I am an archeologist. I specialize in a somewhat obscure but by no means boring or meaningless Neolithic culture in Germany.
It has a Wikipedia page. A well curated, surprisingly extensive Wiki page that encapsulates all the important information about the culture, including literature references for further research.
One day, we asked Chat GPT about this culture. W were curious which details it would get wrong.
ALL OF THEM, except for the fact that it’s a culture in present day Germany.
It didn’t even get the chronological time frame wrong and called it a celtic culture.
When we told it it’s wrong, it came at us with made up literature sources. Literally made up. It took two well known German archeologist who weren’t even active at the same time, added a year - both were already dead - and sold that as source.
And it LITERALLY would only have had to quote Wikipedia to get everything right.
THAT is how unbelievably shitty and wrong all those AIs are.
They are making shit up. They are not sourcing information, they’re just slapping words together by their most like relative occurance.
Do not trust ChatGPT or any other so-called AI ever.
sometimes when I’m bored, I go through the list of recent bad faith Wikipedia edits that have since been reverted. a lot of them are politically contentious/offensive topics that attract crazies and trolls in general, but sometimes there are completely innocent inoffensive articles that people attack for no reason. some guy yesterday vandalized the article on the chemical element francium
Francium IS a stupid element. It has a half life of 22 minutes and barely exists at all, only naturally occurring as a product of the extremely rare alpha decay series ²³⁵U ➝ ²³¹Th ➝ ²³¹Pa (𝜷 decay) ➝ ²²⁷Ac ➝ ²²³Fr (1.38% chance). There’s less than a gram of it on earth at any given moment. It has no uses to anybody and it isn’t even the most reactive group 1A element due to relativistic effects fucking up its electron binding energies. Stupid substance.
If you somehow asked a genie to get you a gram of Francium in a sealed vial so you could do an experiment with it, the genie would just give it to you because the enormous amount of radioactivity it produces would instantly vaporize the sample and cook you alive. Absolute dogshit isotope and its synthetic siblings are just the same but worse
hey i know a lot of you cannot donate, but wikipedia NEEDS money to keep functioning. AO3 was able to surpass their fundraising goal in days, but wikipedia has been trying to get donations for months now to no avail. that’s not a “don’t donate to AO3”, that’s a “also donate to wikipedia” or “donate to wikipedia instead, because AO3 is doing good”. if any of you can donate, please do. wikipedia is one of the best things to happen on the internet, and i would hate to see it with tons of ads or worse.
donate to wikipedia!!
Hey, folks, if you want to donate to Wikipedia because you want to support it, that’s great, but please don’t do so because you’re worried that they aren’t meeting their donation goals.
People have been reporting on this for a decade now:
And they continue to report on it:
In 2021 the wikimedia foundation made its goal of securing $100 million for its endowment YEARS ahead of schedule:
And the endowment is now significantly larger than it was in 2021:
And during this donation season there was a huge clash between the wikimedia foundation and Wikipedia editors, who felt that the banner requesting donations was too alarmist and manipulative given the financial situation of the foundation:
Donating to Wikipedia is fine. It’s an important part of the internet and it is largely donor funded. But they are absolutely meeting - and exceeding - their goals, and it is misleading to suggest that they’ve been running ads to no avail. We obviously don’t have info about 2022 donations yet, but here’s their own info about their current and historical expenses and revenue: (cont’d in reblog because of image limit on mobile)
I have to say, though, it’s easy to be misled when the site is showing you things like this:
So. If you want to support wikipedia, please feel free to do so! But don’t feel like it’s urgent or like they’re about to have to shut their doors or fire their staff.
Also the comparison to Ao3 is very funny. Ao3 meets is goals because it sets and publicizes those goals to its members, and its goal in 2022 was literally 4 orders of magnitude lower than the donations wikipedia collected in 2021:
Goal: 40k, with 275k raised from about 7500 donors.
Annual goal: unstated. Raised: 154 million dollars from 7.7 million donors.
This isn’t even an apples to oranges comparison, it’s an apples to formula 1 car comparison.
(Not that I’m saying it’s better or more worthwhile to donate to one or the other, just that that’s like comparing the cookie sales from your local girl scout troop with cookie sales from a Walmart super center)
Anyway. Here are those articles so you can read up further yourself if you’d like to.
The Register (old article, mostly for content that wikipedia has been fine financially for a while and that has been covered by tech news for years)
i’m looking up whales for a project on wikipedia and do you know what this PIECE OF JUNK page “list of cetaceans” says for the whales they don’t have neat drawings of
Interesting in its own right and as perspective on some of the debates about the OTW, especially “how dare you ask for money.”
Yesterday, ArbCom announced its preliminary decision. A panel of fourteen arbitrators – at least 11 of whom are men – decided to give GamerGate everything they’d wished for. All of the Five Horsemen are sanctioned; most will be excluded not only from “Gamergate broadly construed” but from anything in Wikipedia touching on “gender or sexuality, broadly construed.”
By my informal count, every feminist active in the area is to be sanctioned. This takes care of social justice warriors with a vengeance — not only do the GamerGaters get to rewrite their own page (and Zoe Quinn’s, Brianna Wu’s, Anita Sarkeesian’s, etc.); feminists are to be purged en bloc from the encyclopedia. Liberals are the new Scientologists as far as Arbcom is concerned.
On occasion, the main Wikipedia takes the position that fandom activities are not “notable”. Case in point:
Sectus = 450 fans attend a Harry Potter convention, a 4 day series of fannish and scholarly events. Wikipedia deletes the convention page: The convention is not notable and not worth documenting because it “…is just a school get together with Harry Potter fans.”
In contrast, see Fanlore’s Sectus convention page. Fanlore is a fan run, non-profit wiki that focuses on media fandom history. You do not have to be a BNF or “notable” to be included. And anyone can participate in editing.
But it is not just media fandom that gets the side eye. The Bay Area Science Fiction Association (a fan club for sci-fi fans) was almost deleted because the fan club had not been mentioned by any “third party sources.” (“Articles by notable people that cover BASFA in some detail, a solid history in a notable fanzine, notable events that BASFA has had a recognised role in or organised”).
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