[tivert]

>> I wish I had the time or facility to take a snapshot of wikipedia now before the imminent deluge of Chat-GPT based updates that start materially modifying wikipedia is some weird and unpredictable manner.

> I'm unsure if this will happen. There's plenty of checks-and-balances for Wikipedia edits.

I think it will. It's so tedious to edit Wikipedia (due to bureaucracy and internal politics) that their editorial population is in a long-term decline, which means their oversight ability is declining too.

Probably what will happen is LLM generated content will creep into long-tail articles, then work its way into more "medium-profile" articles as editors get exhausted. The extremely high-profile stuff (e.g. New York City), political battleground articles (e.g. Donald Trump), and areas patrolled by obsessives (railroads, Pokemon) will probably remain unaffected by the corruption the longest. At some point, the only way to resist will to become much more hostile to new editors, but that's also long-term suicide for the project.

I think they're painted into a corner.

[pradn]

I mean, maybe. AI on the "good side" will also improve. It should be possible to check a sentence against its reference with LLMs. And anything not sourced is suspect, just as it is now.

I also don't like the attitude of Wikipedia being "them", as in "their editorial population". It's our public good, like our air, and everyone should care to ensure its high quality. If you see a problem in the world, you have to try to fix it, instead of sitting on the sidelines, looking from the outside in.