Truth(tm), what could possibly go wrong?
I don't understand what supervision you want. Worried about inaccuracies? Double check and use it in conjunction with other sources.
I want some supervision. Why is that hard for you to grasp?
There is supervision, just not community-based.
Just like Wikipedia?
With Wikipedia there is the talk page which will alert you to controversies about topics, as well as checking the citations. While Grokopedia has "citations" when I checked many of them didn't actually have anything to do with what they were supposed to be citing.
Wikipedia has 7 billion potential editors. Grokapedia explicitly says we can't edit it.
So, absolutely the opposite thing.
Can someone give me a deeper understanding of what this post means or the backstory behind it?
There's a website called Wikipedia that is a free online encyclopedia; a compendium of knowledge that can be freely viewed OR edited by anyone with an internet connection. Founded in 2001, it has been looked down upon by academics who believe that compiling and providing knowledge for free leads to cheating.
Over the past few years, ANOTHER new technology called Large Language Model, or LLM, has been invented. This new technology invents new sentences from whole cloth at the request of users. There are many LLM sites providing free responses to user queries. The ease with which users can get plausible answers to any question has led to complaints from the academic world that it is frequently used for cheating, supplanting the previously-favored free cheating technology known as Wikipedia.
Finally, there is an internet humor website known by the name "McSweeny's". As a humor website, sometimes it posts humorous articles written about current events.
This is one of those posts.
I never shat on Wikipedia. The closest thing to it was probably those sets of encyclopedias that seem to be so ubiquitous in middle class, split-level America. And I have little doubt that Wikipedia and its army of contributors outperformed those.
It happened a lot in acedemia. And there was good reason there too. Wikipedia is horrible for developing stories, for example.
The real key for rigorous use was to look at what was cited, not quote directly from wikipedia.
I believe the academics concern early on was a lack of confidence in the quality. First through the sciences then outside I think wikipedia showed sufficient quality to eventually be in the good books for academia.
Yeah, some people didn't like it because anyone could edit it, in contrast to books & journal articles anyone with a bit of money could publish.
You still shouldn't cite it, because it's not a primary source. That's the same with any encyclopedia.
As an early WP editor, I can relate ... the project caught -a lot- of crap back in the early days. This is a smug but accurate, simple recounting of that sordid tale, and the value that WP retains now that AI is around to cite it.
I don't edit much any more, but although it's not perfect, it's retinue of backup resources (including links to Wayback for those which died) remains invaluable.
I remember being told in school that we shouldn't use Wikipedia (not just for citations, but at all) because anyone can edit it. We were told to use other websites directly, or better yet: paper books.
I would get in trouble for "talking back" when I pointed out that anyone can make a website or write a book, too.
Ah, a teacher telling a student to get in line, or else. A tale as told as time.
Since we defunded education in my area, my wife left teaching behind. She says the LLMs will let students ask whatever questions they want, but they make poor educators.
McSweeney's is a satirical website, at the intellectual level the New Yorker cartoons aspire to, except that it's sometimes funny.
If you need context on why "Wikipedia" would write a smug letter taunting the world's experts and teachers on their predictions of it have aged, ... HN presumably has a limit on the text in a single post, so just read the entire intenet or something.
> so just read the entire intenet or something
Hey I have a great idea for an algorithm that can take all that information and using statistical... No wait nevermind.
It is satire. You don't need to know the writer to get it. McSweeney's publishes these type of pieces from time-to-time. Laugh or don't. I found this one amusing.
Wikipedia, a generation ago, was considered controversial. It is now more accepted as a legitimate encyclopedia and the criticisms appear quaint when compared to the post-truth atmosphere of our current media. The footnotes and the "citation needed" annotations are meant to mimic a Wikipedia article.
The donate button is a nice touch, from a time when web sites weren't afraid to put links to external sites. Wikipedia probably doesn't need your money, but it is, in my opinion, a solid organization providing an incredible resource to humanity. Though, as with all human enterprises, it has its flaws.
> It is now more accepted as a legitimate encyclopedia
To be fair, it is easily 10x better as a source than any encyclopedia, even disregarding the scope and quantity of entries.
I loved Encyclopedia Britannica, and probably read the set in its entirety as a kid (nonsequentially), but it was like learning biology from Disney specials. Wikipedia is often updated and corrected by multiple experts, and importantly includes biblio endnotes. The latter alone sets it far above mere encyclopedias.
I remember an early advertisement for EB, masquerading as a research article that compared EB and WP. They found that while WP contained a bit more articles, EB was a bit more accurate (in their totally unbiased sampling). They did not mention that WP was growing exponentially at the time, while EB was not, nor did they mention that WP was continuously updated with corrections, while EB was effectively never ever updated (users bought a static copy).
I learned much of what I know by reading the set of encyclopedias someone gave my family as a gift when I was born. By the time I really got to them there were a bit out of date.
What a lot of folks miss is that traditional encyclopedias ensured correctness by employing experts in various fields. Wikipedia often cites those same experts via academic papers, etc. They just don't pay those SME's money directly.
If anything, I feel that Wikipedia often has less bias as the financial motives aren't there to just publish something for the sake of a paycheck.
And more experts per topic.
I'll never forget EB's entry on "baby". It started with a lengthy paragraph that made a human baby sound like a horrifying, antisocial, psychotic parasite.
Yes, you feel obligated to reply with a joke about how accurate that is. Not the point.
The point is: the author was clearly a man, who didn't raise his own children, and it was unvetted by others.
I would love to see the article you're referencing. It sounds great.
Wikipedia does not conduct scientific research or fact-finding. It's only a publisher. It routinely sources citations from books, journals and other sources, many of them produced by members of the "global academic, scientfic ... community"
Without those sources Wikipedia would have relatively little value, except to quote and cite to web pages
In many (most) fieds, web pages are not a substitute for scientific journals or books from academic publishers
I don't see that any different from saying "bloggers have little value, except to quote and cite to web pages". Even if I agreed, could we both agree that that itself offers value?
Delivering acedemic results to laymen is in many ways more important than the research itself, given the landscape of social media.
This actually reads like it was written by one of those character LLMs
What is there to apologize for, what do you think LLMs use for cheating?
"Cheating" is not something LLMs do, LLMs are something a human could use for cheating. But what's your point?
Tell that to the guy whose wife cheated on him with an LLM
Not sure I have to, that makes as much sense as considering your wife using a vibrator as cheating.
>a violation of a couple's emotional or sexual exclusivity that commonly results in feelings of anger, sexual jealousy, and rivalry
Well, the shoe fits. You can say the boundaries are extremely unreasonable but it fits the definition.
I guess as a more realistic example: I have heard of couples break up over porn habits. Not a viable romantic rival, but one that seeded jealousy and rivalry regardless.
I'm continuing the satire. Did you read the article?
Yes. Cheating is not something LLMs do.
It is only what they are.
Funny article, though none of it would pass as a legitimate Wikipedia article because it does not cite CNN, CNBC, or any other Trustworthy™ news site included in the Wikipedia's totally neutral whiteli- I mean... allow-list.
I love Wikipedia, but Wikimedia does not need your donations at all, as much as its misleading ads try to convince you it's on the brink of death.
As far as this particular article goes, it just comes off as kind of cringeworthy to me. This is a style of internet humor that went out of fashion about 10 years ago.
Indeed, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C... is a worthwhile read on this. Wikimedia is on an internal expense growth spiral that won't stop until they max out on the willingness of others to donate.
Wikipedia is one of the highest-traffic Internet sites worldwide, and it's still being run on a comparatively shoestring budget. It's also an ongoing project, so the usual claim that technical hosting expenses are only a few percent of what's being spent on it overall is misguided. No one would care about hosting a dead encyclopedia
Keeping volunteers editors around is also a harder problem today than it was a decade ago or so, as purely passive consumption use of the Internet has exploded and overtaken the former model of a largely volunteer-run network. Wikipedia is just about managing it today with its current resources; if it had more, it could do better and launch a greater amount of technically compelling projects that would ultimately further its mission. (Already today, Wikidata, one of the more recently-created projects, is getting more edits over time than the largest Wikipedia and acting as a much-needed "hub" of the Semantic Web and Linked Data, which sees much use by the largest tech companies.)
> This is a style of internet humor that went out of fashion about 10 years ago.
That's because reality trumped satire.
The donations are voluntary. I donate money and articles because I've gained so much from having Wikipedia available to me. If they have a big war chest, that's fine, I'll help make it bigger so they don't need to stress about money. If they spend it on some wacky projects, then that's OK too, experimentation is important as well.
Indeed. I like how the website claims "McSweeney’s accepts no writing aided in any manner by AI."
Really hard to believe that a garbage “article” like this was produced by a human.
> This is a style of internet humor that went out of fashion about 10 years ago.
You know what else has happened in the last 10 years? People got stupid.
Between 2017 and 2023, the percentage of U.S. adults at the lowest levels of illiteracy increased from 19% to 28%. Some studies show that the US's peak literacy was around 2015 and has been decreasing ever since.
This article is not some intellectual thinkpiece that only the literati can comprehend. Trends change, humor evolves. If "shoop da whoop", rage comics, leetspeak, and motivational posters aren't funny anymore, it's not because people "got stupid".
I'm not talking about the Literati. Anything above the sixth grade level is no longer suitable for the majority of the population.
I assure you, the reason McSweeney's is no longer funny is not because the humor is too smart. "peer review deez nutz" does not require reading above the sixth grade level.
Except it is still funny. You just don't like it.
How? How do 28% of people not know how to read?
Fifty four percent of Americans now read below the sixth grade level, and the trend is getting worse rather than better.
It'll be below PIAAC level 1 or similar. Even below that level many people can read simple text and extract basic information.
Perhaps it also includes people who can read other languages, but not very well in English.
I bet now you’d kill for a senior thesis based on my free, multilingual, publicly cited, text-based articles, motherfucker
(see: https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/26/scots_wikipedia_fake/ ) (see also: that time the Scottish governmment used Scots wikipedia as a source)
Wasn't that an edge case, though? Not even done by a bad actor, just someone misguided? And it was discovered and quickly corrected, unlike what would happen on something owned by a massive FAANG-style corp.
I have been schooled many times on the failures of Wikipedia, why I shouldn't waste my time editing it, how the editors are toxic; but ultimately, I can't help but buy into the idea of a crowdsourced, centrally administrated, store of knowledge.
I wouldn't base critical decisions off of Wikipedia alone, but it sure helps me understand things in general.
I'm not sure how the actor's good intentions makes the information on the wiki accurate?> Not even done by a bad actor, just someone misguided?
As others have pointed out, it was certainly not "quickly" corrected. And to clarify on "corrected", about half the content on that wiki was simply deleted. A bunch of actual useful edits were definitely removed. And that didn't happen before the Scottish government used it as a source.> quickly corrected> And it was discovered and quickly corrected
It was definitely not quickly corrected. It was going on for years.
You've cherrypicked 0.0006% of Wikipedia... that has been corrected.
Or another way of saying it would be that I've "cherrypicked" literally the majority of Scots wikipedia.
The sneering and nihilist tone is very off putting. But not nearly as much as the boomer brained conception of the world's information model pre 2004, which was not nearly as good as those who invoke Murrow and Cronkite believe it was.
> The sneering and nihilist tone is very off putting
You don't seem to be familiar with McSweeney's Internet Tendency. Fair enough, it's not to everyone's taste and doesn't try to be.
I guess maybe the tone would be less noxious if the core coceit of the satire felt more legitimate. I mean, Wikipedia was kind of a shit show back in the day. It's had 20 years of maturation which is more what makes it useful today.
And yes, the media is full of blatant and bald faced lies but is that worse than the credulous and uncritical way the media basically endorsed the war in Iraq?
I get that it's a joke but the joke kinda only works if there's some truth behind it. And I just don't think there is here. I think people are lamenting old media now, not because the information sphere is genuinely worse today but because it was a comfort to have a consensus in public opinion regardless of how true that consensus was.
> "The tone is noxious and the joke doesn't work"
Thank you for your opinion, however I don't view it as anything more than that.
The few last times I went on Wikipedia, I was totally disgusted by their donation bar. The message is feeling off regarding how much money they have and how much they waste at useless executives.
But also I was really pissed off by the fact that they put multiple bubbles for that that completely cover the main page when you are on mobile and a lot in desktop.
Having to scroll that much is kind of worse than cookie popup that I can close in one click.
So I realized that it is the reason why I don't go to the site anymore. It's more relaxing to get the answer directly from Google, Kagi, or a llm. Sadly for Wikipedia, they are responsible for them own demise in my opinion. And it is a good think in the hope that they will realize something when the traffic will really go down. Despite my sadness on the topic regarding the initial goal of the encyclopedia that was laudable.
Peter Hitchens had a hell of a time trying to fix Wikipedia's appalling biases:
https://hitchensblogarchive.wordpress.com/2018/08/06/goodbye...
Search the site for other examples of the fun he had with it.
I'd choose Wikipedia over AI, of course, so I'm ultimately grateful it's there. But better than both would be a well-edited traditional encyclopedia, written by experts in a single voice, and possibly peer-reviewed.
I decided to look at why the original block happened.. it's on [0], search for "July 2018", then check out administrator's reply, including the links to recent edits.
I had no opinion either way, but wow, I have to agree with the block here. Peter put words like "This was a ridiculous statement" into wikipedia article, which is as far from wikipedia tone as it can get; and then completely failed to understand administrator's advice on the tone.
If you want to show wikipedia has problems, you might want to choose some other example.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Clockba...
> written by experts
…and let the bickering begin…
Nothing is going to be immune from people accusing it of bias, etc. Wikipedia is pretty damn good (and free).
This is true but Britannica articles are also written by LESS people
Less room for activism and other things
I don't know the details but amongst his views apparently is:
>Hitchens has frequently rejected the scientific consensus that human activity is linked to global warming, stating that “there is no proof that this is so”
I wonder if that relates to one of the appalling biases he tried to fix? I'm ok with a bias towards scientific accuracy myself.
I wouldn't take an anti-vaxxers word on Wikipedia being biased. They believe heavily in something that has no scientific basis.
Wikipedia was the greatest long ago. Then anonymous partisans setup a 'source blacklist' which essentially curates all of wiki for a specific ideology. They acknowledge their systemic bias and have done nothing to fix it. Wiki deserves to give us an apology.
In reality no apology needed from wiki, we just move on to what's better. Grokipedia v0.1 is out and from what I've seen it's shockingly better. Tons of improvements are still to come no doubt. Ive found inaccuracies in articles that I look forward to having grok remedy.
Soon we will get APIs which will slot into searxng well. The plan is to have grok be the only editor. You have to convince grok to edit a page.
Grokipedia's AI editor point of view will thus eliminate the human/ideological abuse of wikipedia.
Not sure if your comment is parody or not but can you cite some examples of where Grokipedia is “shockingly better” than Wikipedia?
It’s and honest question. I haven’t noticed a strong bias on Wikipedia but that may just be because the kinds of the things I look up on Wikipedia are usually not political in nature.
>It’s and honest question. I haven’t noticed a strong bias on Wikipedia but that may just be because the kinds of the things I look up on Wikipedia are usually not political in nature.
Lets do it on some random article that isnt political.I have aichophobia, so I'm an outside observer on this one. I will never ever ever ever have it done on me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acupuncture
>Acupuncture[b] is a form of alternative medicine[2] and a component of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) in which thin needles are inserted into the body.[3] Acupuncture is a pseudoscience;[4][5] the theories and practices of TCM are not based on scientific knowledge,[6] and it has been characterized as quackery.[c]
So no neutrality here at all. Just straight up ideological attack. You scroll down:
>It is difficult but not impossible to design rigorous research trials for acupuncture.[69][70]
So that's some pretty strong and biased statements against a widely used procedure that they cant really make conclusions about?
https://grokipedia.com/page/Acupuncture
>Scientific evaluation reveals that while acupuncture demonstrates short-term benefits for some pain-related issues compared to no treatment, its superiority over sham procedures—such as needle insertion at non-acupoints—is often minimal or absent, suggesting effects may stem from placebo responses, expectation, or non-specific factors like counter-irritation rather than meridian-based mechanism
This is shockingly better writing.
>A 2020 Cochrane systematic review of 33 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) involving 7,297 participants found that acupuncture, compared to no treatment or sham acupuncture, provided short-term pain relief and functional improvement for chronic nonspecific low back pain, with standardized mean differences (SMD) of -0.82 for pain versus no treatment (moderate-quality evidence) and -0.18 versus sham (low-quality evidence due to imprecision and inconsistency).[91] The
This is what I'm aware of. That acupuncture has some minimum affect on pain better than placebo. Efficacy comparable to tylenol for pain relief. Which I dont know if you know, but tylenol is extremely ineffective for pain relief.
The science says there's something to it, it's difficult to measure, and further investigation is needed. But Wiki's ideological bias is showing big time.
I agree with you that the Grokipedia article is better here, though I guess I disagree that the wikipedia lead has "no neutrality" and is a "straight up ideological attack."
Having read both articles (and knowing very little about this topic before), I came away with the firm conclusion that acupuncture is psuedoscience; both articles clearly explain that is not based on scientific principles and its practice is not governed by scientific methods. There was no disagreement between the articles on this point. That many in medicine describe it as quackery is a relevant observation.
It is interesting that needling as a therapy does seem to have some efficacy over placebo in trials, but both articles agree that the current body of evidence is weak with a lack of methodological rigor and very small effect sizes. But I should note that both articles describe acupuncture as being more than just a specific type of needle based therapy. They describe it as an entire system of medicine based on "qi" and the "meridians" of the body, concepts for which there is no scientific evidence. So I think describing acupuncture as "pseudoscience" is accurate.
Anyway, I thought the Grokipedia article was quite good, but also didn't find the Wikipedia article to be particularly biased.
>I came away with the firm conclusion that acupuncture is psuedoscience;
I dont think most disagrees on this. As I said, I'm not interested in it at all, even if it did work. The science however is not saying it's pseduoscience. It's saying that the Qi and meridians and that sort of stuff is wrong. Whereas the actual needles are scientifically based as providing pain relief in a small and short term effect.
It's a complex topic that doesn't have good conclusions and I chose it because I knew it would show their ideological bias. There's absolutely no reason to call it qwackery when it's not a settled subject. Perhaps even finish defining what it is before going on the attack.
>Anyway, I thought the Grokipedia article was quite good, but also didn't find the Wikipedia article to be particularly biased.
That's completely fair to come to the conclusion. My guess would be that you tend to also align with the ideology that wiki is written for.
> The science however is not saying it's pseduoscience. It's saying that the Qi and meridians and that sort of stuff is wrong. Whereas the actual needles are scientifically based as providing pain relief in a small and short term effect.
You seem to be conflating the concepts acupuncture and needling as well as the concepts of science and efficacy. Qi and Meridians are a part of acupuncture and it is entirely fair to point at that these systems are unscientific. The Grokipedia entry certainly considers qi and meridians to be parts of acupuncture.
Also, for something to be scientific, it has to be based on scientific methods. If acupuncture wants to be a science, it needs to discard all the baseless qi, meridians, and yin-yang explanations and there needs to be more widespread and rigorous investigation of the therapies.
I am an avid yoga practitioner (I do yoga 4 or 5 days a week) and I think it has all kinds of health benefits. That doesn't mean that yoga is "scientific." Indeed, if someone described yoga as pseudoscience I would probably agree (though it varies a lot between studios), because it is common for teachers to go off on unscientific explanatory tangents involving "chakra," "energy," "detoxification" and so on. Is yoga beneficial by various benchmarks? Yes. Is it based on and further developed by scientific inquiry? Not so much.
So it seems to me like you've misinterpreted a sentence in the wikipedia article. It is actually stating something like: "the acupuncture system is unscientific." You've interpreted it to mean something like: "needling therapy is ineffective." And from that misinterpretation, you've drawn lots of invalid conclusions.
> Whereas the actual needles are scientifically based as providing pain relief in a small and short term effect.
This is the basically the same evidence that says if I set you on fire you'll stop complaining about a cough, right?
> qwackery
Quackery has a 'u'. Maybe you need Grammarly.
> Which I dont know if you know, but tylenol is extremely ineffective for pain relief.
Try not to source all your opinions from the guy who suggested people drink bleach.
> This is shockingly better writing.
Wow you are easily shocked.
> Wikipedia was the greatest long ago.
by what metric(s) ?
> Grokipedia's AI editor point of view will thus eliminate the human/ideological abuse of wikipedia.
Where do you think Grok's "AI editor point of view" comes from?
Counterpoint: woky ideology is irrelevant to most of Wikipedia's content.
Is this satire?
With some controversial topics like Nuclear Power on the German wikipedia or the Gaza conflict on the English one, wikipedia has become less than useless. Once an activist editor sith too much time gets hold of a page, it is game over for neutrality of wokipedia. Grokipedia might introduce some much needed competition.
It is not politically correct to observe this, of course, but the only competition Grokipedia is introducing is the competition to mainstream white supremacist ideas while maintaining plausible deniability.
I think the question that XAI asks is "how close to mecha hitler can we get before people notice and complain?"
There are more than 7 million articles on wikipedia. 2 controversial ones do not invalidate the rest and sure does not deserve the "less than useless" label.
I glanced at the Gaza stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza%E2%80%93Israel_conflict and it seemed quite a reasonable summary. What makes it useless? Any facts wrong?
I'm kind of neutral on the conflict and genuinely curious.
About the only bit of Wikipedia I've come across that I feel is inaccurate due to editorial policy is on covid origins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_SARS-CoV-2
>While other explanations, such as speculations that SARS-CoV-2 was accidentally released from a laboratory have been proposed, such explanations are not supported by evidence.
Which I don't think is true.
To be fair, their isn't any evidence for any explanation how COVID happened. The only thing we know is that gene splicing isn't involved, it's a genetically 'natural' variant. All other theories about what happened, including it's origin, is unsatisfactory at best.
Some Chinese I talk to think it's not from Wuhan, but rural China, and got confused with flu there, and since no one care about them [0].
If the virus circulated two months in rural China and the local authorities only detected it once it got in a big city, that's a big indictment against the CCP. Like a virus breaking out of a lab would be. But we have no evidence of either, and I'm not ready to choose between the two.
[0] China biggest issue is its countryside away from the coast, it's terrible there. less addict than in WV for sure, but tribes of 'abandoned' kids that makes 'lord of the fly' seems like a documentary. Since rural China population curve looks like a U (all the working age adults work for months in the city and come back twice a year, leaving their old parents or sometimes grandparents take care of the kid), and COVID was so hard on the elderly, post COVID it seems you have villages with two adults for 50 kids, and maybe worse.
I wouldn't say it's proven one way or the other but you can cite evidence on both sides, like in favour of a zoonotic origin, the previous SARS outbreak and other viruses have been zoonotic, there were cases near the wet market. In favour of lab, it's a bit of a coincidence that a novel form or SARS popped up near the number one lab in the world researching such stuff, and in a way that could be easily explained by research proposed by Ralph Baric, the no 1 researcher of such stuff who proposed such research in collaboration with the Wuhan lab.
My guess is that although a grant application for Baric's research was turned down, the Wuhan lab went ahead and did it anyway and had a screw up.
Evidence doesn't have to mean proven beyond all doubt.
What I meant that we only have circumstantial evidence, not hard evidence, so any explanation will be about beliefs, not about facts.
Everyone in this comment session is now worse for having read this comment
How would "competition" lead to better neutrality? What's the selling point of "I'm more neutral than you"?
I think it depends on the subject. Sure, I have heard a historian call it "Wickedpedia" because it gets all the facts wrong. But have a look at the "hash function" page. That is pretty in-depth.
However, this all misses the point that the article is making: It's a store of knowledge added to and edited by humans. At least they're not AI, the article says. I don't know if this is true, but if so, I find it compelling.
What an astoundingly similar comment to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45734456
I'm sorry but there is no way for reasonable people to believe that Grokipedia would be a legitimate alternative to wikipedia.
It betrays a deep misunderstanding about LLM's in general, but especially grok, and objectivity itself as a concept.
You had me in the first half.
Maybe if Wikipedia sourced more peer reviewed publications and less Vox, I would be more satisfied. Thrilled to see Grokipedia as a competitor that could perhaps pressure Wikipedia to improve its editorial policies.
I can’t, in good conscience, think that Musk would objectively be a good steward of an encyclopedia.
If this isn't ragebait I don't know what is.
Poe's Law in effect.
Did they omit Wikipedia when creating the models behind Grokipedia? Otherwise it less a competitor and more a re-hash.
Well, some of the "articles" on Grokipedia even state that they were sourced from Wikipedia.