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Wikipedia is under assault: rogue users keep posting AI generated nonsense (www.techspot.com)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Wikipedia has a new initiative called WikiProject AI Cleanup. It is a task force of volunteers currently combing through Wikipedia articles, editing or removing false information that appears to have been posted by people using generative AI.

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[+] [email protected] -17 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (27 children)

i dunno, critical support in their protracted ai war against Natopedia shrug-outta-hecks i guess?

edit. fun fact, back when I was in school you werent allowed to use wikipedia as a source, because everyone knew it was filled with shit, just like it still is.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (5 children)

People didn’t allow you to use it as a source in school because those rules were made by people that just didn’t understand technology.

As for it now being filled with shit, that’s just ignorant. It’s not like they accept edits and publish them from anybody that submits one, they’re reviewed and stuff that is well known or not up for debate is as accurate as can be.

How does it differ from Encarta 98 which we used in school? Or any encyclopaedia?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It wasnt allowed to be used in school because everyone can edit, and thus the sources can be "It came to me in a dream."

All encyclopedias can be bad if you cannot recognize the bias that is inherit in everything that was made to contain knowledge. Natopedia is filled with liberal freaks sitting on their little pages like their personal fiefdoms they do not allow edits, no matter how western your source is, and use sources by historians widely disparaged or they leave things out to form a narrative that suits them.

In early November 2015, you will find K.e.coffman in “20 July plot,” an article about the failed plan by German officers to assassinate Hitler. A sentence has jumped out at her. It says that some of the conspirators came to see the plot as “a grand, if futile gesture” that would save “the honour of themselves, their families, the army and Germany.” The claim isn’t supported by any sources. It’s conjecture, hearsay. And to her it seems strangely flattering.

Coffman navigates over to the Wikipedia article about one of the conspirators—Arthur Nebe, a high-ranking member of the SS. Apart from his role in the plot, Nebe’s main claim to notability is that he came up with the idea of turning vans into mobile gas chambers by piping in exhaust fumes. The article acknowledges both of these facts, along with the detail that Nebe tested his system on the mentally ill. But it also says that he worked to “reduce the atrocities committed,” going so far as to give his bloodthirsty superiors inflated death totals.

Coffman will recall that she feels “totally disoriented.” She cannot believe that an innovator in mass murder would have tried to protect the Jews and other supposed subhumans his troops rounded up. She checks the footnotes. The claim is attributed to War of Extermination, a compendium of academic essays originally published in 1995.

Coffman knows the book is legit, because she happens to have a copy on loan from the library. When she goes to the cited page, she finds a paragraph that appears to confirm all the Wikipedia article’s wild claims. But then she reads the first sentence of the next paragraph: “This is, of course, nonsense.”