Should I believe this headline?
“AI tiddies up Wikipedia’s references…”
I had to do a double-take on that title, too lmao
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Holy fuck my dyslexia tuned “AI tidies” into something really funny
This is good news. One problem I’ve always had with using Wikipedia as a research source is that while most of the claims may have citations, those citations will often point to dead links, or to pages that may have been updated/edited since the Wikipedia page was originally written and no longer back up the original claims. There’ve been numerous times I’ve seen multiple citations for a single claim on an article, and every single link the citations point to are either dead links or don’t actually say what the claim was, at all.
Hopefully this helps to clear up a lot of that mess!
There’s a bot that goes through and identifies link rot so editors have a backlog queue of them to go through.
You can also check for dead links on the internet archive or archive.is.
RE: “should I believe this headline?” I would say yeah this is a reasonable thing to use AI for. I assume they are not going to let it full-auto massacre all Wikipedia citations but as long as they have someone verifying the replacements that the AI is generating then this seems like a semi-auto way to clean up citations. My only worry would be that the AI would become a full replacement for finding sources, in which case people could just start accepting its suggestions as the best answers when manual searching could find a better source.
The article does say it downranks low-quality sources, but I wonder how often you can type “what I want to be true” into it and have it find a source for nonsense.
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I have to test this on some article recommending alternative medicine
So long as the ai can avoid
