Even Wikipedia is union-busting now.
The Wikimedia Foundation has very little to do with what goes on on the English Wikipedia. It hosts the infrastructure, puts some legal policies in place, and really from there, the community-elected administrators (who are themselves active contributors) are the ones who handle enforcement, and the rules are discussed by the community.
Even the administrators don’t exercise all that much power. In ten years, I think I’ve seen the office have to step in exactly one time – for a possible libel issue when even the administrators couldn’t agree with each other.
Wikipedia and its contributors: Good.
Domain name owners and server hosters (Wikimedia Foundation): Bad.And I might get some hate for this but I think of Reddit the same way. I hate the platform and its owners but what’s ON the platform was posted by the community, for the community.
But a lot of redditors and the bots are garbage too. That place eis full of so much transphobia and racism these days. Not to say lemmy is perfect but I’ve certainly seen less of it here.
But a lot of redditors and the bots are garbage too. That place eis full of so much transphobia and racism these days.
I think that’s just general society right now
Who do I donate money to then?
I want Wikipedia to battle misinformation, they are theoretically equipped to do that. I want a last bastion of pre social media pre enshitification Internet, if possible.
Your wiki is cool and all but not making a dent at the moment.
Well, if in the foundation you include the moderators/admins or whatever they call them on wikipedia, then I agree. But just like on reddit, the mods of wikipedia are also part of the issue (not all but most).
Wikipedia and its contributors: Good.
Not really.
Domain name owners and server hosters (Wikimedia Foundation): Bad.
Yes, the people who actually own the website are trash.
OK I’ll bite, what’s wrong with the legion of volunteers who have spent decades giving free information to the world?
Lesser of two evils, one can be better, one can only be worse.
Voting for the lesser of two evils is how they led us into this mess.
Who, when and what
It’s funny how things have shifted from people complaining about citing Wikipedia to people citing AI. Now Wikipedia may as well be the gutenberg
I think part of that has been actual elevated standards on Wikipedia with a more robust culture for things like citations, but probably more importantly, it’s readers already being expected to understand that Wikipedia isn’t an inherently credible source and needs checking if you actually care.
Of course part of it now too, as you imply, is generative AI making it look more rigorous by comparison and lowering people’s standards.
I’m lazy and have started treating wikipedia as a primary source. But if I’m quoting it to somebody else, I tend to look at the cited references to make sure I trust those.
🤓 Point of clarification: primary, secondary, and tertiary sources refer to the proximity to the original information, not to their reliability.
- A primary source would be something like a study on a drug.
- A secondary source would be something like a news article discussing the study or a meta-analysis collating a bunch of studies on that drug.
- A tertiary source would be something like a Wikipedia article or a section of a textbook discussing the drug as a whole.
Secondary and tertiary sources often comprise both the most reliable and unreliable sources. 🤓
(Ik what you meant by “primary” lol)
I meant it exactly as your definitions. Academically. My fuck up was saying “as” instead of “equal to” or “like.” Hence me admitting how utterly lazy that is. I should also add irresponsible.
But now you also have to check if the citations are AI slop too… still better than an AI overview, but it could become more of an issue as AI slop research papers and AI slop news articles get published more often… 🫠
Wikipedia is by design not citable, unless you include the revision number, but it contains all the sources to cite.
are people actually citing AI? i wonder how that would look like, it certainly sounds like: “my mom said…”
tl;dr: i never saw a problem in using Wikipedia (even at it’s beginning), but it’s an awesome to to get started with a topic, same counts for AI I guess.
No encyclopedia is citable. They’re not primary or secondary sources.
You can’t use tertiary sources in academic research because they’re just aggregation of references. You need primary sources whenever possible, and secondary sources when primary sources are unavailable.
Which is where going down to the references and grabbing the primary sources there comes in handy, because you can cite those.
Thank you for being the one to say this; it’s usually me. I typically also address the idea, espoused by far too many teachers, that ‘you can’t cite Wikipedia because it’s an unreliable source’. Where that statement is obviously wrong as Wikipedia nor any encyclopedia is a source, rather it’s a resource, but also, Wikipedia is the most accurate encyclopedia to date due to its ability to be updated on a whim. Which serves to offset the ‘half-life of facts’ that understandably effects the accuracy of written encyclopedias.
Yeah that’s a big failing on the teachers, not explaining why you can’t cite Wikipedia. It’s not hard to explain “you can’t cite wikipedia directly because it isn’t a source. It’s just a collection of references, and you need to go cite the primary source, and here is where wikipedia lists their sources for each claim and how you can cite them”.
This is online discussions, people use links. Similarly copy and paste from AI output. Online isn’t as formal or regulated as published works.
with “online” you are referring to social media discussions?
Generally yes, FB, reddit, Lemmy and so on since these are now the locations where most social discourse happens.
According to APA guidelines, citing an AI is valid but the citation is just
“I used X Model for Y purpose.” And doesn’t require anything more lol
i mean using a model to obtain certain data is fine, we did that already twenty years ago. it would just not be called citing
I had a customer at the store I work at use GPT for info on what we sell. I’d rather he was referencing twitch chat when he told me chat told him we sold something.
But you gotta GIVE!
Not anymore, shady leadership. Everything on the site is suspect as a result.
I still have that Google newsfeed enabled on my phone, just trying to stay informed. The AI overview is actually hella useful, by summarising all the news reports and circumventing the trash clickbait
And lying at least 40% of the time
April:
(Number’s a little better than before but very irresponsible)
You know, you’re getting downvoted for this, and I get why, but I also think you should’ve been offered a suggestion: RSS feeds. They let you get your news from good, reliable sources that aren’t The Daily Beast talking about “Elon Musk drops SHOCKING new post on X (did he shit his pants??)” Unironically, it’s the best way to keep up with the news bar none. I can even give you personalized suggestions if you’d like.
Your problem is real. Your problem is not your fault. Your solution is understandable. I just think it’s misguided.
Holy fuck is this healthy. Thank you sir for, well, existing. I salute this behavior!
I appreciate that. I feel like it’s all of our jobs to help each other in this information hurricane where we can; nobody deserves to be punished for not being a strong sailor.
Wikipedia is suspect now too. They’ve sold the site to AI search. Hard to say that they had much of a choice, but the sure did it swiftly and gleefully.
Its all public anyways. Its more like they sold infrastructure access afaik. Which is a smart move. Money aside, unauthorized scraping is a much bigger PITA and can drain resources quickly, including financial resources. Selling access means you can regulate it and also make it go thru appropriate infra; plus it becomes an asset rather than a liability. Not a fan of the wikimedia org lately, but I don’t fault them for that one.
Exactly this. They are guaranteed to get scraped regardless. Ask any question of an AI model and the first ‘source’ it cites is almost always Wikipedia. (assuming it’s not like a super technical in-depth question)
Might as well save on server overhead costs and get paid while doing it instead of trying (and failing) to block every possible scraper.
Selling access means
Selling access means the content is primarily available to the extremely privileged - huge “AI” grifts, etc.
plus it becomes an asset rather than a liability
For whom?
Primarily available to the extremely privileged
My local LLM narrowly fetching and caching a page or two isn’t what’s been hitting infra across the global and making indie sites blow up or die out. Doesn’t matter if the small players can’t buy the same access as the big players; they don’t need it and it’s not really for them.
(liability to asset) For whom?
The balance sheet. I didn’t mean it in the abstract.