Kind of just skimmed the paper, but isn't it weird that researchers from Google would publish a paper that's basically about how Wikipedia hasn't properly adapted to its contents being used for training data sets?
> "Wikipedians like Knipel imagine that ChatGPT could be used on Wikipedia as a tool without removing the role of humanity. For them, the initial text that’s generated from the chatbot is useful as a starting place or a skeletal outline. Then, the human verifies that this information is supported by reliable sources and fleshes it out with improvements. This way, Wikipedia itself does not become machine-written. Humans remain the project’s special sauce."
https://slate.com/technology/2023/01/chatgpt-wikipedia-artic...
This might create a kind of structural-organizational conformity in all articles, which doesn't sound so great.
Feels wrong to me.
I see this paper as explicitly giving Wikipedia useful information and the ability to make decisions.
I think keeping these things transparent is good for Google.
In addition to the obvious use of responding to questions based on the material, perhaps it could be a tool for finding e.g. if and how a cited source relates to the article where it was cited. Abuse detection could also be one application.
I couldn't exactly find out what the goal of Wikipedia is from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia but it doesn't seem a "better search" would be opposite to those goals.
The paper also tells them how to solve that issue, which is what google would prefer. But they are letting wikipedia make that choice.