Technology

Wales’s quote isn’t nearly as bad as the byline makes it out to be:

Wales explains that the article was originally rejected several years ago, then someone tried to improve it, resubmitted it, and got the same exact template rejection again.

“It's a form letter response that might as well be ‘Computer says no’ (that article's worth a read if you don't know the expression),” Wales said. “It wasn't a computer who says no, but a human using AFCH, a helper script [...] In order to try to help, I personally felt at a loss. I am not sure what the rejection referred to specifically. So I fed the page to ChatGPT to ask for advice. And I got what seems to me to be pretty good. And so I'm wondering if we might start to think about how a tool like AFCH might be improved so that instead of a generic template, a new editor gets actual advice. It would be better, obviously, if we had lovingly crafted human responses to every situation like this, but we all know that the volunteers who are dealing with a high volume of various situations can't reasonably have time to do it. The templates are helpful - an AI-written note could be even more helpful.”

That being said, it still reeks of “CEO Speak.” And trying to find a place to shove AI in.

More NLP could absolutely be useful to Wikipedia, especially for flagging spam and malicious edits for human editors to review. This is an excellent task for dirt cheap, small and open models, where an error rate isn’t super important. Cost, volume, and reducing stress on precious human editors is. It's a existential issue that needs work.

…Using an expensive, proprietary API to give error prone yet “pretty good” sounding suggestions to new editors is not.

Wasting dev time trying to make it work is not.

This is the problem. Not natural language processing itself, but the seemingly contagious compulsion among executives to find some place to shove it when the technical extent of their knowledge is occasionally typing something into ChatGPT.

It’s okay for them to not really understand it.

It’s not okay to push it differently than other technology because “AI” is somehow super special and trendy.

jimmy wales is also the president and co-founder of fandom

to give you an idea of who that guy is

I will stop donating to Wikipedia if they use AI

Why is leadership always so vapid and disconnected from reality?

Remember you can download all of Wikipedia in your language and safely store it on a drive buried in your backyard, for after they rewrite history and eliminate freedom of speech.

tbh i somehow didnt even realize that wikipedia is one of the few super popular sites not trying to shove ai down my throat every 5 seconds

i'm grateful now

He can also stick AI inside his own ass

if jimmy wales puts ai in wikipedia i stg imma scream

The problem with LLMs and other generative AI is that they're not completely useless. People's jobs are on the line much of the time, so it would really help if they were completely useless, but they're not. Generative AI is certainly not as good as its proponents claim, and critically, when it fucks up, it can be extremely hard for a human to tell, which eats away a lot of their benefits, but they're not completely useless. For the most basic example, give an LLM a block of text and ask it how to improve grammar or to make a point clearer, and then compare the AI generated result with the original, and take whatever parts you think the AI improved.

Everybody knows this, but we're all pretending it's not the case because we're caring people who don't want the world to be drowned in AI hallucinations, we don't want to have the world taken over by confidence tricksters who just fake everything with AI, and we don't want people to lose their jobs. But sometimes, we are so busy pretending that AI is completely useless that we forget that it actually isn't completely useless. The reason they're so dangerous is that they're not completely useless.

Honestly, translating the good articles from other languages would improve Wikipedia immensely.

For example, the Nanjing dialect article is pretty bare in English and very detailed in Mandarin

Christ, I miss when I could click on an article and not be asked to sign up for it.

They're trying to get rid of Wikipedia by saying they're shit and doing things you'll hate. Fight for no AI if that's your thing, but read very carefully what's happening. Wikipedia can NOT go away.

Fuck AI

So I fed the page to ChatGPT to ask for advice. And I got what seems to me to be pretty good. And so I'm wondering if we might start to think about how a tool like AFCH might be improved so that instead of a generic template, a new editor gets actual advice. It would be better, obviously, if we had lovingly crafted human responses to every situation like this, but we all know that the volunteers who are dealing with a high volume of various situations can't reasonably have time to do it. The templates are helpful - an AI-written note could be even more helpful.

This actually sounds like a plausibly decent use for an LLM. Initial revision to take some of the load off from the human review process isn't a bad idea - he isn't advocating for AI to write articles, just that it can be useful for copy-editing and potentially supplement a system already heavy in Go/No Go evaluations.

Which is weird, really. Jimmy Wales is just fucking awful. I didn't realize he was anatomically capable of not talking out of his ass.

WikipedAI