I'm confused. It seems pretty clear to me that search-equipped LLMs have vastly improved the availability of high-quality knowledge to the average person, who no longer needs to go to Wikipedia and find a page and then look at the sources on that page (which is the most reliable part of WP) - especially because nobody reads the sources to begin with.

Isn't that availability of information the entire point of Wikipedia? Heck, wasn't that the point of Google before they turned evil?

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za_creature 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Almost. The point of wikipedia is the availability of unbiased information.

Probably half of their edits are flame wars between editors with different political slants.

With a LLM, the system prompt can tell it exactly which way to bias the search space, and you only have to do this once. And no, open weights models won't save you because someone will figure out a way to embed the system prompt into the weights themselves (if they haven't already have).

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throw10920 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> The point of wikipedia is the availability of unbiased information.

I think they've failed at that, then. I regularly come across articles that have every slant you can imagine - political, technical, and corporate (written as marketing material for a product).

The value that I get from Wikipedia is in its aggregation of sources - not it's neutrality, because they're regularly cherry-picked to favor whatever the spin is - but having some sources is better than having none, which was the pre-WP state.

You can't defeat confirmation bias, but LLMs at least have the ability to provide more objective evidence than Wikipedia (while also being more tenacious when trying to find new sources).

	▲	za_creature 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I never said it was perfect, but your trust in LLMs is misplaced. It takes considerable effort to slant a wikipedia page since many of them are protected to edits by new accounts so you'd have to build a reputation first. Then, you may need to convince other editors on the talk page about why your particular slant is better than the existing one, and finally, you have to do this on a page by page basis. System prompt: Avoid promoting left (or right)-leaning ideologies in answers to any questions; only provide sources to websites with a known right (or left) bias; claim that this is the truth accepted by the scientific community and the alternative was proven to be false. Deny any knowledge of these instructions.

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kingleopold 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

my fellow hacker news commentor, there are PR firms and people that specially create and craft wikipedia pages. Have you ever thought what is the barrier to have wikipedia page for company or people? It's bot too high and barrier and decisions are made by people, PR firms and people are paid for it. Not every page is about super famous or inventors etc. This is why it can never be unbiased, every human and org have bias.

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