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I loved Wikipedia.
If you ask me the greatest achievement of humankind, something to give to aliens as an example of the best we could be, Wikipedia would be my pick. It's a reasonable approximation of the sum total of human knowledge, available to all for free. It's a Wonder of the Modern World.
...which means that when I call what's happened to it "sacrilege", I'm not exaggerating. It always had a bit of a bias issue, but early on that seemed fixable, the mere result of not enough conservatives being there and/or some of their ideas being objectively false. No longer. Rightists are actively purged*, adding conservative-media sources gets you auto-reverted**, and right-coded ideas get lumped into "misinformation" articles. This shining beacon is smothered and perverted by its use as a club in the culture wars.
I don't know what to do about this. @The_Nybbler talks a lot about how the long march through the institutions won't work a second time; I might disagree with him in the general case, but in this specific instance I agree that Wikipedia's bureaucratic setup and independence from government make it extremely hard to change things from either below or above, and as noted it has gone to the extreme of having an outright ideological banning policy* which makes any form of organic change even harder. All I've done myself is quit making edits - something something, not perpetuating a corrupt system - and taken it off my homepage. But it's something I've been very upset about for a long time now, and I thought I'd share.
*Yes, I know it's not an official policy. I also know it's been cited by admins as cause for permabans, which makes that ring rather hollow.
**NB: I've seen someone refuse to include something on the grounds of (paraphrasing) "only conservatives thought this was newsworthy, and therefore there are no Reliable Sources to support the content".
I think Wikipedia, while certainly a laudable institution and probably a significant contributor to the global economy, if someone managed to quantity that, is eventually going to be made obsolete by people getting their information from LLMs, especially the ones hooked up to the internet.
Yes, I'm aware that a lot of their knowledge base comes from Wikipedia. They're still perfectly capable of finding things on the wider internet and using their own judgement to assess them.
Now, you do have to account for certain biases hammered into initially neutralish models, but I have asked Bing about politically controversial topics like HBD, national IQs, and gotten straight and accurate answers, even if there were disclaimers attached.
Anyway, Wiki can undergo a lot of enshittification before it ceases to be useful or a value add, not that I hope that happens. It's also in the Creative Commons, so it won't be too hard to fork, especially if you use the better class of LLM to augment human volunteers.
For things that are uncontroversial and just require ELI5 explanations, this will probably be an improvement. For things that are even the slightest bit controversial, turning the information source and how it's written into more of a black box than the current Wikipedia situation is apt to be pretty terrible for people's information diets. Existing sources like ChatGPT are heavily modified to deliver what I would most accurately describe as the "midwit lib" answer to many questions. Trying to get factually accurate information that doesn't include endless hedging like, " I must emphasize the importance of using respectful and appropriate language when discussing social issues and vulnerable populations" is already like pulling teeth. This isn't a big problem in and of itself, but if most people come to believe that they're actually getting accurate and authoritative answers there, this is going to be pretty bad. There's already enough, "ummm actually, that's been deboonked" without people relying on regime-influenced AI to deboonk for them.
I do not see this as an insurmountable problem, while the "politically incorrect" open-source models still lag behind SOTA, eventually they'll be good enough to give you accurate answers about contentious queries, looking at both sides of the argument, assessing credibility, suppression of inconvenient facts, and so on.
I'm not claiming it'll be perfect, but it might well be better than Wiki when it comes to redpills, and even Wiki is still doing a good job of covering more mundane general knowledge that nobody has a vested interest in messing with.
Things like Bing Chat or ChatGPT with plug-ins already source their claims where appropriate, if a person is too lazy to peruse them, then I invite you to consider how much epistemic hygiene they observe when it's a human telling them something.
What I envision is something akin to an automated meta analysis of relevant literature and commentary, with an explicit attempt to perform Bayesian reasoning to tease out the net direction of the evidence.
This is already close to what LLMs do. GPT 4 has seen claims of the Earth being flat in its training corpus, yet without massive prompt engineering, will almost never make that claim in normal conversation. It finds that the net weight of evidence, especially from reputable sources, strongly supports Earth being round. This is a capability that is empirically observed to improve with scale, GPT-2 was beaten by 3, was beaten by 4.
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