Top
Best
New

Posted by ColinWright 1 day ago

Turns Out, Wikipedia Isn't That 'Woke' as Grokipedia Rips Off Most of Its Pages(uk.pcmag.com)
51 points | 32 comments
CupricTea 21 hours ago|
It's an open secret that encyclopedia authors, dictionary authors, and map makers all plagiarize one another, to the point where cartographers have added fictitious "trap streets" to catch others from plagiarizing their maps, and lexicographers have added Mountweazels.

It doesn't surprise me nor does it upset me that Grokipedia would include Wikipedia as an input source, nor do I feel like they're hypocritical for doing so given their stated goals. If you think a source has a bias problem, it makes sense to use that source for reference while applying your own bias checking to it.

Herring 1 day ago||
This has been tried many times, eg conservapedia comes to mind. It rarely works. You generally have to take over a successful brand then drive it to the ground. You can't just start off with a shitty brand when there are alternatives.
array_key_first 20 hours ago||
Turns out having your ideology be fundamentally post-truth and anti-education means you don't make a very good knowledge base!

Whodda thunk?

Herring 19 hours ago||
They don’t care about quality. It’s like a hedge fund buying a struggling company and watering down the product. They hope to make a profit before loyal customers wise up. Pump and dump, Wall Street does it all the time.

America was struggling because of healthcare, college costs, rising rents, mortgages, overall inequality, China rising etc. Trump/Musk/etc saw their chance.

normalaccess 1 day ago||
I think all Grokipedia is doing is exposing Grok's internal LLM "facts" into a preloaded and formatted site. Modern LLMs already have all of wikipedia internalized and can act as a wiki so why not make it an explicit feature?

Once that is in place you can make Grok eat it's own tail by using Retrieval-Augmented Generation on Grok with Grokaiedia (that is now crowdsourced for updates).

This may offset the side effects of model collapse from AIs consuming their own synthetic outputs with enough humanity sprinkled into the mix.

Herring 1 day ago||
Yes and also Hitler is quite interesting outside the Nazi bit. I don't know why everyone obsesses over that.
normalaccess 1 day ago||
I have no clue what you are referring too. The word Nazi gets used so much and for so many things that it has lost all meaning to me due to semantic satiation. You'll have to me more specific.

  Semantic satiation -- a psychological phenomenon in which repetition causes a word or phrase to temporarily lose meaning for the listener,[1] who then perceives the speech as repeated meaningless sounds. Extended inspection or analysis (staring at the word or phrase for a long time) in place of repetition also produces the same effect.
sharperguy 1 day ago||
While I recognize the dangers of splintering sources of truth into various fragmented opinion spaces, if you were to fork wikipedia it would make sense to simply clone all the information there and only change the parts that you consider false. Ideally, you make a reasonable case for why particular sources approved by wikipedia are invalid and why some sources considered invalid by wikipedia are indeed valid, and systematically remove all claims covered by invalid sources while verifying further modifications against the updated set of sources.
mikkupikku 1 day ago||
I expected they would. I was curious if they'd copy the errors too, so I checked my go-to example of errors on wikipedia lasting for years.

Wikipedia's version:

> Brilliant Pebbles was a non-nuclear system of satellite-based interceptors designed to use high-velocity, watermelon-sized, teardrop-shaped tungsten projectiles as kinetic warheads.[79][80] It was designed to operate in conjunction with the Brilliant Eyes sensor system. The project was conceived in November 1986 by Lowell Wood at LLNL.[81] Detailed studies were undertaken by several advisory boards, including the Defense Science Board and JASON, in 1989.

Grok's version:

> The Brilliant Pebbles program, initiated in 1990 by the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO), represented a shift toward distributed, cost-effective constellations of micro-satellites, each approximately 45-100 kg and equipped with autonomous processors for onboard target discrimination and interception.

Both contain errors, although different errors.

xigoi 22 hours ago||
I find it curious that the Wikipedia article on George Floyd specifically mentions in the first sentence that the police officer was white. Grokipedia’s description seems more neutral.
archagon 11 hours ago|
I mean, it may be difficult to understand or properly contextualize the subsequent BLM movement without pointing out the racial aspect of this execution.
xigoi 11 hours ago||
The “racial aspect” is a projection of people who want to make everything about race. Do you think the situation would’ve been different if the officer was black?
archagon 11 hours ago||
Yes, it would have been massively different. I don't think BLM would have coalesced without it.
xigoi 1 hour ago||
Okay, so BLM is racist and only cares about violence if it fits their narrative, but what does that have to do with the situation?
ChrisArchitect 1 day ago||
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45726459

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45737044

timdaub 1 day ago||
Hey, if anyone thinks this article was wrongfully flagged, please contact me via my email in the description and lets talk. I'm building a startup related to moderation on social media so I'd like to user interview you
burnte 1 day ago||
Musk said it was full of partisans a bias, and the reality is the reverse. Too many confuse "you're biased" with "I don't like that."
JohnTHaller 1 day ago||
Reality has a well-established liberal bias
bad_username 22 hours ago||
Bias is deviation from a baseline. What is the baseline here?

This sentence is meaningless.

CupricTea 21 hours ago|||
I have only seen such statements made in bad faith to mean "my subjective political opinions are objective reality". It's quackery. I see people on the conservative end say it too.
tzs 18 hours ago|||
It is not meaningless.

The meaning is that when things that should not be political questions because they have objectively correct answers do become political in recent years most of the time it is liberals whose positions match the objectively correct answer.

Note that this doesn't necessarily mean that liberals are more often correct than conservatives on how to deal with those things--that often is something that does not have an objectively correct answer and so is something that people can reasonably disagree over and so can reasonably become political.

For example consider climate change. How to address climate change is something that does not have an objectively correct answer and so you can't say that any given political group is right or wrong on that.

However, the question of whether or not the increases in the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere since pre-industrial time are most due to human activity is a question that does have an objectively correct answer. The C in CO2 comes in several different isotopes, and by looking at changes in the ratios between those isotopes in the C in atmospheric CO2 it is possible to determine that most of the increase has come from burning fossil fuels.

If a political group is taking the position that the rise in CO2 is not due to human activity they are objectively wrong, and the phrase that reality has a well known bias against that group is a way of highlighting that.

palmotea 23 hours ago|||
> Reality has a well-established liberal bias

Only if you're a liberal who confuses the information you receive, usually filtered through other liberals, for reality (which many do).

tl;dr: if you think reality agrees with your politics, you're actually just in a bubble.

delaminator 1 day ago||
except for the first 300,000 years
array_key_first 20 hours ago||
If you actually look back towards all of human history and analyze the conservative and progressive positions at the time, you will find yourself almost exclusively siding with progressives.

Conservatism, as an ideology, is built on the belief that conservatism has always been wrong, until about 20 years ago to just now. That's what they're trying to conserve: always the very, very near past.

palmotea 59 minutes ago|||
> Conservatism, as an ideology, is built on the belief that conservatism has always been wrong, until about 20 years ago to just now.

That's hilariously wrong: you're basically claiming current-day conservatives [or at least Trump I conservatives, if you want to be hyper-literal) are all about conserving [Democratic-party] Clintonism. Pretty soon they'll all in on Obamacare? You're trying to be clever but have no idea what you're talking about.

AnimalMuppet 20 hours ago|||
I don't think that's accurate. Many US conservatives think that the US Constitution and the Federalist Papers have ideas that are right and are worth conserving. Many would think that the ideas of limited government and government by the people are worth preserving.
SilverElfin 1 day ago|
Ripping off most of its pages doesn't mean it isn't woke. You can copy content on most of the noncontroversial topics that don't have political or ideological angles, while still offering different content on the topics that do.