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Comment by cowardlydragon | Hacker News Reader

As referenced in the article, what is "good" and "bad" is dependent on perspective.

Wikipedia has several perspectives just within the colloquial / perceived mission. Is it for academic integrity? For common education? For the rich and powerful? For the everyman? To record as much as possible? To cull the best knowledge from the stream?

Is it for progressive ideals, which may be opposed by the common majority? Or does it reflect a conservative viewpoint, adopting only what has proven to coalesce in society?

For who's society? What about two sides of a war? Or two equally opposing economic interests (entrenched oil vs alternative energy)?

"good" or "bad" isn't a number...

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"Good" simply means "unlikely to be reverted". The objective is to save time for editors.

Maybe the better metric is usefulness to the reader. A suitable algorithm can recognize things like "N.N. smells", but so can any user. The current algorithms are very effective at dealing with "XY is gay" and "Buy herbal viagra"; you don't see much of that.

The really insidious stuff is spin doctors for companies and nations. So far, Wikipedia does a very poor job with geopolitical conflicts, and competing financial interests are not taken seriously enough either.

But the people who are supposed to define what's good for the reader are the editors. They show the system what they think is good by either reverting edits or not, so by saying "this edit is likely to be reverted", the AI is saying "based on input from all editors, this edit may not be good for the users".

Effectively, those are the same thing, unless you want to create a hard definition of "good for the users". But that's going around the editors, and taking their opinion of "good" out of the equation, which IMO is a very bad idea.

I feel sorry for the AI when it runs into the n-dash, m-dash, hyphen, and minus wars.

Here's one example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(poli...

About 15,000 words and closed wit no consensus.

Here there's hundreds of thousands of words: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=dash&pre...

"Good" on Wikipedia means the opinion of the most powerful group of editors on the page.

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