Correction (10/11/24): Lebleu reached out to clarify a few detailed regarding the motivations behing the user posting AI-generated materiel and the examples mentioned. These changes were applied...

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.

  • Foni@lemm.eeEnglish
    103·
    1 month ago

    How much of an idiot do you have to be to attack Wikipedia?

    • uienia@lemmy.worldEnglish
      661·
      1 month ago

      I think Hanlons razor is in desperate need of an update, since its premise seems to be based entirely on naivity. These days everything happening on the internet seems more like: “Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by malice”.

    • OwlPaste@lemmy.worldEnglish
      51·
      1 month ago

      Could also be state sponsored actors making alot of noise/work to get their more damagong edits through

    • JaggedRobotPubes@lemmy.worldEnglish
      173·
      1 month ago

      How can we still be surprised by this? We see republicans routinely making a sport out of who can bomb and take a shit on the helpful parts of society every day.

      There is no bottom.

      I mean, you’re right. No disagreement. This is just what 20% of people do, and a different 40% think that you’re the real asshole if you try to stop them or even just point out it’s bad.

    • DrDickHandler@lemmy.worldEnglish
      221·
      1 month ago

      It’s not about being an idiot. You just don’t seem to have the mental capabilities to get the whole picture.

  • CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    80·
    1 month ago

    There is a group of people who have been systematically dismantling education, making access to information harder, and generally known to fuck shit up because they want to punish people who don’t agree with them.

    • Zacpod@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      1 month ago

      I got permabanned from Reddit for saying, about someone who destroyed a public library: “I wish we could bring back old-school stocks as punishment for whoever did this so the whole town could line up to throw rotten vegetables at them.” Apperently, that’s so radically violent that they had to permaban me.

    • wagesj45@fedia.io
      64·
      1 month ago

      People fuck with Wikipedia all the time. It’s honestly a wonder that it is usable at all and not a wasteland of defaced articles and bullshit. It is a real testament to the volunteers that keep it up.

      • Lazycog@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        10·
        1 month ago

        Awhile ago russians were harassing OpenStreetMap by fucking up the data, but the heroic volunteers fixed that quite quickly and kept a close eye on edits.

        Fuck people who ruin cool and nice things. And even though some of this kind of malice is state funded, I still blame the asshats for putting money before anything else and taking these jobs. If everyone acted like these assholes their lives would be miserable too.

        • ogeist@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          1 month ago

          The hacker group is 𝐒𝐍_𝐁𝐋𝐀𝐂𝐊𝐌𝐄𝐓𝐀 according to their Profile, they are in Staraya Russa, Novgorod region

          But! It might be a false flag.

          • Allero@lemmy.todayEnglish
            1·
            1 month ago

            Thanks for additional info!

            That’s interesting, actually. I can’t see why Russia the state would be interested in this (it already has issues accessing certain sources, so messing with a free open library is shooting oneself in the foot), so it’s either truly for the lulz (which are probably the most questionable lulz in history), or there’s some truly mastermind plot behind this.

      • MalReynolds@slrpnk.netEnglish
        14·
        1 month ago

        Also some Russian hackers are brought down the Internet Archive

        Er, do you mean the Russian hackers brought down the IA (and why, I’d peg government actors for that, more to lose, and more competent with legality) or were brought down by the IA, in which case I missed it.

        No judgement, English grammar is obscure, but this sentence is ambiguous and incorrect.

  • Aatube@kbin.melroy.org
    9·
    1 month ago

    Don’t worry, it’s not as bad as the title suggests. The attack on Internet Archive is far, far worse. It’s obviously a bit of a problem, though.

  • GenderIsOpSec [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    1128·
    1 month ago

    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.

    • dependencyinjection@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      5·
      1 month ago

      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?

      • Aatube@kbin.melroy.org
        2·
        1 month ago

        As an editor, Wikipedia is a good source, but you should not be citing it. Cite what Wikipedia cites.

        Pending changes (the review you mean) is a form of protection placed on vandalized pages. Most vandalism is reverted by editors who patrol the recent changes.

      • notceps [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        43·
        1 month ago

        Wikipedia has some good pages and some horrifically bad pages, we all know the one where some american teen made all the scots pages even though he literally didn’t speak a word of scots but there’s tons of other pages that are questionable at best and wrong at worst. The main contributors after decades are still like 80% men and most of them are in a STEM field which again shows in pages that go outside of that narrow niche. I at one point edited some wiki pages myself and you’ll literally have some guy do a fucking edit war because he thinks Somatotypes are real and you have to fight for months because you don’t have the clout of a math nerd.

        And this isn’t even looking at the serious Nazi problem wiki has.

        Wikipedia had decades to get their act together, they didn’t I doubt they will anytime in the future because of how their whole shitty system works.

        Edit: To double down their reviewers are also shitty STEMlords who often have no qualifications but think they do, again look at any philosophy page which is just laughable. Everyone is always walking around on eggshells when it comes to how shitty some sections of wikipedia are which has resulted in festering puss filled wounds that glorify nazis and since it’s on wikipedia well then it has some credibility to it.

      • GenderIsOpSec [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
        44·
        1 month ago

        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.”

        from here