[HN Gopher] Making sure AI serves people and knowledge stays human
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Making sure AI serves people and knowledge stays human
Author : benbreen
Score : 75 points
Date : 2025-09-30 19:23 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (diff.wikimedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (diff.wikimedia.org)
| CharlesW wrote:
| I wonder if the timing of this announcement with regard to Musk's
| announcement of Grokipedia is coincidental.
| https://gizmodo.com/elon-musks-wikipedia-competitor-is-going...
| physarum_salad wrote:
| Yes, I am interested to see if Grokpedia can live up to the
| initial hype. As much as I dislike wikipedia it is a difficult
| thing to get right. In particular where lots of political and
| business interests (and others, etc) apply pressure to manicure
| pages. With everyone banning everyone they don't like it may
| just turn into another boring partisan internet split.
| mostlysimilar wrote:
| > As much as I dislike wikipedia
|
| What specifically do you dislike about Wikipedia?
| physarum_salad wrote:
| It is a great example of "objectivism" where on the surface
| it seems neutral and rational but actually is the subject
| of intense motivations that corrupt the content. This is
| particularly true for anything related to politics,
| history, nation states, celebrity tech bros, and so on. An
| average article on "the history of bicycles" is not a
| problem and not what I am referring to ofc.
|
| For a different reason it is host to a wide range of
| superficial treatments of scientific and medical
| information. Which is not ideal. See scholarpedia for a
| better alternative for this kind of information (although
| its not well populated).
| paulhebert wrote:
| Do you have specific examples where you think the biases
| show?
| physarum_salad wrote:
| For example, the page on Adult neurogenesis had an
| overreliance on early and limited evidence in 2010s with
| lots of editing wars occurring by academics. Then it got
| shifted to "controversial" which is better but the
| process for dealing with new scientific results is not
| ideal.
| foxes wrote:
| You really think Elon Musk is going to make a non biased
| wikipedia??
| physarum_salad wrote:
| Definitely not! It will be better on certain topics and
| worse on others. It is all down to whether you think Grok
| is more thorough with controversial topics, scientific
| and medical information, etc compared with the current
| human edit-a-thon on wikipedia.
| miltonlost wrote:
| What topics, specifically, will Grokpedia be better on?
| Which race has the lowest IQs? Whether trans people are
| mentally ill and should be committed? Whether a CEO
| should be able to run 5 different companies while on
| ketamine? Was Hitler really all that bad?
| MountDoom wrote:
| Pages about companies and contemporary politics make up a
| relatively small percentage of Wikipedia. And what's the
| realistic alternative? These pages are always going to
| represent opinions. Traditional encyclopedias usually
| represent views closer to the establishment mainstream, but
| that's just a function of who gets a job at Britannica versus
| who has the time to edit Wikipedia all day.
|
| Will Elonpedia be better in that respect? Its owner is not
| exactly known from having a healthy distance to internet
| culture wars.
|
| More importantly, even if all these pages disappear
| overnight, Wikipedia is still extremely valuable and
| beneficial.
| RajT88 wrote:
| This is old hat. There are many Wikipedia alternatives which
| are based on the idea that Wikipedia is not
| conservative/hilarious/libertarian enough:
|
| Let's take a spin through what the various Wikis have written
| about Musk:
|
| https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Elon_Musk
|
| https://www.conservapedia.com/Elon_Musk
|
| https://en.uncyclopedia.co/wiki/Elon_Musk
|
| http://www.scholarpedia.org/ - no Musk article
|
| https://citizendium.org/wiki/Elon_Musk - nothing here (yet)
|
| ... and so on.
|
| Honorable Mention to Encyclopedia Dramatica which had some
| funny parody content.
| physarum_salad wrote:
| scholarpedia is the best because it has almost zero biography
| pages/knuckleheaded political slants. However, it seems to
| have just have stopped in its tracks c. 2008
| imiric wrote:
| Ugh. I miss Encarta.
| throwaway198846 wrote:
| The best thing wikimedia can do is make sure Wikipedia is
| unbiased as possible in sensitive topics - not just really on
| random online editors to notice things but to actually actively
| check for biases and omissions.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| I'm not sure if moving from the biases of wikipedia editors to
| the biases of wikipedia staff would necessarily be a positive
| IshKebab wrote:
| It depends. Often staff are a lot more even handed than
| volunteer editors because you have to be a bit weird and
| _love_ moderating to do it voluntarily, but it 's pretty
| normal to do it as a job.
|
| StackOverflow has this problem (or had, before it died) - the
| mods were _hugely_ invested in closing questions for
| basically any reason, so normal users ended up hating it and
| the company couldn 't make any changes to improve things
| because whenever they tried the mods revolted.
|
| It's not as much of an issue with Wikipedia because most
| Wikipedia users aren't actually editing articles and running
| into any moderation issues.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Wikipedia is in very real danger when it comes to AI, because AI
| is too stupid to understand that straightforward reasoning about
| facts that are undisputed by any of the parties involved
| constitute "original research," but that labeling everyone who
| doesn't agree with them "right-wing" is actually just objective
| observation, one that is so uncontroversial that it should be
| applied to living persons (who strenuously object) as an almost
| _heroic_ priority.
|
| Unleashing any current model, as it is with no specialized
| training, on your average Wikipedia article would generate
| evaluations that would make a lot of people who were ridiculed
| until banned on the talk pages seem in retrospect like they may
| have been treated a bit unfairly. I'm sure the LLMs would wonder
| why large sections of articles have disappeared repeatedly, or
| why everyone's opinions on trans people are so darn _notable._
|
| The best thing Wikipedia can do is have a public legislative
| process, between actual people with names, rather than a
| "consensus" rationalization for centralized decisionmaking by a
| star chamber. The second best thing it can do is abandon any
| attempt at objectivity, and become a guide to sources: if I think
| 9/11 was a conspiracy, I want to know what claims that other
| people who believe that are making, what evidence they are
| offering, how to find more detail and secondary sources, and how
| to find the best evidence that disagrees with those claims. I
| don't want to know which newspapers Wikipedia editors prefer.
|
| I'm not interested in Wikipedia management's opinion of what
| consensus is. According to Sanger, 85% of them are anonymous;
| they could literally be LLMs themselves.
| chris_wot wrote:
| Wikipedia is very much in maintenance mode now. The vast majority
| of editors are interested in tweaking things like external links
| and categories. Some people (many!) are overly invested in the
| admin's noticeboard.
|
| If you are a content creator, good luck. You aren't really
| valued.
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(page generated 2025-09-30 23:00 UTC)