[HN Gopher] Generative AI and Wikipedia editing: What we learned...
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Generative AI and Wikipedia editing: What we learned in 2025
Author : ColinWright
Score : 226 points
Date : 2026-01-31 21:14 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (wikiedu.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (wikiedu.org)
| ColinWright wrote:
| The title I've chosen here is carefully selected to highlight one
| of the main points. It comes (lightly edited for length) from
| this paragraph:
|
| _Far more insidious, however, was something else we discovered:_
|
| More than two-thirds of these articles failed verification.
|
| _That means the article contained a plausible-sounding sentence,
| cited to a real, relevant-sounding source. But when you read the
| source it's cited to, the information on Wikipedia does not exist
| in that specific source. When a claim fails verification, it's
| impossible to tell whether the information is true or not. For
| most of the articles Pangram flagged as written by GenAI, nearly
| every cited sentence in the article failed verification._
| dang wrote:
| Submitted title was "For most flagged articles, nearly every
| cited sentence failed verification".
|
| I agree, that's interesting, and you've aptly expressed it in
| your comment here.
| the_fall wrote:
| FWIW, this is a fairly common problem on Wikipedia in political
| articles, predating AI. I encourage you to give it a try and
| verify some citations. A lot of them turn out to be more or
| less bogus.
|
| I'm not saying that AI isn't making it worse, but bad-faith
| editing is commonplace when it comes to hot-button topics.
| mjburgess wrote:
| Any articles where newspapers are the main source are
| basically just propaganda. An encyclopaedia should not be in
| the business of laundering yellow journalism into what is
| supposed to be a tertiary resource. If they banned this
| practice, that would immediately deal with this issue.
| mmooss wrote:
| A blanket dimsissal is a simple way to avoid dealing with
| complexity, here both in understanding the problem and
| forming solutions. Obviously not all newspapers are
| propaganda and at the same time not all can be trusted; not
| everything in the same newspaper or any other news source
| is of the same accuracy; nothing is completely trustworthy
| or completely untrustworthy.
|
| I think accepting that gets us to the starting line. Then
| we need to apply a lot of critical thought to sometimes
| difficult judgments.
|
| IMHO quality newspapers do an excellent job - generally
| better than any other category of source on current
| affairs, but far from perfect. I remember a recent article
| for which they intervied over 100 people, got ahold of
| secret documents, read thousands of pages, consulted
| experts .... That's not a blog post or Twitter take, or
| even a HN comment :), but we still need to examine it
| critically to find the value and the flaws.
| abacadaba wrote:
| > Obviously not all newspapers are propaganda
|
| citation needed
| tbossanova wrote:
| There is literally no source without bias. You just need
| to consider whether you think a sources biases are
| reasonable or not
| troyvit wrote:
| See you should work for a newspaper. You have the
| gumption.
| the_fall wrote:
| That's not what I'm saying. I mean citations that aren't
| citations: a "source" that doesn't discuss the topic at all
| or makes a different claim.
| snigsnog wrote:
| That is probably 95% of wikipedia articles. Their goal is
| to create a record of what journalists consider to be true.
| chr15m wrote:
| People here are claiming that this is true of humans as well.
| Apart from the fact that bad content can be generated much
| faster with LLMs, what's your feeling about that criticism?
| It's there any measure of how many submissions before LLMs make
| unsubstantiated claims?
|
| Thank you for publishing this work. Very useful reminder to
| verify sources ourselves!
| chrisjj wrote:
| So, a small proportion of articles were detected as bot-written,
| and a large proportion of those failed validation.
|
| What if in fact a large proportion of articles were bot-written,
| but only the unverifiable ones were bad enough to be detected?
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| Human editors, I suspect, would pick up the "tells" of
| generated text, although as we know, there's a lot of false
| positives in that space.
|
| But it looks like Pangram is a text classifying NN trained
| using a technique where they get a human to write a body of
| text on a subject, and then get various LLMs to write a body of
| text on the same subject, which strikes me as a good way to
| approach the problem. Not that I'm in anyway qualified to
| properly understand ML.
|
| More details here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.14873
| candiddevmike wrote:
| I feel like this is such a tragedy of the commons for the LLM
| providers. Wikipedia probably makes up a huge bulk of their
| dataset, why taint it? Would be interesting if there was some
| kind of "you shall not use our platform on Wikipedia" stance
| adopted.
| ohyoutravel wrote:
| I don't think it's the providers doing this, it's the awful
| users. They're doing the same thing on GitHub. It's maddening.
| asadotzler wrote:
| I don't think Lockheed Martin or Raytheon are doing this,
| it's the awful pilots and intercept operators launching
| missiles into Palestinian homes. I don't think Rostec
| Corporation is doing this. It's only the grunts on the ground
| pressing the button sending heavy munitions into crowds of
| Ukranian civilians.
|
| These mega corporations are entirely free from blame and
| you're gonna see to it none of us question their role, right?
| ohyoutravel wrote:
| It's a bad analogy. In this case Lockheed isn't building a
| killer drone and then finding a market for it, nation
| states are sending requirements to Lockheed based on what
| they want to do. Hence the label "defense contractor."
|
| I think your analogy would hold if slop creators were
| creating requirements and contracting OpenAI to build the
| thing that lets them slop edit Wikipedia and GitHub issues.
| But since they aren't, this is breaking the analogy.
|
| You are still within the edit window to change up your
| analogy (but unfortunately not to completely delete your
| post), so you have a little time to make it coherent.
| tehjoker wrote:
| I suspect that this is a very simplistic view of how R&D
| and the revolving door work.
|
| For example, previous Secretary of War Lloyd Austin was
| on the board of Ratheon
|
| https://www.opensecrets.org/revolving-door/lloyd-
| austin/summ...
| ohyoutravel wrote:
| You're not wrong at all, and I agree, but it was an
| analogy for someone who was comparing defense contracting
| companies with a regular saas company. In any case, for
| these purposes I don't think we need to address all edge
| cases.
| parineum wrote:
| > I don't think Lockheed Martin or Raytheon are doing this,
| it's the awful pilots and intercept operators launching
| missiles into Palestinian homes.
|
| Missiles have a lot of legitimate and good uses. They sold
| to the only entity that can buy them, the government, then
| redistributed from there.
|
| Missiles will be created because there is financial
| incentive to do so. If you really want to make the point
| you're trying to make, at least blame the people who create
| the financial incentive or the people giving orders. You've
| omitted the obvious most responsible party.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| It would be random individuals.
| kingstnap wrote:
| Wikipedia having incorrect citations is way older than LLMs. As
| many other people have pointed out in this thread, if you start
| pulling strings a lot of what people write starts falling
| apart.
|
| Its not even unique to Wikipedia. Its really not difficult to
| find very misleading statements cited through a citation that
| doesn't even support the claim when you check the original.
| acdha wrote:
| This is like saying handing out machine guns is no big change
| because people have been shooting arrows for a long time. At
| some point volume becomes the story once it overwhelms the
| community's ability to correct errors.
| parineum wrote:
| > once it overwhelms the community's ability to correct
| errors.
|
| I think the point is that it already has.
| simianwords wrote:
| I find it very interesting that the main competitor to Wikipedia
| which is Grokipedia is taking a 180 degree approach being AI
| first.
| ktzar wrote:
| Didn't know about Grokipedia, I've just opened an article in it
| about Spain, scrolled to a random paragraph, and the
| information in it is plain wrong:
|
| From https://grokipedia.com/page/Spain#terrain-and-landforms >
| Spain's peninsular terrain is dominated by the Meseta Central,
| a vast interior plateau covering about two-thirds of the
| country's land area, with elevations ranging from 610 to 760
| meters and averaging around 660 meters
|
| Segovia is at 1.000 meters, and so is most of the top half of
| the "Meseta". https://en-gb.topographic-
| map.com/map-763q/Spain/?center=41....
|
| I still stand on not trusting any of what AI spits out, be it
| code or text. And it takes me usually longer to check that
| everything is ok than doing it myself, but my brain is enticed
| by the "effort shortcut" that AI promised.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Grok does cite that claim as being from
| https://countrystudies.us/spain/30.htm a page in Eric Solsten
| and Sandra W. Meditz, editors. Spain: A Country Study.
| Washington: GPO for the Library of Congress, 1988.
|
| The nice thing about grokipedia is that if you have counter
| examples like that you can provide it as evidence to change
| it and it will rewrite the article to be more clear.
| malfist wrote:
| You know what other site you can provide evidence to and
| change to be more correct?
| homebrewer wrote:
| I don't ever edit English wikipedia because my English is
| not nearly up to the standard, and suggestions for
| improvement (worthwhile IMO) are usually ignored. Grok at
| least won't ignore you. (I tend to post suggestions to
| unpopular pages with sparse edit history, which is
| probably the reason for them going unnoticed.)
| 6510 wrote:
| I use to frequent irc channels and forums where no such
| thing as an old question existed. Someone asked an
| interesting question on irc and days or weeks later a
| response would happen. On forums the response could be
| more than a year "delayed". Gradually things shifted to
| newer new new news that couldn't possibly be new enough.
| Then debates happen where people sometimes link to the
| vastly superior olds. Wikipedia finally caught up and
| questions are no longer ignored. In stead they are
| archived long before an ignored status could be earned.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Not Wikipedia as Wikipedia doesn't care about evidence.
| Those people care about reputable secondary sources and
| will ignore you when point out evidence that contradicts
| such sources.
| nl wrote:
| I'm not an expert on the geography of Spain, and it's rare
| that I'd defend Grokipedia but in this case I think it is
| correct.
|
| Meseta Central mean _central tableland_. Segovia is on the
| edge of the mountain range that surrounds that tableland, but
| often referred to as part of it. This is fuzzy though.
|
| Wikipedia says: _The Meseta Central (lit. 'central
| tableland', sometimes referred to in English as Inner
| Plateau) is one of the basic geographical units of the
| Iberian Peninsula. It consists of a plateau covering a large
| part of the latter's interior._[1]
|
| Looking at the map you linked the flat part _is_ between 610
| to 760 meters.
|
| Finally, when speaking about the Iberian Peninsula Wikipedia
| itself includes this:
|
| > "About three quarters of that rough octagon is the Meseta
| Central, a vast plateau ranging from 610 to 760 m in
| altitude."[2]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meseta_Central
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iberian_Peninsula
| anthk wrote:
| Spaniard here. Spain it's tricky, it's both 'flat' with the
| meseta and the 2nd most mountainous country in Europe. I am
| not kidding, look at a heigth map. It has a plateau...
| surrounded by mountains and with a bigass sierra at mid-
| North (Picos de Europa).
| Sharlin wrote:
| Main competitor? I'm pretty sure that Uncyclopedia is a more
| relevant competitor to Wikipedia than Grokipedia. Likely more
| accurate, too.
| simianwords wrote:
| In some time it will become a serious alternative.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Serious alternative if what you're after is false
| information, certainly.
| simianwords wrote:
| What false information?
| bawolff wrote:
| Maybe, maybe not. There are a ton of failed attempts at
| competing with Wikipedia out there. Whether grokipedia is
| one remains to be seen.
| bawolff wrote:
| > I find it very interesting that the main competitor to
| Wikipedia which is Grokipedia
|
| Encyclopedia Britannica (the website not the printed book) is
| the main competitor to Wikipedia and gets an order of magnitude
| more traffic than grokipedia. Right now grokipedia is the new
| kid on the block. It has yet to be seen if its just a novelty
| or if it has staying power but either way it still has a ways
| to go before its Wikipedia's primary competitor.
| oblio wrote:
| That thing is "the main competitor to Wikipedia" in the same
| way I'm the main competitor for the Olympic 100m race. I mean,
| both I and the winner have legs so it's going to be a close
| race, right?
| simianwords wrote:
| It's on its way to becoming more popular and a clear
| competitor to it. Just a matter of time.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| Is that "more popular" in the sense of McDonald's popular?
| simianwords wrote:
| Yeah so?
| shmeeed wrote:
| No, it's more the "a thousand flies can't be wrong" type.
| SCNR
| alt227 wrote:
| Doesnt really matter the reason why does it?
|
| If more people use it then it is more popular. Simple
| metric.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| Well, kinda ...
|
| Approximately 3.2m Americans drink Hard Kombucha.
|
| Approximately 5m Americans use Cocaine.
|
| Simple metric.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| Wouldn't touch that grokipedia pos with your bargepole ... let
| alone mine.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _That means the article contained a plausible-sounding
| sentence, cited to a real, relevant-sounding source. But when you
| read the source it's cited to, the information on Wikipedia does
| not exist in that specific source. When a claim fails
| verification, it's impossible to tell whether the information is
| true or not._
|
| This has been a rampant problem on Wikipedia always. I can't seem
| to find any indicator that this has increased recently? Because
| they're only even investigating articles flagged as potentially
| AI. So what's the control baseline rate here?
|
| Applying correct citations is actually really hard work, even
| when you know the material thoroughly. I just assume people write
| stuff they know from their field, then mostly look to add the
| minimum number of plausible citations after the fact, and then
| most people never check them, and everyone seems to just accept
| it's better than nothing. But I also suppose it depends on how
| niche the page is, and which field it's in.
| crabmusket wrote:
| There was a fun example of this that happened live during a
| recent episode of the Changelog[1]. The hosts noted that they
| were incorrectly described as being "from GitHub" with a link
| to an episode of their podcast which didn't substantiate that
| claim. Their guest fixed the citation as they recorded[2].
|
| [1]: https://changelog.com/podcast/668#transcript-265
|
| [2]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Eugen_Rochko&diff...
| chr15m wrote:
| How did they know it was not LLM generated?
| michaelt wrote:
| The false claim was added 7 Nov 2022 [1] while chatgpt
| wasn't released until 30 Nov 2022.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Eugen_Rochko
| &diff...
| mmcwilliams wrote:
| Not that it's likely but there were publicly-released
| LLMs, like GPT-J, that were released in 2021.
| mmooss wrote:
| When I've checked Wikipedia citations I've found so much brazen
| deception - citations that obviously don't support the claim -
| that I don't have confidence in Wikipedia.
|
| > Applying correct citations is actually really hard work, even
| when you know the material thoroughly.
|
| Why do you find it hard? Scholarly references can be sources
| for fundamental claims, review articles are a big help too.
|
| Also, I tend to add things to Wikipedia or other wikis when I
| come across something valuable rather than writing something
| and then trying to find a source (which also is problematic for
| other reasons). A good thing about crowd-sourcing is that you
| don't have to write the article all yourself or all at once; it
| can be very iterative and therefore efficient.
| crazygringo wrote:
| It's not that I _personally_ find it hard.
|
| It's more like, a lot of stuff in Wikipedia articles is
| somewhat "general" knowledge in a given field, where it's not
| always exactly obvious how to cite it, because it's not
| something any specific person gets credit for "inventing".
| Like, if there's a particular theorem then sure you cite who
| came up with it, or the main graduate-level textbook it's
| taught in. But often it's just a particular technique or fact
| that just kind of "exists" in tons of places but there's no
| obvious _single_ place to cite it from.
|
| So it actually takes some work to find a _good_ reference.
| Like you say, review articles can be a good source, survey
| articles or books. But it can take a surprising amount of
| effort to track down a place that actually says the exact
| thing. I literally just last week was helping a professor
| (leader in their field!) try to find a citation during peer
| review for their paper for an "obvious fact" in the field,
| that was in their introduction section. It was actually
| really challenging, like trying to produce a citation for
| "the sky is blue".
|
| I remember, years ago, creating a Wikipedia article for a
| particular type of food in a particular country. You can buy
| it at literally every supermarket there. How the heck do you
| _cite_ the food and facts about it? It just... _is_. Like...
| websites for manufacturers of the food aren 't really
| citations. But nobody's describing the food in academic
| survey articles either. You're not going to link to
| Allrecipes. What do you do? It's not always obvious.
| Jepacor wrote:
| If you can buy the food at a supermarket, can't you cite a
| product page? Presumably that would include a description
| of the product. Or is that not good enough of a citation?
| crazygringo wrote:
| Retail product listing URLs change constantly. They're
| not great.
|
| And then you usually want to describe how the food is
| used. E.g. suppose it's a dessert that's mainly popular
| at children's birthday parties. Everybody in the country
| knows that. But where are you going to find something
| written that says that? Something that's not just a
| random personal blog, but an actual published valid
| source?
|
| Ideally you can find some kind of travel guide or book
| for expats or something with a food section that happens
| to list it, but if it's not a "top" food highly visible
| to tourists, then good luck.
| efilife wrote:
| I found several that were contradicting the claim they were
| supposed to support (in popular articles). I will never
| regain faith in wikipedia. Being an editor or just verifying
| information from wikipedia makes you hate it
| gonzobonzo wrote:
| The problems I've run into is both people giving fake citations
| (the citations don't actually justify the claim that's being
| made in the article), and people giving real citations, but if
| you dig into the source you realize it's coming from a crank.
|
| It's a big blind spot among the editors as well. When this
| problem was brought up here in the past, with people saying
| that claims on Wikipedia shouldn't be believed unless people
| verify the sources themselves, several Wikipedia editors came
| in and said this wasn't a problem and Wikipedia was
| trustworthy.
|
| It's hard to see it getting fixed when so many don't see it as
| an issue. And framing it as a non-issue misleads users about
| the accuracy of the site.
| 6510 wrote:
| > but if you dig into the source you realize it's coming from
| a crank.
|
| It is a dark sunday afternoon, Bob Park is sitting on his
| sofa as usual, drunk as usual, suddenly the TV reveals to him
| there to be something called the Paranormal (Twilight Zone
| music) ..instantly Bob knows there are no such things and
| adds a note to the incomprehensible mess of notes that one
| day will become his book. He downs one more Budweiser. In the
| distance lightning strikes a tree, Bob shouts _You don 't
| scare me!_ and shakes his fist. After a few more beers a
| miracle of inspiration descends and as if channeling, in the
| time span of 10 minutes he writes notes about Cold Fusion,
| Alternative Medicine, Faith Healing, Telepathy, Homeopathy,
| Parapsychology, Zener cards, the tooth fairy and father xmas.
| With much confidence he writes that non of them are real.
| It's been a really productive afternoon. It reminds him of
| times long gone back when he actually published many serious
| papers. He counts the remaining beers in his cooler and says
| to himself, in the next book I will need to take on god
| himself. The world needs to know, god is not real. I too will
| be the authority on that subject.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:WhatLinks.
| ..
| CPLX wrote:
| Curious what the point you're making here is. I don't know
| anything at all about Bob Park and whether he is a crank.
| But if you make your career doing the admirable work of
| debunking pseudo-science and nonsense theories, you would
| necessarily be linked to in discussions of those theories
| very, very frequently.
|
| So maybe that's not a good description of him. But the link
| you posted is hardly dispositive.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| A common source of error is in articles for movies where it
| gives plot summaries. The plot summaries are very often
| written by people who didn't watch the movie but are trying
| to re-resemble the plot like a jigsaw puzzle from little bits
| they glean from written reviews, or worse just writing down
| whatever they assume to be the plot. Very often it seems like
| the fuck ups came from people who either weren't watching the
| movie carefully, or were just listening to the dialogue while
| not watching the screen, or simply lacked media literacy.
|
| Example [SPOILERS]: the page for the movie Sorcerer claims
| that rough terrain caused a tire to pop. The movie never says
| that, the movie shows the tire popping (which results in the
| trucks cargo detonating). The next scene reveals the cause,
| but only to those paying attention; the bloody corpse of a
| bandito laying next to a submachine gun is shown in the
| rubble beside the road, and more banditos are there, very
| upset and quite nervous, to hijack the second truck. The
| obvious inference is that the first truck's tire was shot by
| the bandit to hijack/rob the truck. The tire didn't pop from
| rough terrain, the movie never says it did, it's just a
| conclusion you could get from not paying attention to the
| movie.
| shmeeed wrote:
| To me that sounds a bit like summaries made on the base of
| written movie scripts. A long time ago, I read a few
| scripts to movies I had never watched, and that's exactly
| the outcome: You get a rough idea what it's about and even
| get to recognise some memorable quotes, but there's little
| cohesion to it, for lack of all the important visual
| aspects and clues that tie it all together.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > The problems I've run into is both people giving fake
| citations (the citations don't actually justify the claim
| that's being made in the article), and people giving real
| citations, but if you dig into the source you realize it's
| coming from a crank.
|
| Citations have become heavily weaponized across a lot of
| spaces on the internet. There was a period of time where we
| all learned that citations were correlated with higher
| quality arguments and Wikipedia's [Citation Needed] even
| became a meme.
|
| But the quacks and the agenda pushers realized that during
| casual internet browsing readers won't actually read, let
| alone scrutinize the citation links, so it didn't matter what
| you linked to. As long as the domain and title looked
| relevant it would be assumed correct. Anyone who did read the
| links might take so much time that the comment section would
| be saturated with competing comments by the time someone can
| respond with a real critique.
|
| This has become a real problem on HN, too. Often when I see a
| comment with a dozen footnoted citations from PubMed they're
| either misunderstandings what the study says or some times
| they even say the opposite of what the commenter claims.
|
| The strategy is to just quickly search PubMed or other
| sources for keywords and then copy those into the post with
| the HN footnote citation format, knowing that most people
| won't read or question it.
| chr15m wrote:
| LLMs can add unsubstantiated conclusions at a far higher rate
| than humans working without LLMs.
| EA-3167 wrote:
| At some point you're forced to either believe that people
| have never heard of the concept of a force multiplier, or to
| return to Upton Sinclair's observation about getting people
| to believe in things that hurt their bottom line.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| I don't see why people keep blaming cars for road safety
| problems; people got into buggy crashes for centuries
| before automobiles even existed
| nullsanity wrote:
| Because a difference in scale can become a difference in
| category. A handful of buggy crashes can be reduced to
| operator error, but as the car becomes widely adopted and
| analysis matures, it becomes clear that the fundamental
| design of the machine and its available use cases has
| fundamental flaws that cause a higher rate of operator
| error than desired. Therefore, cars are redesigned to be
| safer, laws and regulations are put in place, license
| systems are issued, and traffic calming and road design
| is considered.
|
| Hope that helps you understand.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| Is the sarcasm really that opaque? Who would unironically
| equate buggy accidents and automobile accidents?
| obidee2 wrote:
| I'd like to introduce you to the internet.
|
| There's a reason /s was a big thing, one persons obvious
| sarcasm is (almost tautologically) another persons true
| statement of opinion.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| How much time have you spent around developers?
| mikkupikku wrote:
| True, but humans got a 20 year head start and I am willing to
| wager the overwhelming majority of extant flagrant errors are
| due to humans making shit up and no other human noticing and
| correcting it.
|
| My go too example was the SDI page saying that brilliant
| pebble interceptors were to be made out of tungsten
| (completely illogical hogwash that doesn't even pass a basic
| sniff test.) This claim was added to the page in February of
| 2012 by a new wikipedia user, with no edit note accompanying
| the change nor any change to the sources and references. It
| stayed in the article until October 29th, 2025. And of course
| this misinformation was copied by other people and you can
| still find it being quoted, uncited, in other online
| publications. With an established track record of fact
| checking this poor, I honestly think LLMs are just pissing
| into the ocean.
| asadotzler wrote:
| If LLMs 10X it, as the advocates keep insisting, that means
| it would only take 2 years to do as much or more damage as
| humans alone have done in 20.
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Perhaps so. On the other hand, there's probably a lot of
| low hanging fruit they can pick just by reading the
| article, reading the cited sources, and making
| corrections. Humans can do this, but rarely do because
| it's so tedious.
|
| I don't know how it will turn out. I don't have very high
| hopes, but I'm not certain it will all get worse either.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| The entire point of the article is that LLMs cannot make
| accurate text, but ironically you claiming LLMs can do
| accurate texts illustrates your point about human
| reliability perfectly.
|
| I guess the conclusion is there simply is no avenues to
| gain knowledge.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Linkrot is a problem and edited articles are another. Because
| you can cite all you want, but if the underlying resource
| changes your foundation just melted away.
| jayflux wrote:
| Pretty much every citation added to wikipedia is passed on to
| web archive now, either by the editor or automatically later
| on.
|
| For news articles especially the recommendation now is to use
| the archive snapshot and not the url of the page.
|
| It's not a perfect solution, but it tries to solve the link
| rot issue.
| shevy-java wrote:
| > Applying correct citations is actually really hard work
|
| Not disagreeing - many existing articles on wikipedia have
| barely any references or citation at all and in some cases
| wrong citation or wrong conclusions. Like when an article says
| water molecules behave oddly and then the wikipedia article
| concluding that water molecules behave properly.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > This has been a rampant problem on Wikipedia always. I can't
| seem to find any indicator that this has increased recently?
| Because they're only even investigating articles flagged as
| potentially AI. So what's the control baseline rate here?
|
| ...y'know, I don't want to be that guy, but this actually seems
| like something AI could check for, and then flag for human
| review.
| bjourne wrote:
| You don't need an LLM to find loads of uncorroborated claims
| on Wikipedia. See f.e.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variational_autoencoder Most
| articles about tech are woefully undersourced.
| wry_durian wrote:
| Note that this article is _only_ about edits made through the
| Wiki Edu program, which partners with universities and academics
| to have students edit Wikipedia on course-related topics. It 's
| not about Wikipedia writ large!
| tovej wrote:
| I've found Wiki Edu -edited pages with pages of creative
| writing exercises. When I have read their sources they were
| clumsily paraphrasing and misunderstanding the source.
|
| LLMs definitely fit the use-case of Wiki Edu students, who are
| just looking to pass a grade, not to look into a topic because
| of their interest.
| ketzu wrote:
| That's interesting as my first thought reading the comments was
| "this problem seems very similar to many students writing
| papers just finding citations that sound correct".
|
| Sometimes it is really sad to read from (even PhD level)
| students on social media about their paper writing practices.
| Jepacor wrote:
| Ah, so when you force students to edit Wikipedia for their
| courses, you get worse results than someone editing something
| voluntarily because they're passionate about it. That's...
| Hardly surprising.
|
| So it's more about how generative AI is a problem in college
| right now because lazy students are using it to do the work
| than about Wikipedia itself, I think.
| arjie wrote:
| > _That means the article contained a plausible-sounding
| sentence, cited to a real, relevant-sounding source. But when you
| read the source it's cited to, the information on Wikipedia does
| not exist in that specific source._
|
| This happens a lot on Wikipedia. I'm not sure why, but it does
| and you can see its traces through the Internet as people post
| the mistaken information around.
|
| One that took me a little work to fix was pointed out by someone
| on Twitter: https://x.com/Almost_Sure/status/1901112689138536903
|
| When I found the source, the twitter poster was correct! Someone
| had decided to translate "A hundred years ago, people would have
| considered this an outrage. But now..." as "this function is an
| outrage" which honestly is ironically an outrageous translation.
| What the hell dude.
|
| But it takes a lot of work to clean up stuff like that!
| https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Weierstrass_funct...
|
| I had to go find the actual source (not the other 'sources' that
| repeated off Wikipedia or each other) and then make sure it was
| correct before dealing with it. _A lie can travel halfway around
| the world..._
| throwaway5465 wrote:
| There seems much defensiveness in the comments here along the
| lines of "not a new thing" and "not unique to LLM/AI".
|
| It seems to deflect, even gaslight TFA.
|
| > For most of the articles Pangram flagged as written by GenAI,
| nearly every cited sentence in the article failed verification.
|
| So why deflect that into convenient other pedantry (surely not
| under the guise tech forums often do so)?
|
| WSo why the discomfort for part of HN at an assertion AI is being
| used for nefarious purposes and creation of alternate 'truths'?
| emp17344 wrote:
| Astroturfing or marketing, I'd guess. I've noticed you're no
| longer allowed to say negative things about AI here without
| significant pushback, and I'd bet this isn't an organic shift
| in perception.
| malfist wrote:
| I've found that generally people reserve down votes for posts
| that don't add to the conversation, in general, just like
| we're supposed to do. Its always been down vote city if you
| happen to criticize political positions that benefit
| libertarian technologists. But lately anything critical of AI
| tends to get a lot of down votes. Even on older posts that
| you can't find on the front page anymore... It feels
| inorganic
| oblio wrote:
| > Its always been down vote city if you happen to criticize
| political positions that benefit libertarian technologists.
|
| This varies wildly by timezone. Usually I get upvoted
| during European timezones and then brace for the Americans
| to wake up.
| shmeeed wrote:
| Well, I guess these days there's just a sizeable chunk of
| users on HN that earn their living with AI, one way or
| another. It's really only natural that some of them get thin-
| skinned if you shit on their lawn.
|
| I'm not a fan of certain trends either, but I wouldn't say
| it's inorganic. It's just a shift in the industry, and humans
| being human.
| malfist wrote:
| There sure are a lot of green names on this post pushing that
| agenda. Makes you wonder if its astroturfing. And why its
| nessecary, is AI so fragile it can't let any criticism stand
| unchallenged?
| vibeprofessor wrote:
| I trust Grokipedia way more, even though it's AI-generated.
| Wikipedia on any current topic is dominated by various edit gangs
| trying to push an agenda
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| Ah yes Elon Musk the man with no agenda
| vibeprofessor wrote:
| here is just one example, wikipedia turned into antisemitic
| propaganda outlet
| https://x.com/just_whatever/status/2017948781895880726?s=20
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Grokipedia is a pile of propaganda written by an AI that
| moonlights as a CSAM generator, built to serve as a weapon in a
| culture war being waged by a bunch of billionaires trying to
| normalize pedophilia by selling it to neo-Nazis.
|
| For now, I think I'll take the Wikipedia edit gangs.
| theendisney wrote:
| What would be a truly epic application would be their own chat
| bot to ask about applying edit guidelines. After reading almost
| all of the guidelines the talkpage debates, even amoung
| experienced edditors, looked waaaay off. The pattern of revert
| first make up excuses later seems the worse newbie deterrent
| possible. This while it should be fine to make mistakes. Many
| such excuses would get debunked by a bot imediately. It simply
| wont do any favors. If established editors dont like it they can
| edit the guidelines.
| fernly wrote:
| Set aside the effect within Wikipedia and consider the larger
| picture, millions of people generating text with LLMs and at
| least some of that text being accepted as correct by millions of
| readers.
|
| The WikiEdu article clearly demonstrates what everyone should
| have known already: an LLM has no commitment to the truth. An
| LLM's only commitment is to correct syntax.
| Jepacor wrote:
| An LLM's only commitment isn't to correct syntax either. It's
| only commitment is to _popular_ syntax.
|
| It happens that what is popular is correct often enough for the
| whole thing to somewhat work but I think it's always gonna be
| bristle.
| thorum wrote:
| I'm honestly surprised LLMs are still screwing up citations. It
| does not feel like a harder task than building software or
| generating novel math proofs. In both those cases, of course,
| there is a verifier, but self-verification with "Does this text
| support this claim?" seems like it ought to be within the
| capabilities of a good reasoning model.
|
| But as I understand the situation, even the major Deep Research
| systems still have this issue.
| 12_throw_away wrote:
| > LLMs [...] reasoning model
|
| Found your problem right there
| PlatoIsADisease wrote:
| ITT: People saying what I got downvoted for on the last wikipedia
| HN thread
|
| I don't care if AI is used. I care about citations.
|
| I don't know what happened between that thread and this, maybe
| the narrative really changes how people respond.
| Lapsa wrote:
| wikipedia is great but I can't get over this -
| https://www.wikifunctions.org/view/en/Z16393
| alt227 wrote:
| Have you tried going under it? /s
| shevy-java wrote:
| So, AI spam can degrade quality.
|
| But ... isn't this with regards to Wikipedia a much more general
| problem?
|
| Usually revisions are approved manually by real people. This
| already can be negative; takes a lot of time; no guarantee that
| new information is true but old information can be wrong too. To
| me it seems more as if the problem has much more to do with the
| quality control problems of wikipedia itself. Yes, AI spam
| fatigues here but if the quality control steps are bad then AI
| spam will only make this worse. But AI spam going away, does not
| mean the quality control steps have gotten any better. These two
| issues should be separate. Wikipedia needs to find better quality
| control mechanisms in general. And that also includes existing
| articles - some are written by people who are experts in the
| field. But they don't really explain anything at all. So, these
| articles appear good but are virtually useless for 98% of the
| people. I am not saying one should dumb down wikipedia, but you
| need to kind of focus primarily on the average person really -
| not stupid but not a godlike expert either. Explain it to, say,
| someone at age 18 or perhaps even a bit less than that.
| shevy-java wrote:
| Another issue, somewhat indirectly, is Grokipedia. As we now have
| more and more information, the AI that is used here deliberately
| engineers Grokipedia to contain, shall we say it ... "alternative
| facts". If you look at Grokipedia, it actually looks visually
| better than Wikipedia, on a smartphone at the least. At the same
| time it tries to destroy an objective purpose, e. g. Wikipedia
| trying to show accurate information without any "spin". I don't
| believe that how AI is used by, e. g. Elon or mega-corporations,
| has purity and truth at heart though. We may have to look
| carefully at what happens to Wikipedia - it almost seems as if
| the attacks against Wikipedia by AI may not be merely
| "accidental". (Since it stores a lot of data, of course AI bots
| will leech off regularly, but I am talking here about purposes by
| organisations who may dislike democracy, for instance.)
| julienchastang wrote:
| "Never copy and paste the output from generative AI chatbots" is
| mentioned in the article three times. This has been my experience
| as well. Initial AI output can be stunning until you quickly
| realize that it is mostly BS, filler and pap. However, I do find
| LLMs to be really useful for brainstorming, ideation, sounding
| boards etc.
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