Should I believe this headline?
Wikipedian here - AI on Wikipedia is actually nothing new. we’ve had a machine learning model identify malicious edits since 2017, and Cluebot (an ML-powered anti-vandalism bot) has been around for even longer than that.
even so, this is pretty exciting. from what i gather, this is a transformer model turned on its side; instead of taking textual data and transforming it, it checks to see if two pieces of textual data could reasonably be transformations of each other. used responsibly, this could really help knock out those [dubious] and [failed verification] tags en masse
If I’m understanding you correctly, it doesn’t ever edit the actual pages, it just adds flags on certain kinds of content. Is that right?
yes. it only surfaces citations that may back up the content better, an editor still has to read the source and approve the change
Fascinating, as a developer, where can I read more/contribute?
The aforementioned ClueBot is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:ClueBot_NG
For bots in general, start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bots
“AI tiddies up Wikipedia’s references…”
I had to do a double-take on that title, too lmao
I have to test this on some article recommending alternative medicine
So long as the ai can avoid
Holy fuck my dyslexia tuned “AI tidies” into something really funny
RE: “should I believe this headline?” I would say yeah this is a reasonable thing to use AI for. I assume they are not going to let it full-auto massacre all Wikipedia citations but as long as they have someone verifying the replacements that the AI is generating then this seems like a semi-auto way to clean up citations. My only worry would be that the AI would become a full replacement for finding sources, in which case people could just start accepting its suggestions as the best answers when manual searching could find a better source.
The article does say it downranks low-quality sources, but I wonder how often you can type “what I want to be true” into it and have it find a source for nonsense.
👍
This is good news. One problem I’ve always had with using Wikipedia as a research source is that while most of the claims may have citations, those citations will often point to dead links, or to pages that may have been updated/edited since the Wikipedia page was originally written and no longer back up the original claims. There’ve been numerous times I’ve seen multiple citations for a single claim on an article, and every single link the citations point to are either dead links or don’t actually say what the claim was, at all.
Hopefully this helps to clear up a lot of that mess!
There’s a bot that goes through and identifies link rot so editors have a backlog queue of them to go through.
