[strogonoff]

Wikipedia editors is among the many communities that have for a long time mostly successfully relied on the tendency of relatively superficial, easy to validate capabilities (such as being able to use a website, write something resembling real language, and handle basic communication) to correlate with more valuable but harder to validate qualities (such as ability to write reasonably well and follow rules/guidelines, and generally being a well-intentioned person) as one of their main barriers to entry. Attributable to the deluge of commercial LLMs[0] available at such low prices that their operators lose millions to billions of dollars in order to gain market share and ultimately profit, such communities may not be able to continue to exist as is for long, I suspect: either they would be forced to institute more intrusive barriers (be that ID verification, invite-only memberships, or something else) while the deluge lasts, or they may be effectively destroyed when members secretly lacking the requisite qualities and act in bad faith become a majority, damage community’s reputation, and drive out the existing members.

[0] Which paradoxically to a significant degree exist thanks to the unpaid work of volunteers in many of such communities.

[muldvarp]

LLMs destroying Wikipedia would be incredibly sad and is one of the things that makes me think that LLMs will have a strong negative impact on the lives of most people.

[georgefrowny]

I have previously translated a very small handful of redlink articles into English from another language. Chasing down the sources in the other language and synthesising and cross-referencing with English sources is a fun challenge. To the best of my knowledge, I did an OK job.

While translation tools are a godsend for that, as well as life in general when dealing with a language I am not that good at, LLMs make me increasingly reluctant to do that much more because there is no way I could detect AI slop in a second language. For all I know I'd be translating junk into English and enabling translingual citogenesis.

Bad as the slopwave is for native speakers, it's absolutely brutal for non-native speakers when you can't pick up on the tells. Maybe the gap will narrow and narrow until the slop is stylistically imperceptible.