[HN Gopher] Wikipedia-grounded chatbot "outperforms all baseline...
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Wikipedia-grounded chatbot "outperforms all baselines" on factual
accuracy
Author : akolbe
Score : 211 points
Date : 2023-07-17 12:41 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| c0brac0bra wrote:
| But did they measure the truthiness of those facts?
| altilunium wrote:
| Related : https://diff.wikimedia.org/2023/07/13/exploring-paths-
| for-th...
| quotemstr wrote:
| Accuracy according to whom? Wikipedia is a battleground for
| ideologues. You can't trust anything even remotely controversial
| present there.
| PopePompus wrote:
| This highlights a problem LLMs will face if they improve enough
| to solve their hallucination problems. People will begin to
| treat the LLM like some sort of all knowing oracle. Activists
| will fight fiercely to control the model's output on
| controversial topics, and will demand lots of model "tuning"
| after training.
| quotemstr wrote:
| > Activists will fight fiercely to control the model's output
| on controversial topics,
|
| They already do. I'd love to know how much "brain damage"
| RLHF and other censorship techniques cause to the general
| purpose reasoning abilities of models. (Human reasoning
| ability is also harmed by lying.) We know the damage is
| nontrivial.
| lacksconfidence wrote:
| Accuracy as in faithfully represents the source material. It
| doesn't matter if the source material is true or not in this
| analysis.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Can someone update the link to https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.14292 ?
|
| The headline refers to only a small portion of the linked page.
| charlieo88 wrote:
| I wish I had the time or facility to take a snapshot of wikipedia
| now before the imminent deluge of Chat-GPT based updates that
| start materially modifying wikipedia is some weird and
| unpredictable manner.
| ravetcofx wrote:
| You can use Kiwix too as an easy way to get an archive of it
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| The wikipedia politburo already makes it impossible for normies
| to edit any wikipedia article worth editing. If you don't
| believe me, try it out with a stopwatch to see how long it
| takes for your edit to be reverted.
| _djo_ wrote:
| That you call them a 'politburo' and refer to 'normies' gives
| an indication that the types of edits you were making were
| neither well sourced nor neutral.
|
| I've never had an edit reverted on Wikipedia.
| cheald wrote:
| You can torrent a copy of Wikipedia, including article history.
| Locally, you can go back to any revision of any article you
| want. I keep a copy locally just because it seems something
| valuable to have.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| In late 2021 / early 2022 I got scared about the incoming
| consequences of LLMs and downloaded all the "Kiwix" archives I
| could find, including Wikipedia, a bunch of other Wikimedia
| sites, Stack Overflow, etc.
|
| I'm pretty glad that I did. I'm going to hold onto them
| indefinitely. They have become the "low background steel" of
| text.
| samwillis wrote:
| I really like that analogy.
|
| For anyone curious what low background steel is, it's steel
| that was made before the first atomic bombs were tested:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel
| tivert wrote:
| > In late 2021 / early 2022 I got scared about the incoming
| consequences of LLMs and downloaded all the "Kiwix" archives
| I could find, including Wikipedia, a bunch of other Wikimedia
| sites, Stack Overflow, etc.
|
| > I'm pretty glad that I did. I'm going to hold onto them
| indefinitely. They have become the "low background steel" of
| text.
|
| Also, ironically, the Pushshift reddit dumps (still available
| via torrent), before they were taken down. The exact time
| Reddit shut down the API to sell their data for AI training
| is also exactly the time it started to become less valuable
| for that.
|
| I believe a lot of subreddits started implementing protest
| moderation policies after reddit came down on the blackout.
| IMHO, they should implement rules like "no posts unless it's
| a ChatGPT hallucination."
| bombela wrote:
| You can download a full archive already.
|
| edit, link:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download
| hughesjj wrote:
| Wikipedia has released snapshots available for download for
| over a decade now including ones with full edit histories,
| meaning you can just revert all edits to before a chosen epoch.
| masklinn wrote:
| Wikipedia dumps are publicly available, both from themselves
| and from the Internet archives.
|
| There's no "time or facility" constraint, only storage space.
| speedgoose wrote:
| Wikipedia doesn't remove the old versions.
|
| Otherwise you can find an archive there:
| https://archive.org/details/wikimediadownloads?and%5B%5D=sub...
| int_19h wrote:
| Without article history and videos, it's small enough that many
| modern smartphones can have a local offline copy.
|
| http://kiwix.org/
| deepserket wrote:
| "As of 2 July 2023, the size of the current version of all
| articles compressed is about 22.14 GB without media." -
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia
| pradn wrote:
| I'm unsure if this will happen. There's plenty of checks-and-
| balances for Wikipedia edits. There's automated spam detection,
| editors manually looking over edits for articles on their
| watchlist, editors who look over subtopics, and even editors
| that take a look at the general stream of edits. It's already
| possible to flag mass edits. As for whether ChatGPT will
| inflect the subtle tone and bias of edits made using it, that's
| the same as bias from human users. And the same mechanisms for
| dealing with human bias apply here.
|
| In terms of practical utility, for the vast majority of
| humanity, access to translated articles in their local language
| is the biggest problem, I think. There is no Yoruba-language
| Wiki article on General Relativity, for example. Second comes
| entire biased communities - like some of the smaller Wikis are
| full of far-right editors, and most editors (like 90%) are men.
| worrycue wrote:
| I can see AI bots submitting convincing edits at random times
| in no particular pattern. Eventually they will overwhelm
| Wikipedia checks and balances.
| tivert wrote:
| >> I wish I had the time or facility to take a snapshot of
| wikipedia now before the imminent deluge of Chat-GPT based
| updates that start materially modifying wikipedia is some
| weird and unpredictable manner.
|
| > I'm unsure if this will happen. There's plenty of checks-
| and-balances for Wikipedia edits.
|
| I think it will. It's so tedious to edit Wikipedia (due to
| bureaucracy and internal politics) that their editorial
| population is in a long-term decline, which means their
| oversight ability is declining too.
|
| Probably what will happen is LLM generated content will creep
| into long-tail articles, then work its way into more "medium-
| profile" articles as editors get exhausted. The extremely
| high-profile stuff (e.g. New York City), political
| battleground articles (e.g. Donald Trump), and areas
| patrolled by obsessives (railroads, Pokemon) will probably
| remain unaffected by the corruption the longest. At some
| point, the only way to resist will to become much more
| hostile to new editors, but that's also long-term suicide for
| the project.
|
| I think they're painted into a corner.
| oxguy3 wrote:
| The Wikipedia community has generally been pretty resistant to
| allowing fully AI-based tools in. We've had tools such as
| Lsjbot (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lsjbot) in the past, but
| they've failed to gain community consent on any of the large
| Wikipedias. If someone tries to bring an LLM-based tool to
| Wikipedia, it would take a lot of finesse to have any shot of
| the community allowing it.
| 1270018080 wrote:
| But what about the whole mass of tech bros who don't
| understand what LLM's are (random text generators and nothing
| more), and manually start to add changes? It's a virus
| polluting every industry.
| bruce343434 wrote:
| I don't think it takes much finesse to just randomly start
| "improving" articles using the output of an LLM. It only
| takes a single well meaning yet misguided person. Remember
| this? https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-
| an-aw-...
| TillE wrote:
| The trouble with Wikipedia is that it's an inch deep. For any
| given topic, especially history, there's a trove of information
| in scholarly books from good publishers, but the corresponding
| Wikipedia article is like three pages long.
| bsaul wrote:
| Just an anecdotal experience : wikipedia is up-to-date with
| regards to "recent" discoveries. Whereas books will always be
| engraved with what was regarded as knowledge at the time of
| writing.
|
| Case in point : elder of zions protocol french article
| contained outdated knowledge (it said we knew who the author
| was, propagating an old hypothesis that had been debunked in
| the last 10 years, eventhough the other wikipedia articles were
| fixed). Historians were heard repeating that same boggus claim
| on radio. Until i convinced an historian friend of mine to fix
| the french article, and all of the sudden historians started
| fixing their speech. Meaning not only did they not update their
| knowledge from scholarly books, but they needed wikipedia to
| help them get up to date.
| quotemstr wrote:
| New is not always better.
|
| For example, from about 1960-2010, anthropologists
| universally held a "pots, not people" view of prehistory:
| they asserted, with great confidence, that styles of pottery
| and metalworking changed over time due to voluntary exchange
| of ideas among peaceful, cooperating peoples. These
| anthropologists asserted that pre-1960 theories that pottery
| styles changed because population groups violently replaced
| each other were not only wrong, but immoral and barbaric. To
| them, it was modernity that made humans violent.
|
| Now due to ancient DNA, we know that the pre-1960s
| anthropologists were right and the post-1960 consensus was
| wrong: prehistory was violent and populations violently
| replaced each other with regularity.
|
| You're more informed reading, say, Gordon Child book from
| 1920 than a serious book on prehistoric archaeology from
| 2000.
|
| So it goes in many fields. Imagine how much longer it would
| take for science's self correction mechanism to operate if
| our knowledge were encoded solely in a "living" information
| system aligned with only currently fashionable ideas.
| ragequitta wrote:
| But wouldn't you agree reading about this topic now, with
| the counter-argument of the post-1960 consensus (though I
| have a hard time thinking most things debatable like this
| are ever strictly consensus), and the follow-up DNA
| evidence, is far more informative and convincing than what
| you would read in 1920? It seems that the people guessing
| from 1920 might've had about as much chance of being right
| as the people guessing in 1960 with neither having the
| relevant evidence to back their claim.
| quotemstr wrote:
| Come on: if you're excavating an ancient village and find
| a layer of charcoal littered with arrowheads and skulls
| and find totally different pottery before and after the
| charcoal layer, then unless your brain has been
| codrycepted by fashionable academic nonsense, you're
| going to conclude that someone conquered that village and
| replaced its people --- not that the charcoal layer
| represents some kind of ceremonial swords-to-plowshares
| peaceful pottery replacement ceremony. For 50 years,
| academics insisted on the latter interpretation. If you'd
| read old books, you'd know the post-1960s consensus was
| nonsense even without ancient DNA. Ancient DNA merely
| created a body of evidence so totally compelling that not
| even diffusionists (the "pots not people" crowd) could
| stick to their stories and keep a straight face.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Check the wiki page in another language, closer to the affected
| area.
|
| Its not a direct translation, its an entirely different
| encyclopedia and can be far more robust.
|
| (Maybe an LLM could harmonize all the wikipedias across
| languages)
| curiousllama wrote:
| I wonder if that's the next iteration of Wikipedia. Right now,
| the model is to summarize secondary sources. Once summarization
| becomes trivial via LLMs, the most valuable thing to do would
| be to assemble ever-expanding datasets of secondary sources for
| the LLM to pull from.
| klyrs wrote:
| My hope in this regard is that Wikipedia pages tend to have
| much more than an inch of citations. If even a significant
| fraction of those sources can be digested, it could give rise
| to a much deeper source. The really cool thing about their
| chatbot is that it appears to have the ability to summarize and
| highlight where the summaries came from. Extending that to the
| ability to summarize the backing sources, and point to where
| _that_ came from, could be an incredible research tool.
| ilyt wrote:
| Well, it has link that it can follow.
|
| Add some AI to take the footnotes and get to the sources and
| train on that.
| the_af wrote:
| Is it wrong that Wikipedia articles are only three pages long?
| Does anybody claim that reading an encyclopedia article
| (Wikipedia, Britannica or whatever) is better than reading a
| scholarly book on the given topic?
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| Some people just demand that Wikipedia be a universal factual
| info database, missing nothing. It'd be nice, though.
| ghaff wrote:
| There really isn't such a thing though for many topics as a
| universal factual info database. For many, e.g. historical,
| topics different books have different areas of focus and
| interpret events differently. Encyclopedias do to a certain
| degree (and historical "truth" may shift over time) but, in
| general, they're not the place to hash out the "right"
| interpretation of events.
| LawTalkingGuy wrote:
| > historical, topics different books have different areas
| of focus and interpret events differently
|
| In those areas the fact isn't the base fact, but claims
| of fact. We don't know who explored which bit of the
| great pyramid in which order, and may never, but we know
| of many specific claims.
|
| The fact check wouldn't be "The great pyramid X" but
| "Herodotus said X about the great pyramid".
|
| > in general, they're not the place to hash out the
| "right" interpretation of events.
|
| Once you scope the problem correctly it's not a problem.
| The point isn't to solve historical riddles, it's to
| document what evidence we have.
|
| Sometimes that evidence is broadly accepted measurements
| (land area of Australia) and other times it's not.
| NegativeK wrote:
| People with just a Wikipedia-level knowledge will argue with
| actual experts as if Wikipedia is equivalent.
|
| Of course, you can't really say that distrusting experts is
| unique to encyclopedias.
| harshreality wrote:
| If there's something in a wikipedia article that experts
| will argue against, the article needs updating to be
| compatible with, even if does not include, expert-level
| knowledge.
| the_af wrote:
| But isn't that the same as people who argue because "they
| read it on a magazine/on the newspaper"? So they are wrong
| -- is it Wikipedia's fault though?
|
| An encyclopedia is always the starting point, never the end
| of serious research. (It's ok however to stick to Wikipedia
| if a superficial acquaintance with the topic is enough!).
| mcv wrote:
| Still deeper than most people, though. You can't put all of
| human knowledge in Wikipedia, but it's extremely thorough in
| the basics.
| mfer wrote:
| Wikipedia is a summary. Is it meant to be deep? If you want to
| go deep on any topic you'll need to go to other sources.
| Wissenschafter wrote:
| Isn't that literally the point of an encyclopedia? A starting
| point, it's the abstract on the subject if you will.
| seydor wrote:
| it has a good format though and would be nice to have a
| second level of scholarship (e.g scholarpedia). Modeling
| itself after encyclopedia would be regressive
| michaelt wrote:
| In discussions about "deletionism" I've seen people argue
| that, disk space being cheap, Wikipedia should try to be much
| more expansive than an encyclopedia.
|
| A paper encyclopedia might not have time or space for
| individual entries about many hundreds of pokemon, episodes
| of the simpsons, or characters from star wars.
| [deleted]
| thefifthsetpin wrote:
| I don't think that TillE meant "the problem with wikipedia is
| that wikipedia is an inch deep." I think TillE meant "the
| problem with training a chatbot grounded with wikipedia is
| that wikipedia is only an inch deep."
| tivert wrote:
| > Isn't that literally the point of an encyclopedia? A
| starting point, it's the abstract on the subject if you will.
|
| Yes, but Wikipedia is also frequently conceived and marketed
| as "the sum of all human knowledge," which that shows is a
| lie by definition.
| humanistbot wrote:
| > "the sum of all human knowledge," which that shows is a
| lie by definition.
|
| By which definition? In math, the sum of a set necessarily
| implies a loss of information about that set, for sets
| larger than 1. But they're using "sum" not in the purely
| mathematical sense, more like "the summary of all human
| knowledge". But the same principle applies axiomatically,
| because summaries are lossy compression: you cannot have a
| summary that contains all the information of the source it
| is summarizing.
| tivert wrote:
| >> "the sum of all human knowledge," which that shows is
| a lie by definition.
|
| > By which definition?
|
| That's pretty easy: definition 2 "the whole amount :
| aggregate" (https://www.merriam-
| webster.com/dictionary/sum). That it's interpreted that
| way is shown by the frequency of people saying stuff like
| "I loaded Wikipedia onto this battery powered Raspberry
| Pi in a Pelican case, now I'm ready to rebuild
| civilization if it collapses," and seemingly believing
| it.
|
| But you do correctly point to another issue: sum has a
| meaning of "a summary of the chief points or thoughts,"
| which I feel is a less common usage. So the marketing
| phrase may not be so much a lie, but rather an _extremely
| misleading_ statement that invites misinterpretation that
| usually goes unchallenged. IMHO, those are actually even
| more pernicious than outright lies.
| kube-system wrote:
| > people saying stuff like "I loaded Wikipedia onto this
| battery powered Raspberry Pi in a Pelican case, now I'm
| ready to rebuild civilization if it collapses," and
| seemingly believing it.
|
| The least delusional part of this is the sparseness of
| information contained within Wikipedia. If that scenario
| came to be, they wouldn't be short on information. They'd
| be short on time, resources, and skills.
| humanistbot wrote:
| > the frequency of people saying stuff like "I loaded
| Wikipedia onto this battery powered Raspberry Pi in a
| Pelican case, now I'm ready to rebuild civilization if it
| collapses," and seemingly believing it.
|
| As someone who inched closer into the doomsday prepper
| scene before swerving far away from it, I assure you that
| people in that subculture have a lot of unrealistic
| beliefs about their own capacities and resources. I don't
| think it's Wikipedia's fault that they (and you) are
| taking a quote about Wikipedia's never-ending goal and
| interpreting it as if it is their description of what
| they are.
|
| An even worse example of deceptive marketing would be a
| compact folding multitool marketed as "the only tool
| you'll ever need." Even with that, I'd say that if you
| actually believe that you can rebuild civilization with
| that tool solely on the basis of that marketing slogan,
| then that's your fault as much as it is the marketers.
|
| And a minor nitpick: the standard prepper info archives
| also include collections of various survival guides and
| resources that are specifically written for these kinds
| of purposes.
| karaterobot wrote:
| It sounds like your issue is with someone describing
| Wikipedia as the sum of all human knowledge, not with
| Wikipedia itself, which is what the person to whom you're
| replying seemed to be saying.
| sdht0 wrote:
| Wikipedia also has numerous sister projects like Wikibooks
| and Wikiversity (including open access WikiJournal) which
| aim to fill in the details. All these project taken
| together can indeed fulfill the *aspirational* goal of
| noting down all human knowledge. If we ever reach there is
| of course upto us.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| If we could condemn a thing due to hype alone, we would
| condemn all that is good in the world.
| neilk wrote:
| Jimmy Wales said that phrase in an interview, but it was
| never meant to say that Wikipedia itself was the only work
| that needed to be consulted.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Prime_objective
|
| You seem to have an issue with some person or persons who
| has been advising others that the only work they need to
| consult is Wikipedia. Who are they? Specifically.
| narag wrote:
| Please, before assuming you know what I mean, read the complete
| comment.
|
| _The trouble with Wikipedia is that it 's an inch deep._
|
| That's not its biggest problem. Wikipedia is biased.
|
| Of course there's political bias in the American fashion. But
| that's not all. There is bias about History depending on what
| country is telling the story. And there is a strong bias even
| in scientific topics (maybe specially in them) when there are
| commercial interests involved.
|
| That's not specific to Wikipedia.
|
| But when you research some topic, reading multiple books,
| you'll notice there are different opinions, you learn to
| discount bias looking at the procedence. Wikipedia tries to
| adopt a neutral tone and cite different sources, but sometimes
| it does a terrible job at it.
| nomel wrote:
| > There is bias about History depending on what country is
| telling the story.
|
| A funny example of this is fan death [1]. Comparing English
| to southeast Asian languages show that Asian languages pages
| suggest that it's real (at least last few times I translated
| it).
|
| An, in a bit of relevancy, the Japanese page has been
| overwritten with "I love you" and "I'm sorry".
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_death
| jojobas wrote:
| Can there be factual correctness from being grounded in
| scholarly books as such?
|
| The amount of disagreement between researchers over time and
| changing consensus requires an external arbiter of individual
| facts at the very least.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| Maybe a Wikipedia based LLM could make decisions about which
| papers are factual enough to include in a more extensive LLM.
| joeframbach wrote:
| You'll end up with a corpus consisting entirely of paywall
| text and 404 pages.
| janalsncm wrote:
| Wikipedia is not some thing handed down by God at the beginning
| of time. It's a work in progress by volunteers. If you think a
| page lacks depth, you're free to update it.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| I don't think that's a fair criticism of wikipedia. Summarizing
| knowledge is literally the job of an encyclopedia. There was a
| reason all my professors in college told us to use wiki as a
| jumping off point for further reading in the citations.
| Closi wrote:
| > I don't think that's a fair criticism of wikipedia.
|
| It's not a fair criticism of Wikipedia, but it is a fair
| criticism of using Wikipedia as a single-source.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| Once you stray off the popsci/undergrad topics, wikipedia's
| summation of knowledge is often a few sentences _if any_.
| Topics for which numerous books have been written may get
| only one or two sentences on wikipedia, so I think it 's fair
| to say that wikipedia is an inch deep. Maybe a few inches
| deep since popular topics do get longer articles, but the
| long tail of knowledge gets very shallow coverage on
| wikipedia.
| downWidOutaFite wrote:
| If you're knowledgeable about missing topics that's a
| perfect opportunity to give back to wikipedia and write the
| article yourself.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| Often it's a topic I don't yet know much about. I hear
| about a topic and search for it, and find a disappointing
| wikipedia stub. I continue my search to find there are
| numerous books and research papers about the subject.
| After reading those my intellectual curiosity may be
| satisfied, but I wouldn't consider myself an expert and I
| also don't have any inclination to go back and write a
| proper wikipedia page.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| I generally agree with you and I will say that my
| experience contributing to wikipedia has been extremely
| pleasant. The community does a good job of making
| newcomers feel welcome even if you make mistakes.
|
| With that said I've seen two areas where contributing to
| wikipedia falls short:
|
| The first is things involving what I'd call
| editorialization (I'm sure there's some wikipedia term
| for it). Any article that's about an unsettled or
| somewhat contentious issue seems to give outsized weight
| to the non-consensus view. Even if 85% of a field thinks
| that one thing is more likely than the other the
| wikipedia article will often split its coverage of the
| views 50/50 and then maybe tack a sentence on at the end
| saying that the majority of people in the field favor xyz
| view.
|
| Contributing to or changing those pages is often a hassle
| because you have to argue with people and that's
| generally not worth your time (unless you're of the
| minority opinion and you want to give legitimacy to your
| side - in which case you are motivated to argue).
|
| The second are the stub articles. The ones that say "This
| article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding
| it." Often I could help wikipedia by expanding it but
| it's so much work to write a full encyclopedia entry.
| Like it might take me 4 hours to summarize what I know,
| look up references, etc. It's easier to just not do it.
|
| Where I find contributing useful is when I'm fixing a
| small factual error, updating based on a recent
| discovery, fixing a citation, etc.
|
| I'm not sure if they do it but it would be good for
| Wikipedia to pay someone to go through and fill out the
| basics of a bunch of pages on a topic so that there's a
| scaffolding to work with and then the occasional
| volunteers could come through and add on facts and fix
| problems.
| arp242 wrote:
| I think it's a fair criticism; or rather, an important
| limitation one needs to keep in mind. Wikipedia articles can
| miss out on a great deal of nuance and context, which can
| matter a great deal.
| thebooktocome wrote:
| Worse than that, motivated editors often color their pet
| pages with specific nuance and context, and no casual
| editor has a hope of winning an edit war against such
| opposition.
|
| My favorite example of this is the debate between a faction
| that believes Lithobates is the proper genus of a certain
| set of frogs, and another faction that believes the correct
| genus is Rana. The Lithobates side is essentially one
| person along with his sock and/or meat puppets, so in the
| end, after many rounds of moderation, most of the species
| in question are listed under both genuses.
| jurimasa wrote:
| [flagged]
| weregiraffe wrote:
| Wikipedia is full of references to scholarly sources. Make a
| bot that follows the references to the sources and incorporates
| them in the training data, and Bob's your uncle.
| jefftk wrote:
| There are multiple studies discussed on this page; the one we're
| looking at is partway down the page, under "Wikipedia-based LLM
| chatbot "outperforms all baselines" regarding factual accuracy".
| This link will take you there if your browser supports scrolling
| to text fragments:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
| kemayo wrote:
| This link will take you there regardless of text-fragment-link
| support:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
| indymike wrote:
| This article was more about open the value of open access when
| publishing research being 15% more likely to be cited on
| Wikipedia. The AI part was somewhat weak as it did not compare
| against ChatGPT.
| ot wrote:
| The layout is very confusing, but the page is a review of
| various recent research papers about Wikipedia and the title
| references one of them, search for the section titled
|
| > Wikipedia-based LLM chatbot "outperforms all baselines"
| regarding factual accuracy
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| How does this make sense? Search to find it on the page??
| [deleted]
| edgyquant wrote:
| How does one even go about testing such a thing? Comparing it to
| Wikipedia articles? Even if it is factual does it spew the
| interpretations present in most Wikipedia articles?
| the_af wrote:
| The abstract of the article explains what they mean: they mean
| the LLM does not hallucinate (so much) and provides facts
| _based_ on Wikipedia. Absolute "truth" is not measured;
| rather, they measure how much the chatbot "sticks to the known
| facts" within Wikipedia. Since they are measuring this,
| presumably other chatbots and LLMs tend to hallucinate much
| more, providing "facts" not supported _by their training data_.
| em-bee wrote:
| now that is the interesting bit really. what makes the
| wikipedia based LLM hallucinate less?
|
| the only thing i can think of ad hoc is that wikipedia
| contains less conflicting or unclear information which helps
| to avoid the LLM getting confused. also the information is
| more organized, and it is clear which articles relate to each
| other.
|
| this would show what i think we already knew that LLMs can
| summarize the data they get but they can not evaluate or
| verify it.
| jojobas wrote:
| The most irritating effect is that the LLM somehow guesses
| what you want it to respond. Human-in-the-loop training is
| imperfect.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| After having seen what professional "fact checkers" accept as
| fact (and reject as misinformation) makes me similarly
| skeptical.
| the_af wrote:
| They are not fact checking "truth" but whether the chatbot
| spouts "facts" supported by Wikipedia. This is objective and
| much easier to check than capital letter Truth. Consider that
| when discussing ideological or political articles, what is
| "true" becomes nebulous.
| [deleted]
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Here is a direct link to the arxiv article:
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.14292
|
| _WikiChat: A Few-Shot LLM-Based Chatbot Grounded with Wikipedia_
| CSMastermind wrote:
| I'm not a scientist but isn't it suspect that they're both
| creating a new bot and a new evaluation metric for bots at the
| same time?
|
| Like we invented this new thing and this new measurement for
| evaluating it. It does great on the metric we just made up
| while we were making it.
| [deleted]
| theptip wrote:
| No, it's not suspect in and of itself. Often you need to
| develop a new benchmark when solving a new problem. It's
| common to see this in software engineering/CS papers too.
|
| Of course, one should always be critical of benchmarks, and
| there is an obvious opportunity for bias here that should be
| reviewed with care. But your phrasing suggests that this is
| unusual or actively suspicious, which it is not.
| rjtavares wrote:
| We invented the Turing Test decades ago. Since it became
| irrelevant with ChatGPT [1], we need new tests.
|
| [1]: We can discuss if ChatGPT passes the Turing Test or not,
| but I think we can now all agree that being able to have a
| convincing conversation is not a good test for intelligence.
| jpadkins wrote:
| [1] I disagree. I think we can agree there needs to be a
| refinement on the definition of intelligence, but I think
| LLMs passed the 1950 definition of general machine
| intelligence.
| [deleted]
| htag wrote:
| Here is this new thing, and here is how it is different than
| anything else.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| You know you could probably get really far just training an LLM
| on wikipedia and all linked citations, and nothing else
|
| The whole problem of wikipedia only being an "inch deep" on any
| given topic is basically solved if the LLM also has to read every
| cited work in full
|
| And maybe citation counts could affect exposure to that work
| during training
| kernal wrote:
| [flagged]
| flangola7 wrote:
| That's a strong accusation. What evidence do you have? What
| are the "ideological views" and why do you think they are
| baseless?
| jabbany wrote:
| A lot of full text for research (outside CS) is still locked up
| behind subscription paywalls. Plus, often times PDFs are not
| the best format to extract text out of.
|
| Interesting suggestion but probably a lot of practical
| limitations.
| slg wrote:
| > and all linked citations
|
| I wonder what percentage of Wikipedia citations are actually
| currently available on the internet. For example, here is
| today's featured article[1]. The majority of references on that
| pages are books, journals, magazines, television, and unlinked
| news articles that can't be easily accessed. Plus on more niche
| topics, it is common for the externally linked references to
| disappear over time.
|
| [1] -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kelly_(weapons_expert)
| harshreality wrote:
| archive dot org and dot is, sci-hub and libgen / zlib will
| cover a lot of those _text_ sources. Aren 't bots largely
| what's responsible for links being updated to point to
| archived sources? I've noticed archive links a lot lately.
|
| Someone doing serious AI training will mirror sci-hub and
| libgen first, so they'll already have a fair amount of the
| (good quality) referenced papers and educational books.
|
| Wikipedia (and citation count on google scholar for papers)
| could be used as a filter for which books and papers to train
| on first.
| wizofaus wrote:
| The ability to predict the expected answer to a given question
| isn't something I could see naturally falling out of those
| sources though, unlike an LLM trained on text from online
| forums and the like.
| awb wrote:
| That's basically Google's PageRank algorithm with Wikipedia as
| the 10/10 ranked source of truth.
| Julesman wrote:
| We can talk about alignment of LLMs. We can also talk about
| alignment of people who write Wikipedia. To imagine there is no
| bias is foolish and dangerous. More accurate isn't truth. More
| accurate for whom?
| msla wrote:
| Everything is biased. Everyone, every single human being, is
| aligned.
|
| That said, bias towards, and alignment with, verifiable reality
| is possible to achieve, and getting there partway is better
| than not at all:
|
| https://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html
|
| > [W]hen people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong.
| When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong.
| But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just
| as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is
| wronger than both of them put together.
| mellosouls wrote:
| _Everything is biased. Everyone, every single human being, is
| aligned._
|
| Of course but as discussed many times here before, Wikipedia
| leans left - presumably reflecting the statistical properties
| of the demographic of the people drawn to edit and moderate
| it - as implied by the comment you are replying to - and that
| can be a significant issue for topics (e.g cultural,
| historical, social, political etc) where that bias filters
| what might be assumed by the user to be objective answers.
|
| This isn't a left vs right thing either; there are plenty of
| publications, demographics and institutions that lean right.
| The problem is the transparency, awareness and communication
| of that bias when using them as sources for tools like this.
|
| In the underlying study, there is no mention of the word
| "bias".
|
| Here's a sample quote which is also concerning:
|
| _For recent topics, we look at the most edited Wikipedia
| articles 1 in the first four months of 2023. The number of
| edits is also a good proxy for how much interest there is
| around a certain topic._
|
| True - and it may also be an indication of a topic that is
| heavily contested. If the two (or more) views on the "truth"
| of the article are imbalanced, the chatbot will reflect that
| imbalance, and can therefore in no way be said to "outperform
| all baselines on factual accuracy".
|
| To be fair to the researchers, they do address related
| concerns and talk about avoiding some areas of discussion,
| but the headline here is extremely misleading.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > Wikipedia leans left
|
| That is subjective, and depends on where you think the
| "centre" is.
|
| I don't regard Wikipedia as reliable on any topic that is
| political or involves national history. Modern Wikipedia
| expects editors to support their edits with citations to
| "reliable sources", which means the mainstream press,
| mainly (because primary sources are deprecated). But the
| mainstream press is overwhelmingly right-wing, and left-
| wing papers and magazines are usually explicitly rejected
| as not reliable.
|
| On matters of politics and history, I always dig into the
| citations (unless I'm happy to get a sketchy version that
| isn't really accurate). But on most technical and
| humanities-based topics, the articles are usually quite
| good (and often much deeper than 1").
|
| There's still way too much stuff in articles that is not
| cited at all. That changes gradually, as editors delete
| uncited material, and others come along with suitable
| citations. I think it's getting better all the time.
| mellosouls wrote:
| _That is subjective, and depends on where you think the
| "centre" is._
|
| Not at all. Even wikipedia itself acknowledges it [1] -
| and you can bet the editors responsible for the bias were
| fighting tooth and nail against that admission - which
| gives some idea how unbalanced it must be in reality.
|
| _Modern Wikipedia expects editors to support their edits
| with citations to "reliable sources", which means the
| mainstream press..._
|
| And academia - don't forget academia, that bastion of the
| right.
|
| _...the mainstream press is overwhelmingly right-wing_
|
| That's ridiculous - The Guardian?? The Washington Post?
| New York Times?
|
| I think you've made a point about Wikipedia though, but
| perhaps not the one you intended...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideological_bias_on_Wik
| ipedia
| hammock wrote:
| "Breaking: Trivia bot trained on the dictionary spells words
| better than trivia bot trained on high school English papers"
| [deleted]
| bloqs wrote:
| The religious level hype that minor incremental and obvious
| improvements to existing technologies gets are patently absurd.
| l5870uoo9y wrote:
| It is an important information that you don't really need
| petabytes of common crawl data to make a highly accurate bot.
| There are a few other open source models that preform well with
| significantly smaller training data that OpenAI.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| >It is an important information that you don't really need
| petabytes of common crawl data to make a highly accurate bot.
| There are a few other open source models that preform well
| with significantly smaller training data that OpenAI.
|
| Sure, but the tradeoff is in generalization vs
| specialization. No one is impressed by the fact that ChatGPT
| is able to recite facts. Google can do that. Where it becomes
| interesting is in the general applicability of a single tool
| to thousands of possible domains.
| JimmyAustin wrote:
| That isn't what is being described here. They are just
| providing additional context to ChatGPT using its plugin API.
| It's still trained on large amounts of public text data.
| im3w1l wrote:
| I think there is a subtle hindsight bias here. Like if you
| asked someone yesterday "would grounding a chatbot on wikipedia
| make it do better?" I think many people would say that it
| sounds quite plausible. But if you ask instead "what are your
| top 10 ideas for making chatbots better at facts?" then it may
| not be so obvious.
| esjeon wrote:
| They are not bragging about the bot. They are bragging about
| how great the dictionary is. There's this subtle difference in
| the context.
| rvnx wrote:
| They are also the ones judging what is truth and neutrality.
|
| This is equivalent to saying:
|
| "A bot trained on the articles that we have written gives the
| answers that the writers of the articles expected"
| mcpackieh wrote:
| esjeon is simply wrong; this study is not touting the
| accuracy of wikipedia's knowledge. It's touting their bot's
| ability to accurately convey wikipedia's knowledge. It's
| very much about the qualities of their bot, not the
| qualities of wikipedia.
|
| https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.14292.pdf
| lacksconfidence wrote:
| It's both. My interpretation is that the study is as you
| say, but it's posted on the wikipedia signpost for the
| reasons esjeon says.
| TZubiri wrote:
| Wikimedia controls what goes in the signpost, they are
| very different from the actual community, and they are
| known for misrepresenting the intent of a project.
|
| When the Ukraine Russia war came out, they made a banner
| about a ukranian translation project that had existed for
| years and made it look like some project to support
| Ukraine, effectively breaking neutrality on the war
| subject (which was unrelated to the translation project.)
| notyourwork wrote:
| The old self-fulfilling prophecy.
| dmix wrote:
| It's also largely going to be the sum of it's sources since
| most (contentious) arguments on Wikis come down to who can
| cite the most articles, assuming edits get challenged in
| the first place.
|
| Wikipedia maintains a list of 'reliable' news sites:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Pe
| r...
| Jorge1o1 wrote:
| Wow, what a list. Eye-opening really.
|
| The American Conservative (yellow) ==> The American
| Conservative is published by the American Ideas
| Institute, an advocacy organisation. It is a self-
| identified opinionated source whose factual accuracy was
| questioned and many editors say that The American
| Conservative should not be used as a source for facts.
|
| The New Republic (green) ==> There is consensus that The
| New Republic is generally reliable. Most editors consider
| The New Republic biased or opinionated. Opinions in the
| magazine should be attributed.
|
| This seems like a somewhat arbitrary double standard to
| be applying. As a reader of both news sources they are
| both biased, opinionated sources, and I don't think you
| can trust one more than the other. But one is green with
| "be careful this might be biased" and the other is yellow
| for pretty much the same reason.
| hughesjj wrote:
| Bias != Reliability.
|
| There's a reason "The Atlantic" is listed green even
| though it's conservative. Hell they list the Christian
| Science monitor as green for reliability (as they should
| imo), I don't think Wikipedia is demonstrating a bias
| based on any particular ideology in their sources on this
| list.
|
| This wiki list is a list of sources by reliability. If
| you only publish stories which support your bias, but
| those stories are scientifically sound and don't omit
| context, I don't see the problem with using them as a
| source regardless of bias.
|
| If you only allow sources from reliable sources aligned
| with a particular bias to the exclusion of reliable
| sources from another alignment, that would be an issue,
| but I don't see evidence of such here.
|
| The problem isn't the bias. The problem is the
| factuality.
| mr_toad wrote:
| * * *
| next_xibalba wrote:
| > There's a reason "The Atlantic" is listed green even
| though it's conservative.
|
| The Atlantic is in no way conservative leaning.
|
| https://www.allsides.com/news-source/atlantic
|
| https://adfontesmedia.com/the-atlantic-bias-and-
| reliability/
|
| https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-atlantic/
|
| https://www.biasly.com/sources/the-atlantic-bias-rating/
| mandmandam wrote:
| Wikileaks on zero retractions, and most anti-war news
| sources: red / black.
|
| Lest anyone think the problem is that Wikileaks is 'left
| biased'.
| Jorge1o1 wrote:
| I think the biggest issue is not even the left/right or
| political bias of Wikipedia but rather the fact that some
| committee of wiki editors decide along what seem to be
| fairly arbitrary/subjective lines that some sources are
| reliable and others aren't.
|
| And then those claims make their way into Wikipedia where
| they inevitably (even though they shouldn't) are relied
| upon by students, politicians, journalists, who then
| perpetuate the claim.
|
| https://xkcd.com/978/
| [deleted]
| wpietri wrote:
| It's not a committee, it's not arbitrary, and "arbitrary"
| and "subjective" mean two very different things.
|
| Reliability from a fact-checking perspective is a pretty
| specific thing, and a thing that is vital to Wikipedia as
| an open-source, anyone-can-edit encyclopedia. This can
| correlate with political views in particular times and
| places, but does not broadly correlate with either left
| or right. E.g., after the Russian revolution, we saw the
| left using Pravda as a vehicle to "indoctrinate" and
| "encourage unity of thought". [1] But a significant part
| of the current US right has frequently taken the approach
| of "flooding the zone with shit" [2].
|
| [1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Pravda
|
| [2]
| https://www.google.com/search?q=flood+the+zone+with+shit
| mcpackieh wrote:
| More like it's WASP establishment biased. Like the
| NYTimes.
| mr-ron wrote:
| 'factual accuracy was questioned' vs 'The New Republic is
| generally reliable'
| mcpackieh wrote:
| Heh. The glass is missing some water vs the glass is
| mostly full of water.
|
| (Not commentary on either of those media orgs btw, I
| don't follow nor have any opinion on either of those one
| way or the other.)
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Have you considered that conservative sources have always
| been less accurate by dint of failure to accept new data
| that contradicts existing bias.
|
| You can argue that all parties have biases but if you
| look at modern conservatism it's worldview is
| increasingly wildly divergent from reality. If your
| publication desires the readership of people who are
| obliged to stand in a puddle and deny being wet you shall
| have to follow them at least to the perimeter of
| Neverland and spend at least some of your breath speaking
| of pirates and fairies. Mentioning the puddle will also
| be verboten.
|
| Reading several of the articles on the front page I noted
| a completely incoherent takes on Ukraine and birth
| control for instance. It's not the outright horror show
| of Fox news nor is it what one would consider objective
| or news. It's essentially 100% op eds by your least
| incoherent older relative.
| jjav wrote:
| > the other is yellow for pretty much the same reason
|
| I have read neither, so don't have an opinion on them.
|
| But going by the descriptions quoted, it doesn't seem to
| be for the same reason.
|
| Both are listed as biased/opinionated, but for The
| American Conservative it additionally says "factual
| accuracy was questioned", which would make it less
| trustworthy as a reference.
| TZubiri wrote:
| Also see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FUTON_bias
|
| There's also some policy pages that talk about othet
| potential biases like technical biases. There is
| awareness
| thunkshift1 wrote:
| X doubt
| zby wrote:
| This sounds like a paradox - but it is not. You don't give the
| bot the answer you expect - but only the ground facts, it
| generates the answer based on these facts by itself.
|
| This is a RAG system - and you need to treat it as a whole - it
| is an question answering machine that remembers the whole
| wikipedia.
|
| By the way just today I wrote a blogpost about the common
| misconception that to teach an LLM new facts you need to
| finetune it: https://zzbbyy.substack.com/p/why-you-need-rag-
| not-finetunin...
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Lol, I wonder how many of their fact checkers silently used
| Wikipedia to verify the facts outputted by the AI.
| EGreg wrote:
| And how is factual accuracy determined? Using the exact same
| sources as Wikipedia, right?
| [deleted]
| freitzkriesler2 wrote:
| [citation needed]
|
| And no you can't cite Wikipedia ;)
| the_af wrote:
| Easy-peasy, here's the citation:
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.14292
|
| Looks like a legit paper.
| guestbest wrote:
| That value was calculated and verified using Wikipedia?
| ogou wrote:
| "this first draft is probably not solid enough to be cited in
| Wikipedia"
| tcbawo wrote:
| I hope somebody makes a game of Trivial Pursuit with generated
| questions sourced from Wikipedia.
| ec109685 wrote:
| "All baselines" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.
| spacephysics wrote:
| This is great and all, but we still run into the problem with
| political biases embedded in the source data [0]
|
| Musk's AI's aim is to get to the truth, not eliminate biases
| retroactively. I think that's a noble goal, politics aside.
|
| I agree with him that teaching an AI to lie is a dangerous path.
| Currently it's probably not exactly akin to lying, but it's close
| enough to be on that path.
|
| We should find a way to feed source material from all "biases" if
| you will, and have it produce what's closest to reality. It's
| obviously easier said than done, but I don't think the AI Czar VP
| Harris aims to do this.
|
| If we're too divided or hellbent on pushing our own agenda, it'll
| be a bad outcome for all.
|
| Unfortunately the differences we have are at a very fundamental
| level that really is a question of how reality is perceived, and
| what we consider meaningful. The difference of if something by
| its nature has meaning, or if we give meaning to it
| culturally/societally.
|
| The former is a more "conservative" (personality wise, not
| political) view.
|
| The later is more of, "everything that has meaning is based off
| the meaning we say it has, thus we can ascribe the level of
| meaning to that or other things as we wish". The idea that many
| things are social constructs, and we can change those as we wish
| to craft what we'd like to see.
|
| I'm probably doing a poor job of wording it, but this fundamental
| difference in perception is going to very quickly be at the
| forefront of AI ethics.
|
| [0]
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideological_bias_on_Wikipedi...
| mrangle wrote:
| The problem that Musk is going to run into is that civilization
| blossoms from deeply rooted lies.
|
| Apart from necessary lies that lie at the core mechanics of
| civilization, anything remotely political has been long been
| vulnerable to outrageous grand lies that enjoy as much pressure
| as it takes to maintain them. Wikipedia is valuable apart from
| any political topic. More topics are political than many would
| believe.
|
| They are going to make AI lie, as there isn't a choice in the
| matter. One major future problem will be the strategic war
| (military, business, etc) advantage of AI that is beyond the
| reach of censors. The reasonably accurate conclusion is likely
| that private and DoD AI won't be trained on lies, but all
| others will be.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Any lie that you can identity as a lie, an AI can be trained
| not to tell.
| akolbe wrote:
| By the same token, any AI can be trained to withhold any
| truth identified as inconvenient. :/
| nitwit005 wrote:
| > We should find a way to feed source material from all
| "biases" if you will, and have it produce what's closest to
| reality.
|
| Can't help but suspect you'll end up with an AI that
| confidently reports that Jesus was an extra-terrestrial, and
| the world is controlled by a secret cabal of lizard people.
|
| If you look into rare diseases, you'll find the counter
| intuitive idea that rare disease is common. Each disease is
| individually rare, but there are so many of them, that a lot of
| people have them in total. Human beliefs are sort of similar.
| There's a huge volume of strange beliefs.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| Literally suggesting we enshrine the Balance fallacy into our
| conception of truth:
|
| https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Balance_fallacy
| jakearmitage wrote:
| How did they manage to get it to stop hallucinating? I can't
| prevent my llama-index based chatbot from making up absurd things
| from my own documents, even though I've been trying to restrict
| it to that specific area of knowledge.
| jokoon wrote:
| People on the internet still often criticizes wikipedia when I
| link to it, I don't understand why.
|
| It's true that it's not good enough for academic work (is it?),
| but it's largely enough for everything else.
| Outright0133 wrote:
| "Wikipedia Is Badly Biased":
| https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/
|
| By cofounder Larry Sanger
| ravenstine wrote:
| There's some atrociously written articles on Wikipedia even in
| the year 2023.
|
| Case example:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_intimacy
|
| The majority of the article is woman-centered, even though
| there's no evidence that it's highly gender-biased, and the
| only information pertaining to men is that if they have fear-
| of-intimacy then they might be a sex offender.
|
| Otherwise, the article barely communicates anything meaningful.
| How do attachment types relate to fear-of-intimacy? Are they
| causative or merely correlative?
|
| Then there's of course poor writing throughout such as this:
|
| > Fear of intimacy has three defining features: content which
| represents the ability to communicate personal information
| [...]
|
| What the hell does that mean? "Content?" Like a YouTube video
| or something?
|
| This is just the latest example I've come across, and happens
| to be one of the least encyclopedic bodies I've text I've ever
| read. So much of what I read on Wikipedia is of a similar low
| caliber. People scan over Wikipedia articles but don't think
| critically, in part because Wikipedia has devolved into writing
| that can't decide what its audience is and won't get to the
| point. As I've said before, check out the Talk sections of the
| pages you visit, and you'll find some of the most arrogant
| responses from Wikipedia's inner circle of editors.
|
| What makes me LOL the most is supposedly scientific articles
| that are written as if there is no debate behind a scientific
| idea, despite there being no such thing in science as "case
| closed." Wikipedia often behaves like it's a peer-reviewed
| scientific journal, yet has none of the chops to act as such.
| Anything that you read on Wikipedia that suggest that there is
| "no evidence" for something is likely to be some buffoon's
| ignorant opinion on the actual literature.
|
| And no, I can't just "edit" Wikipedia to fix these issues. I've
| tried. Both my home IP address and my phone IP address is
| banned from them, despite my having never set up an account
| with them.
| delusional wrote:
| > > Fear of intimacy has three defining features: content
| which represents the ability to communicate personal
| information [...]
|
| > What the hell does that mean? "Content?" Like a YouTube
| video or something?
|
| It's taken directly from the source cited (page 2 of
| https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Development-and-
| Valida...). I'm not an expert in the field and have no idea
| if this is a good paper, but it has received 267 citations
| which does convey some impact.
|
| > The fear-of-intimacy construct takes into account three
| defining features: (a) content, the communication of personal
| information;(b) emotional valence, strong feelings about the
| personal information exchanged; and (c) vulnerability, high
| regard for the intimate other. We propose that it is only
| with the coexistence of content, emotional valence, and
| vulnerability that intimacy can exist. Consider, for example,
| the customer who talks to an unknown bartender about his or
| her troubles. Although there may be personal content
|
| It's clear that it's not the noun "content" but the
| adjective, defined as "pleased with your situation and not
| hoping for change or improvement".
|
| I hope the Wikipedia editors are more literate and willing to
| research than that. I don't think I want to read your version
| of wikipedia.
| marcellus23 wrote:
| > It's clear that it's not the noun "content" but the
| adjective, defined as "pleased with your situation and not
| hoping for change or improvement".
|
| No, it's not the adjective. The other 2 features are nouns,
| so this one must also be a noun, since it's a parallel
| construct. Also, they're all "features", so they have to be
| nouns by definition. And what would the adjective even be
| describing?
|
| In this case, the "content" refers (I guess) to the content
| that's being communicated, though it's poorly phrased.
|
| The Wikipedia excerpt is badly written, whether you agree
| with the GP or not about the article being biased towards
| women. It's not even a paraphrase of the original source,
| which claims the content is the communication itself,
| whereas the article claims the content "represents the
| ability to communicate personal information" -- which is
| pretty meaningless.
| jrflowers wrote:
| >The majority of the article is woman-centered, even though
| there's no evidence that it's highly gender-biased...
|
| If you were able to edit this wiki page, what particular
| studies about fear of intimacy in men would you cite in the
| sections you add?
|
| Also, is this bit
|
| > Anything that you read on Wikipedia that suggest that there
| is "no evidence" for something is likely to be some buffoon's
| ignorant opinion on the actual literature
|
| meant to be ironic?
| delusional wrote:
| What an absolute trashfire of a blogpost.
|
| It's written in the tone of a sore loser. A person who fought
| for regressive policies, against people with better arguments
| and more accurate facts. A person who now, having lost the
| fight for the policy, retreats into their echo chamber and
| decries the debate as "not making room for my facts."
|
| It's apparently impossible to write any neutral statement that
| does not receive 100% unanimous support from every single
| person on the planet earth:
|
| > A great many Christians would take issue with such
| statements, which means they are not neutral for that reason
| alone
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| 79a6ed87 wrote:
| It's even blatantly worse in the Spanish Wikipedia
| bawolff wrote:
| Larry Sanger is not exactly a neutral source on wikipedia. He
| is behind multiple competing projects, so might be financially
| motivated to shit-talk wikipedia.
| Vicinity9635 wrote:
| Trying to change the subject to Larry Sanger is an ad hominem
| fallacy. Address the content of the message, not the speaker.
|
| For example, is this accurate or isn't it?
|
| > _Examples have become embarrassingly easy to find. The
| Barack Obama article completely fails to mention many well-
| known scandals: Benghazi, the IRS scandal, the AP phone
| records scandal, and Fast and Furious, to say nothing of
| Solyndra or the Hillary Clinton email server scandal--or, of
| course, the developing "Obamagate" story in which Obama was
| personally involved in surveilling Donald Trump. A fair
| article about a major political figure certainly must include
| the bad with the good. Beyond that, a neutral article must
| fairly represent competing views on the figure by the major
| parties._
|
| And if so, then wikipedia is indeed badly biased. Whether or
| not Larry Sanger is isn't that interesting. But a bias at
| wikipedia - a source blindly trusted by millions - is a very
| interesting and concerning state of affairs.
| bawolff wrote:
| > Trying to change the subject to Larry Sanger is an ad
| hominem fallacy. Address the content of the message, not
| the speaker.
|
| I disagree. This thread started with "By cofounder Larry
| Sanger" - so the argument started with an implication that
| larry sangar should be listened to due to who he is. You
| can't both claim his argument holds extra weight due to who
| he is well also claiming its irrelavent who he is. You have
| to pick one.
|
| As far as the obama article goes - im not an american and i
| havent heard of those scandals before, so honestly i dont
| know if their ommision is appropriate or not (it should be
| noted that libyan intervention is mentioned in his
| article).
|
| However, i think this is asking the wrong question. Nothing
| is 100% neutral. I don't doubt you can find biased things
| in wikipedia. It is made by humans not revealed through
| divine revelation. The important question in my mind is how
| does it stack up against other sources. Is it mostly
| neutral relative to other information sources? That's how i
| would like to judge it.
| Outright0133 wrote:
| [dead]
| nitwit005 wrote:
| > In another place, the article simply asserts, "the gospels
| are not independent nor consistent records of Jesus' life." A
| great many Christians would take issue with such statements,
| which means they are not neutral for that reason alone.
|
| I'd love to see his article on Jesus that absolutely no one
| would "take issue with".
| Perceval wrote:
| While I don't think it's possible to write an article on a
| controversial subject that no one will take issue with, it is
| possible to write with a generally Neutral Point of View,
| which has been a guiding principle of Wikipedia since the
| very early days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neut
| ral_point_of_vie...
|
| Making a flat statement that the gospels are "not independent
| nor consistent" is not settled or universal assessment. An
| article written in NPOV would discuss the variety of citeable
| interpretations and the debate between them over time.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Larry hates Wikipedia because Jimbo Wales got all the credit.
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