> Just as a start, other sources of reference, including encylopedias, dictionaries
This just seems like healthy competition. I thought we were talking about a situation where Wikipedia’s use of other encyclopedias is an instrument of their demise.
> Maybe there's a little bias there
Paradoxically, I suspect you’d be pleasantly surprised about how tough this article is on itself. A lot of attention is given to bias in this case.
> Would Wikipedia accept Wikipedia's analysis of its own reliability as a valid source?
First, it is not Wikipedia’s own analysis. Editors should not present their own conclusions from research, just what each paper says. See [[WP:SYNTH]]. Second, generally Wikipedia discourages anyone citing it as it is not a stable source of information. Much better is to use the sources the article itself conveniently cites inline. As a general policy citing any encyclopedia is discouraged.
> having no knowledge of the accuracy of any particular article, it's not worth very much to me.
Wikipedia does have internal metrics grading the quality of an article. [[WP:ASSESS]]. In general though, even entirely discounting the Wikipedia component of the británica comparison, based on británicas own failures it seems wise to verify each and every claim in an encyclopedia, which Wikipedia does an excellent job of helping you do.
> They don't with you, but many people obviously use them that way. Also, reputation does not correlate strongly with reality
OpenAIs own benchmarks show much higher hallucination rates than any study on Wikipedia. Wikipedia itself is quite close to a ban on LLMs for reliability issues. If you ask literally any layman “has ChatGPT ever been wrong for you” they will say yes, either in that moment or after only a little prompting. It is much harder to elicit such a response regarding Wikipedia in my experience
Correct. The amount of Wikipedia pages at any given moment with active vandalism is vanishingly small. The only time I have ever stumbled upon vandalism is as part of my work as a volunteer there actively looking for such cases. Looking at my feed of possibly problematic changes at the moment, about 3 entries are appearing per minute with the most recent revert being just 2 entries ago. It is significantly worse while school is in session in my experience, but vandalism very rarely lasts long. Talking to people, people frequently confess to vandalising wikipedia at one point or another. When I ask them "how long did it survive" they tell me answers ranging between "a few moments" to "5 minutes." So to answer your question, I believe it is unlikely the average person has seen vandalism on the site barring those looking at their own shit.
>> Just as a start, other sources of reference, including encylopedias, dictionaries
> This just seems like healthy competition. I thought we were talking about a situation where Wikipedia’s use of other encyclopedias is an instrument of their demise.
Somewhere above, someone complained that LLMs were harming Wikipedia, a source of its information. My point is that Wikipedia did the same to others.
This just seems like healthy competition. I thought we were talking about a situation where Wikipedia’s use of other encyclopedias is an instrument of their demise.
> Maybe there's a little bias there
Paradoxically, I suspect you’d be pleasantly surprised about how tough this article is on itself. A lot of attention is given to bias in this case.
> Would Wikipedia accept Wikipedia's analysis of its own reliability as a valid source?
First, it is not Wikipedia’s own analysis. Editors should not present their own conclusions from research, just what each paper says. See [[WP:SYNTH]]. Second, generally Wikipedia discourages anyone citing it as it is not a stable source of information. Much better is to use the sources the article itself conveniently cites inline. As a general policy citing any encyclopedia is discouraged.
> having no knowledge of the accuracy of any particular article, it's not worth very much to me.
Wikipedia does have internal metrics grading the quality of an article. [[WP:ASSESS]]. In general though, even entirely discounting the Wikipedia component of the británica comparison, based on británicas own failures it seems wise to verify each and every claim in an encyclopedia, which Wikipedia does an excellent job of helping you do.
> They don't with you, but many people obviously use them that way. Also, reputation does not correlate strongly with reality
OpenAIs own benchmarks show much higher hallucination rates than any study on Wikipedia. Wikipedia itself is quite close to a ban on LLMs for reliability issues. If you ask literally any layman “has ChatGPT ever been wrong for you” they will say yes, either in that moment or after only a little prompting. It is much harder to elicit such a response regarding Wikipedia in my experience
https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/2221c875-02dc-4789-800b-e7758f372...