I don’t get the impression you’ve ever made any substantial contributions to Wikipedia, and thus have misguided ideas about what would be actually helpful to the editors and conductive to producing better articles. Your proposal about translations is especially telling, because the machine-assisted translations (i.e. with built-in tools) have already existed on WP long before the recent explosion of LLMs.
In short, your proposals either: 1. already exist, 2. would still risk distorsion, oversimplification, made-up bullshit and feedback loops, 3. are likely very complex and expensive to build, or 4. are straight up impossible.
Good WP articles are written by people who have actually read some scholarly articles on the subject, including those that aren’t easily available online (so LLMs are massively stunted by default). Having an LLM re-write a “poorly worded” article would at best be like polishing a turd (poorly worded articles are usually written by people who don’t know much about the subject in the first place, so there’s not much material for the LLM to actually improve), and more likely it would introduce a ton of biases on its own (as well as the usual asinine writing style).
Thankfully, as far as I’ve seen the WP community is generally skeptical of AI tools, so I don’t expect such nonsense to have much of an influence on the site.
Heh. I fell off of contributing in recent years, but there was a time back in the day when my edit count was in the top hundred or so. Your impression is completely wrong.
Anyway, this discussion here isn’t going to affect what the people on Wikipedia are doing, so it doesn’t really matter. I linked to the project page above and it’s quite clear that even this “AI Cleanup” project is not in any way fundamentally opposed to using AI, they’re just focused on ensuring that editors using it are adhering to Wikipedia’s guidelines. If you think AI can’t do that then clearly your concept of how AI is useful is too limited.
I don’t get the impression you’ve ever made any substantial contributions to Wikipedia, and thus have misguided ideas about what would be actually helpful to the editors and conductive to producing better articles. Your proposal about translations is especially telling, because the machine-assisted translations (i.e. with built-in tools) have already existed on WP long before the recent explosion of LLMs.
In short, your proposals either: 1. already exist, 2. would still risk distorsion, oversimplification, made-up bullshit and feedback loops, 3. are likely very complex and expensive to build, or 4. are straight up impossible.
Good WP articles are written by people who have actually read some scholarly articles on the subject, including those that aren’t easily available online (so LLMs are massively stunted by default). Having an LLM re-write a “poorly worded” article would at best be like polishing a turd (poorly worded articles are usually written by people who don’t know much about the subject in the first place, so there’s not much material for the LLM to actually improve), and more likely it would introduce a ton of biases on its own (as well as the usual asinine writing style).
Thankfully, as far as I’ve seen the WP community is generally skeptical of AI tools, so I don’t expect such nonsense to have much of an influence on the site.
Heh. I fell off of contributing in recent years, but there was a time back in the day when my edit count was in the top hundred or so. Your impression is completely wrong.
Anyway, this discussion here isn’t going to affect what the people on Wikipedia are doing, so it doesn’t really matter. I linked to the project page above and it’s quite clear that even this “AI Cleanup” project is not in any way fundamentally opposed to using AI, they’re just focused on ensuring that editors using it are adhering to Wikipedia’s guidelines. If you think AI can’t do that then clearly your concept of how AI is useful is too limited.