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Wikipedia is facing an existential crisis. Can gen Z save it?

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.

DumbAceDragon ,
@DumbAceDragon@sh.itjust.works avatar

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

newthrowaway20 ,

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

MicroWave OP ,
@MicroWave@lemmy.world avatar

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 ,

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.

givesomefucks , (edited )

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

BreadstickNinja ,

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.

pennomi ,

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.

newthrowaway20 ,

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

grue ,

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 ,

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.

theunknownmuncher , (edited )

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 , (edited )

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 ,

Because new

JimmyBigSausage ,

Because lazy-minded.

newthrowaway20 ,

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

skillissuer ,
@skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

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

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