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Wikipedia is facing an existential crisis. Can gen Z save it? (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by MicroWave@lemmy.world to c/news@lemmy.world
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The world’s most important knowledge platform needs young editors to rescue it from chatbots – and its own tired practices

Established in 2001, Wikipedia is an “old man” by internet standards. But the role it plays in our collective knowledge of the world remains astonishing. Content from the free internet encyclopedia appears in everything from high-school term papers and pub trivia questions to search engine summaries and voice assistants. Tools like Google’s AI Overviews and ChatGPT rely heavily on Wikipedia, although they rarely credit the site in their responses.

And therein lies the problem: as Wikipedia’s visibility diminishes, reduced to mere training data for AI applications, it also loses prominence in the minds of readers and potential contributors. When someone notices a topic that is poorly described on Wikipedia, they might feel motivated to correct it. But this can-do spirit goes away when the error comes through an AI summary, where the source of the information isn’t clear.

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[-] CondensedPossum@lemmy.world 83 points 3 months ago

Wikipedia is fine, it isn't "losing prominence." This is willful misinterpretation of a speech to make it sound more dire, a nonsense AI propaganda angle, and a bunch of ageist nonsense about Gen-Z that will be immediately familiar to anyone who pays attention to this kind of slop.

Please post better articles

[-] newthrowaway20@lemmy.world 57 points 3 months ago

AI Chat bots could easily refer to their source. But the companies that own the chat bots don't wanna do that.

[-] BreadstickNinja@lemmy.world 58 points 3 months ago

It's actually not easy to ensure that an LLM will cite a correct source, in the same way it's not easy to ensure that it will provide accurate information. It's based on token probability, not deterministic lookups of "this data came from this source." It could entirely make something up, then write "Source:" and then probabilistically write "Wikipedia" because those tokens commonly follow those for "Source."

If you have an AI bot that looks up information in real time, then that would be easy. But for a trained LLM, the training process is highly destructive. Original information is not preserved except in relationships based on probability.

[-] newthrowaway20@lemmy.world 27 points 3 months ago

The more I learn about AI, the less I like it.

[-] BreadstickNinja@lemmy.world 13 points 3 months ago

It's a fun toy. It's not a research aid, it's not a productivity tool, and it's not particularly useful in the workplace.

It's honestly very similar to the VR craze of a few years back. Silicon Valley invented a fun toy and then tried to convince everyone that it would transform the workplace. Meetings in VR and simulated workstations and all that. Ultimately everyone figured out that VR is completely useless in the workplace and Silicon Valley was just trying to find ways to sell their fun toy. Now we're going through the same learnings with AI.

[-] med@sh.itjust.works 8 points 3 months ago

I love VR. I have so many hours in some of the slower paced fps titles that it's almost matched my video game time total for non-vr games on steam.

The one thing I learned for sure is that I don't want anyone else telling me when I have to put on the headset and when I'm allowed to take it off.

Never will wear a vr headset in the workspace.

[-] BreadstickNinja@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago

Oh yeah, I love my Index as well. I think it's a lot of fun as a gaming device. But the big money is in B2B sales, which is why tech companies try to convince everyone that blockchain/VR/LLMs have all these corporate applications that just make no damn sense.

[-] TherapyGary@lemmy.blahaj.zone 0 points 3 months ago

It's actually extremely useful as a productivity tool in many workplaces. You're just stating how you feel about it as if it's fact for everyone

[-] BreadstickNinja@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago

It's a great way to replace competent human workers with a lower-cost, lower-quality alternative. Wall Street may buy that anti-worker BS but workers tell a different story.

Literally an article in Forbes today that says 77% of employees report that AI tools make them less productive: https://www.forbes.com/sites/torconstantino/2024/09/12/77-of-surveyed-employees-say-ai-tools-make-them-less-productive/

[-] PlantJam@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago

I personally use LLMs in the workplace. It's great for generating boilerplate code, especially stuff that is often very repetitive like test classes.

[-] pennomi@lemmy.world 6 points 3 months ago

Right, in my experience the majority of URLs generated by LLMs are just jumbles of letters that vaguely look like a URL. A fundamental architecture difference needs to happen in one way or another to properly cite sources, and it’s really bad for performance.

[-] grue@lemmy.world 3 points 3 months ago

I choose to interpret the grandparent commenter's use of "easily" to mean "not impossible, and an ethical obligation, so you'd better fuckin' make it a priority."

[-] newthrowaway20@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago

That's accurate. Nothing in technology is actually "easy" and I know it requires a lot of work. Didn't mean to diminish all the time and energy put into making this stuff. Thanks for better expressing what I meant.

[-] mindlight@lemm.ee 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Maybe specifying source should be a legal requirement if the LLM service provider shouldn't automatically be held accountable for the answers their services produce?

[-] LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 1 points 3 months ago

Yeah Bing Chat had sources for a while (not sure if it still does) and when I checked the sources, the frequently didn't contain the claim in question. So even if you get it to cite real pages, it just doesn't work the same way as human citations do.

[-] suigenerix@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago

perplexity.ai does a decent job at providing sources for searches.

[-] MicroWave@lemmy.world 16 points 3 months ago

Agreed. ChatGPT doesn’t like to cite sources. Microsoft CoPilot and Google Gemini do link to some sources, though not as accurate or thorough like Wikipedia.

[-] Throw_away_migrator@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago

What I don't understand is how Microsoft has/has Watson which was able to answer questions well enough to go on Jeopardy and dominate. And now, more than a decade later these LLMs absolutely suck at it.

It makes me wonder if Watson was nothing more than a Mechanical Turk because what is out there now seems like a huge step backwards.

[-] Carrolade@lemmy.world 0 points 3 months ago

They just work in entirely different ways. An car and a horse are both able to serve as transportation, but they aren't anything alike in other ways. LLMs compared to previous sorts of bots are similar.

The main difference is that an LLM isn't fetching whole answers from some database somewhere. It's generating them fresh. You have to hope it generates the right stuff, which it does a certain percentage of the time.

[-] givesomefucks@lemmy.world 14 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Part of it obviously not wanting to pay for training.

But its also that if it provides a source, people might click it and realize the chatbot did a shitty job summarizing.

The focus is on getting people to trust the chatbots, not to get the chatbots to give trustworthy answers.

It's why capitalism shouldn't drive technology. Doesn't matter if it's a good product, it just matters if stock price goes up

[-] theunknownmuncher@lemmy.world 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

No, but they can easily generate text that is statistically likely to look like a source.

LLMs are a probabilistic model of language, not an information source.

[-] newthrowaway20@lemmy.world 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I don't get it then, why are all these companies so gung-ho to replace something that was working with an AI that doesn't?
It's less accurate, it uses way more energy, it doesn't show its work, it doesn't cite its source, and it'll make up shit that sounds right when it needs to. Why would anyone think AI is worth putting in any consumer product at this rate?

[-] PugJesus@lemmy.world 3 points 3 months ago

Because new

[-] newthrowaway20@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago

Damn it I hate how simple and accurate this answer is.

[-] theunknownmuncher@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago

As far as I can tell, it is hype because it is the hot new toy that they can sell.

LLMs are great for tasks like handling natural language data or classifying and identifying semantic meaning of text, but they are NOT good at math, logic, or as a store of facts/information. I think that they do actually deserve a lot of hype for these specific use cases, because they really accomplish these extraordinarily better than previous/traditional approaches.

The big problem is that they are being used for things that they are not good at, like when people ask a chatbot questions they they expect a factual answer to. They are also surprisingly bad at summarizing text (in my opinion and also this has been shown by some studies) despite companies like Google and Microsoft using them for things like summarizing and present search results. I think these companies are ultimately shooting themselves in the foot when they use LLMs for things that LLMs aren't great for.

Think back to when blockchain was being shoved into everything possible, even places where blockchain makes no sense. And before blockchain, it was cloud

[-] skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 3 months ago

chatbots are fundamentally unable of citing a source, they just make up something that looks like a link to a source. sometimes it's a rickroll

[-] DumbAceDragon@sh.itjust.works 55 points 3 months ago

I use wikipedia all the time, and I make a monthly donation.

[-] okwhateverdude@lemmy.world 17 points 3 months ago

You should stop. The wikimedia foundation has all the money it needs to fund wikipedia perpetually. The endowment was met years and years ago. Your money is being spent on parasitic non-profit management class nonsense things.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer

[-] SoleInvictus@lemmy.blahaj.zone 12 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

That essay isn't terribly well thought out. They have an issue with the increase in employees, but lack any evidence that they're not actually required. The core of their thesis seems to be "it was fine with fewer employees before, why do we need more now?" but they fail to provide much supporting evidence beyond substantiating increasing levels of spending over the years.

Edit: also, this is seven years old and it appears Guy's predictions have yet to even begin to manifest.

[-] Randomgal@lemmy.ca 4 points 3 months ago

Lol trash article.

[-] Benjaben@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago

Oh for chrisakes. I also donate to The Wikimedia Foundation, feeling secure in the knowledge that at least I could feel good about that one. Time to do some reading I guess.

this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2024
105 points (80.0% liked)

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