Wikipedia Editors Adopt 'Speedy Deletion' Policy for AI Slop Articles (404media.co) 31
Wikipedia editors have adopted a policy enabling administrators to delete AI-generated articles without the standard week-long discussion period. Articles containing telltale LLM responses like "Here is your Wikipedia article on" or "Up to my last training update" now qualify for immediate removal.
Articles with fabricated citations -- nonexistent papers or unrelated sources such as beetle research cited in computer science articles -- also meet deletion criteria.
Articles with fabricated citations -- nonexistent papers or unrelated sources such as beetle research cited in computer science articles -- also meet deletion criteria.
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They can just adapt their deletion bot that instantly removes content that is of interest to conservatives.
You mean the one that removes links to child porn and cuck videos?
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Conservative: "Am I so out of touch?"
"No, it's the reality of the physical world that is wrong"
Re: The code is already there (Score:2)
What if scientific explanations are exercises in hubris, and Trump's calling that out (but ignorinv his own hubris on immigration)?
Should the tskeaway from the BLS chief firing be that market signals come with such huge margins of error that standard economic models would, if they properly propagated error, yield predictions that are so wide no one could use them for policy making?
Re: The code is already there (Score:2)
Do you realize the jobs report has a margin of error of hundreds of thousands of jobs? So why take the point estimate as gospel in your models? Why not propagate the errors as any physicist does?
Re:The code is already there (Score:5, Insightful)
They can just adapt their deletion bot that instantly removes content that is of interest to conservatives.
Here's a crazy idea: Don't make your political party's platform include rejecting evidence-based science.
Then, repositories of facts won't be deleting your content of interest!
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Here's a crazy idea: Don't make your political party's platform include rejecting evidence-based science.
But why not, when it self-evidently works so very, very well?
Re: The code is already there (Score:2)
Why did they delete Michael Crawford's page? Was he not notable in representing me? Do they want to suppress me and Michael Crawford because we are inconvenient truths?
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Re: The code is already there (Score:2)
Wouldn't it be great if I could link to Michael David Crawford's Wikipedia page right now, describing his epic trolls (he invented the Wall of Text!), his descent into homelessness after an unjust firing by a tech company boss who later died after running a red light on his scooter, and his ultimate suicide?
I have fallen foul of something similar (Score:3)
I occasionally update Wikipedia entries - without an account - if I see something incorrect or missing.
A week ago I added a missing entry to a table, only to see that it had been backed out again three minutes later. I suppose it was the equivalent of filling a gap in the periodic table except that it was far more obscure than that. The account which did this appears to be a real account but I don't understand how a real person would even notice such a correction let alone revert it without checking the content - it has to have been an automated process (and a real person would have checked and reinserted the entry).
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The history file should have shown an explanation for the deletion?
Re:I have fallen foul of something similar (Score:5, Interesting)
That's pretty much been normal behavior for Wikipedia for awhile now. The "anybody can edit Wikipedia" era is long since over. It's more accurate to say you can edit Wikipedia if you want to put in the effort to become an established part of their "community". If you just want to drive-by edit articles, yeah, that will likely get reverted even if you're technically contributing something positive.
Yes, it certainly does disincentivize people from contributing to Wikipedia if they only want to do so casually, but I suppose the Wikipedia gods have figured the site has grown to the point where they see it as no longer necessary. I'm surprised they haven't just disabled anonymous editing completely, but seeing how every decision on that site has to go through an insane amount of bureaucracy, it kind of makes sense that they'd just have people reverting edits rather than changing something many might view as a traditional part of Wikipedia.
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This is going to get worse as people push more "Agentic AI", which as best I can tell, means "AI able to manipulate an API on its own."
The human won't have to browse to Wikipedia and Ctrl+V anymore. The human might not even be aware Wikipedia is getting hit on the back end.
How about you leave it there... (Score:2)
...and make it visible only to IA scrapers? So IA keeps feeding on itself and will eventually explode
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In English, "IA" is usually understood to mean "Internet Archive." Only "AI" means "Artificial Intelligence."
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Thanks. I used the Italian acronym :-)
Yet they have 6 million slop articles (Score:5, Insightful)
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Wikipedia ruined my life
If you are a Wikipedia-addict-in-recovery I can understand you saying that, but other than that, I don't see how it could ruin your life all by itself. If you are a Wikipedia-addict, black-holing from your network might be a good 1st, er, post-first-step (the "first step" is admitting you are powerless over Wikipedia...).
If you mean Wikipedia's content about you ruined your life:
If you are a living person, Wikipedia's policies, editors, and overlords generally do a good job of keeping out unverifiable goss
Re:Yet they have 6 million slop articles (Score:5, Informative)
It isn't "Wikipedia" lecturing because the headline really should read "the Wikipedia English project" (of the WMF). Each language version is independent and has their own rules. The contributor community of the Wikipedia English project decided to implement speedy delete rules to improve their contents. If there are problems with the Cebuano or Scots Wikipedias, it isn't something the contributors of the Wikipedia English project can do anything about.
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This doesn't seem right. So some obscure language might not have an article at all because someone hasn't written it in that language or facts are different or missing from one language to the next?
Despite how it seems to you, that is both right and correct.
It's correct because that's how it works, and it's right because requiring that articles in a given language be written by someone who speaks that language is a requirement for it to be known whether they are slop.
Seems wikipedia should be taking all these different language articles merging the most factual details from each into a master article and then creating translated articles
If you want translations, use a translation tool.
If you want details to be propagated from articles in languages you don't speak into the articles in languages you do speak, then make that happen.
If you don't want to put in the time to a
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Seems wikipedia should be taking all these different language articles merging the most factual details from each into a master article
They could do that, if Wikipedia was built by a corporate taking this order from a management. But it's not, it's a project by little ants, who know one thing and write it down in their language. By the way you're only recommended to write in Wikipedia in the language you're NATIVE in.
A master article would have the problem that you need to choose a human language for it, which means imposing a language to people, also it means cultural biases that come with every language.
Usually contributors do that natu
So, if you don't like a certain article (Score:2)
Add a statement "Here is your Wikipedia article on..." and poof, it will disappear!
Seems like a useful tool for certain politicians.
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Add a statement "Here is your Wikipedia article on..." and poof, it will disappear!
If the people pushing the "delete" button are doing their jobs right, they will be checking the edit history to make sure it really is "AI slop" and not a human-created page edited later to make it look like "AI slop."
Wikipedians Hate Def Leppard (Score:2)
As distinct from self serving corporate slop (Score:2)