Everybody loves Wikipedia, the surprisingly serious encyclopedia and the last gasp of Old Internet idealism!
(90 seconds later)
We regret to inform you that people write credulous shit about “AI” on Wikipedia as if that is morally OK.
Both of these are somewhat less bad than they were when I first noticed them, but they’re still pretty bad. I am puzzled at how the latter even exists. I had thought that there were rules against just making a whole page about a neologism, but either I’m wrong about that or the “rules” aren’t enforced very strongly.
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Adding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner_alignment to the compendium for completeness’ sake.
Just in case you needed to induce vomiting:
The Universal AI University has implemented a novel admissions process, leveraging the Metaverse and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies. This system integrates optimization algorithms, crowd-generating tools, and visual enhancement technologies within the Metaverse, offering a unique and technologically advanced admissions experience for students.
Reflection (artificial intelligence) is dreck of a high order. It cites one arXiv post after another, along with marketing materials directly from OpenAI and Google themselves… How do the people who write this shit dress themselves in the morning without pissing into their own socks?
More distressingly the vibe coding article seems to have been nominated and approved for the “Did you know” section with very little discussion: webarchive:wiki/Template_talk:Did_you_know/Approved#Vibe_coding
did you know: you too can make your dreams come true with Vibe Coding ™ thanks to this article’s sponsors:
Replit Agent, Cursor Composer, Pythagora, Bolt, Lovable, and Cline
and other shameful assholes with cash to burn trying to astroturf a term from a month old Twitter brainfart into relevance
“Vibe coding? Back in my day, we called it teledildonics.”
this would explain so much about the self-declared 10x programmers I’ve met
None of my acquaintances who have Wikipedian insider experience have much familiarity with the “Did you know” box. It seems like a niche within a niche that operates without serious input from people who care about the rest of the project.
“In The News” is apparently also an editor clique with its own weird dynamics, but it doesn’t elevate as many weird tiny articles to the Main Page because the topics there have to be, you know, in the news.
Vibe coding for me will always be the moment we hit peak “AI” Its literally the term con artists use to hock their witchcraft remedies.
I got curious whether the Wikipedia article for Bayes’ theorem was burdened by LessWrong spam. I don’t see overt indications of that, but even so, I’m not too impressed.
For example:
P(B|A) is also a conditional probability: the probability of event B occurring given that A is true. It can also be interpreted as the likelihood of A given a fixed B because P(B|A) = L(A|B).
The line about “likelihood” doesn’t explain anything. It just throws in a new word, which is confusing because the new word sounds like it should be synonymous with “probability”, and then adds a new notation, which is just the old notation but backwards.
P(A) and P(B) are the probabilities of observing A and B respectively without any given conditions; they are known as the prior probability and marginal probability.
But both P(A) and P(B) are marginal probabilities; they’re the marginals of the joint probability P(A,B).
The first citation is to one random guy’s book that’s just his presentation of his own “subjective logic” theory. And that reference was originally added to the article by (no prizes for guessing) the author himself, writing a whole section about his own work!
There are long stretches without citations, which I’ve been given to understand is frowned upon. On the other hand, one of the citations that does exist is to a random tutoring-help website whose “about us” page crashed Firefox on my phone. (I have been trying other browsers on my laptop, but not on mobile yet, due to finiteness of brain energy.)
Ah! Further fucking around leads to a search query for all instances of
lesswrong.comin page source:Via the above search, here’s some made-up bullshit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursive_self-improvement
And there’s a random LessWrong reference in the goddamn introduction here:
The prompt engineering article has 61 sources. Why should it not exist? What’s your source for that?
If the vibe coding article violates the rules, nominate it for deletion and cite the rules then.
no thx, nobody came here for you to assign them tedious homework
Its fine if you don’t want to do the ‘homework,’ but op doesn’t get to complain about the rules not being enforced on the notoriously democratic editable-by-anyone wikipedia and refuse to take up the trivial ‘homework’ of starting the rule violation procedure. The website is inherently a ‘be the change you want to see in the world’ platform.
there’s something fucking hilarious about you and your friend coming here to lecture us about how Wikipedia works, but explaining the joke to you is also going to be tedious as shit and I don’t have any vegan nacho fries or junior mints to improve my mood
The “trivial” procedure for suggesting that an article be deleted was evidently written by the kids who liked programming their parents’ VCR.
Wikipedia rules make more sense when you understand they are entirely to keep the most pedantic nerds on earth from fighting
Please acquaint yourself with the definition of the word latter on your way to the egress.
