Much of wikipedia is written by one person, Steven Pruitt. He has created more than 33,000 Wikipedia articles. People rightly credit him for cataloging obscure topics even though much of what he writes is rote.

But now when AI does it, it's deemed bad? If it's factual and at all useful to someone, why not leave it? I feel like we're waging the same battles when Wikipedia became an open encyclopedia. Surely you need to control who can edit right? We all know how that ended.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Pruitt

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callmeal an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Maybe when Steven Pruitt starts hallucinating facts we can make the "both sides" argument. But until then....

	▲	dodger-dog an hour ago \| parent [-]
		He just farts lies when he's not sharting subjectivity instead.

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cainxinth an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Much of wikipedia is written by one person, Steven Pruitt. He has created more than 33,000 Wikipedia articles.

There are over 7m articles in English Wikipedia.

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asystole an hour ago | parent [-]

But he's edited a "third" of en.wikipedia according to his article which is genuinely astounding to me. Surely much of that has to have been automated?

	▲	asdewqqwer 32 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		If my memory was correct, a third of the edits is from him, not editing a third of it. There are a large and small edits. I think lot of it is mechanical and automated.

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an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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flexagoon 38 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Note that Pruitt has the highest number of edits on Wikipedia, but not the highest number of created articles.

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pessimizer 33 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

The problem with AI on Wikipedia is that the reason I've noticed it is because I've just seen blatantly incorrect stuff, mentioned breezily in passing, with no references. It's shitting up a thing that was already pretty easy to shit up if you had a motive, and your changes often wouldn't be noticed for months or years if an article wasn't well-trafficked.

AI doesn't even have a motive, it's just dumb - so you can't even track the mistakes to specific motivated users or networks of users. There's no way to clean it up.

Although I have to agree with you (probably, because I'm going to put words in your mouth) that this is a basic problem with wikipedia and how it is structured and governed, rather than a problem with AI. Anybody could always just put nonsense anywhere at any time; AI is just a chaos monkey. Wikipedia can't rely on groupthink to maintain itself, it has not worked and will not work, chaos monkeys are needed.