Wikipedia-grounded chatbot “outperforms all baselines” on factual accuracy
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
This is equivalent to saying:
"A bot trained on the articles that we have written gives the answers that the writers of the articles expected"
Wikipedia maintains a list of 'reliable' news sites:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per...
The American Conservative (yellow) ==> The American Conservative is published by the American Ideas Institute, an advocacy organisation. It is a self-identified opinionated source whose factual accuracy was questioned and many editors say that The American Conservative should not be used as a source for facts.
The New Republic (green) ==> There is consensus that The New Republic is generally reliable. Most editors consider The New Republic biased or opinionated. Opinions in the magazine should be attributed.
This seems like a somewhat arbitrary double standard to be applying. As a reader of both news sources they are both biased, opinionated sources, and I don't think you can trust one more than the other. But one is green with "be careful this might be biased" and the other is yellow for pretty much the same reason.
Lest anyone think the problem is that Wikileaks is 'left biased'.
And then those claims make their way into Wikipedia where they inevitably (even though they shouldn't) are relied upon by students, politicians, journalists, who then perpetuate the claim.
Reliability from a fact-checking perspective is a pretty specific thing, and a thing that is vital to Wikipedia as an open-source, anyone-can-edit encyclopedia. This can correlate with political views in particular times and places, but does not broadly correlate with either left or right. E.g., after the Russian revolution, we saw the left using Pravda as a vehicle to "indoctrinate" and "encourage unity of thought". [1] But a significant part of the current US right has frequently taken the approach of "flooding the zone with shit" [2].
[1] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Pravda
[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=flood+the+zone+with+shit
There's a reason "The Atlantic" is listed green even though it's conservative. Hell they list the Christian Science monitor as green for reliability (as they should imo), I don't think Wikipedia is demonstrating a bias based on any particular ideology in their sources on this list.
This wiki list is a list of sources by reliability. If you only publish stories which support your bias, but those stories are scientifically sound and don't omit context, I don't see the problem with using them as a source regardless of bias.
If you only allow sources from reliable sources aligned with a particular bias to the exclusion of reliable sources from another alignment, that would be an issue, but I don't see evidence of such here.
The problem isn't the bias. The problem is the factuality.
The Atlantic is in no way conservative leaning.
https://www.allsides.com/news-source/atlantic
https://adfontesmedia.com/the-atlantic-bias-and-reliability/
It almost seems as if some people think that reality is everywhere subjective, and saying or believing something makes it truth, much like religion.
(Not commentary on either of those media orgs btw, I don't follow nor have any opinion on either of those one way or the other.)
You can argue that all parties have biases but if you look at modern conservatism it's worldview is increasingly wildly divergent from reality. If your publication desires the readership of people who are obliged to stand in a puddle and deny being wet you shall have to follow them at least to the perimeter of Neverland and spend at least some of your breath speaking of pirates and fairies. Mentioning the puddle will also be verboten.
Reading several of the articles on the front page I noted a completely incoherent takes on Ukraine and birth control for instance. It's not the outright horror show of Fox news nor is it what one would consider objective or news. It's essentially 100% op eds by your least incoherent older relative.
I have read neither, so don't have an opinion on them.
But going by the descriptions quoted, it doesn't seem to be for the same reason.
Both are listed as biased/opinionated, but for The American Conservative it additionally says "factual accuracy was questioned", which would make it less trustworthy as a reference.
There's also some policy pages that talk about othet potential biases like technical biases. There is awareness
When the Ukraine Russia war came out, they made a banner about a ukranian translation project that had existed for years and made it look like some project to support Ukraine, effectively breaking neutrality on the war subject (which was unrelated to the translation project.)
Sure, but the tradeoff is in generalization vs specialization. No one is impressed by the fact that ChatGPT is able to recite facts. Google can do that. Where it becomes interesting is in the general applicability of a single tool to thousands of possible domains.
This is a RAG system - and you need to treat it as a whole - it is an question answering machine that remembers the whole wikipedia.
By the way just today I wrote a blogpost about the common misconception that to teach an LLM new facts you need to finetune it: https://zzbbyy.substack.com/p/why-you-need-rag-not-finetunin...
edit, link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download
There’s no “time or facility” constraint, only storage space.
Otherwise you can find an archive there: https://archive.org/details/wikimediadownloads?and%5B%5D=sub...
I'm pretty glad that I did. I'm going to hold onto them indefinitely. They have become the "low background steel" of text.
For anyone curious what low background steel is, it's steel that was made before the first atomic bombs were tested: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel
> I'm pretty glad that I did. I'm going to hold onto them indefinitely. They have become the "low background steel" of text.
Also, ironically, the Pushshift reddit dumps (still available via torrent), before they were taken down. The exact time Reddit shut down the API to sell their data for AI training is also exactly the time it started to become less valuable for that.
I believe a lot of subreddits started implementing protest moderation policies after reddit came down on the blackout. IMHO, they should implement rules like "no posts unless it's a ChatGPT hallucination."
In terms of practical utility, for the vast majority of humanity, access to translated articles in their local language is the biggest problem, I think. There is no Yoruba-language Wiki article on General Relativity, for example. Second comes entire biased communities - like some of the smaller Wikis are full of far-right editors, and most editors (like 90%) are men.
> I'm unsure if this will happen. There's plenty of checks-and-balances for Wikipedia edits.
I think it will. It's so tedious to edit Wikipedia (due to bureaucracy and internal politics) that their editorial population is in a long-term decline, which means their oversight ability is declining too.
Probably what will happen is LLM generated content will creep into long-tail articles, then work its way into more "medium-profile" articles as editors get exhausted. The extremely high-profile stuff (e.g. New York City), political battleground articles (e.g. Donald Trump), and areas patrolled by obsessives (railroads, Pokemon) will probably remain unaffected by the corruption the longest. At some point, the only way to resist will to become much more hostile to new editors, but that's also long-term suicide for the project.
I think they're painted into a corner.
I also don't like the attitude of Wikipedia being "them", as in "their editorial population". It's our public good, like our air, and everyone should care to ensure its high quality. If you see a problem in the world, you have to try to fix it, instead of sitting on the sidelines, looking from the outside in.
I've never had an edit reverted on Wikipedia.
There are a lot of such edits at Wikipedia (neither well sourced nor neutral). For some reasons, a certain bias passes through the filter.
WikiChat: A Few-Shot LLM-Based Chatbot Grounded with Wikipedia
Like we invented this new thing and this new measurement for evaluating it. It does great on the metric we just made up while we were making it.
[1]: We can discuss if ChatGPT passes the Turing Test or not, but I think we can now all agree that being able to have a convincing conversation is not a good test for intelligence.
Of course, one should always be critical of benchmarks, and there is an obvious opportunity for bias here that should be reviewed with care. But your phrasing suggests that this is unusual or actively suspicious, which it is not.
In those areas the fact isn't the base fact, but claims of fact. We don't know who explored which bit of the great pyramid in which order, and may never, but we know of many specific claims.
The fact check wouldn't be "The great pyramid X" but "Herodotus said X about the great pyramid".
> in general, they're not the place to hash out the "right" interpretation of events.
Once you scope the problem correctly it's not a problem. The point isn't to solve historical riddles, it's to document what evidence we have.
Sometimes that evidence is broadly accepted measurements (land area of Australia) and other times it's not.
Of course, you can't really say that distrusting experts is unique to encyclopedias.
An encyclopedia is always the starting point, never the end of serious research. (It's ok however to stick to Wikipedia if a superficial acquaintance with the topic is enough!).
Yes, but Wikipedia is also frequently conceived and marketed as "the sum of all human knowledge," which that shows is a lie by definition.
By which definition? In math, the sum of a set necessarily implies a loss of information about that set, for sets larger than 1. But they're using "sum" not in the purely mathematical sense, more like "the summary of all human knowledge". But the same principle applies axiomatically, because summaries are lossy compression: you cannot have a summary that contains all the information of the source it is summarizing.
> By which definition?
That's pretty easy: definition 2 "the whole amount : aggregate" (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sum). That it's interpreted that way is shown by the frequency of people saying stuff like "I loaded Wikipedia onto this battery powered Raspberry Pi in a Pelican case, now I'm ready to rebuild civilization if it collapses," and seemingly believing it.
But you do correctly point to another issue: sum has a meaning of "a summary of the chief points or thoughts," which I feel is a less common usage. So the marketing phrase may not be so much a lie, but rather an extremely misleading statement that invites misinterpretation that usually goes unchallenged. IMHO, those are actually even more pernicious than outright lies.
The least delusional part of this is the sparseness of information contained within Wikipedia. If that scenario came to be, they wouldn't be short on information. They'd be short on time, resources, and skills.
As someone who inched closer into the doomsday prepper scene before swerving far away from it, I assure you that people in that subculture have a lot of unrealistic beliefs about their own capacities and resources. I don't think it's Wikipedia's fault that they (and you) are taking a quote about Wikipedia's never-ending goal and interpreting it as if it is their description of what they are.
An even worse example of deceptive marketing would be a compact folding multitool marketed as "the only tool you'll ever need." Even with that, I'd say that if you actually believe that you can rebuild civilization with that tool solely on the basis of that marketing slogan, then that's your fault as much as it is the marketers.
And a minor nitpick: the standard prepper info archives also include collections of various survival guides and resources that are specifically written for these kinds of purposes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Prime_objective
You seem to have an issue with some person or persons who has been advising others that the only work they need to consult is Wikipedia. Who are they? Specifically.
A paper encyclopedia might not have time or space for individual entries about many hundreds of pokemon, episodes of the simpsons, or characters from star wars.
Its not a direct translation, its an entirely different encyclopedia and can be far more robust.
(Maybe an LLM could harmonize all the wikipedias across languages)
The amount of disagreement between researchers over time and changing consensus requires an external arbiter of individual facts at the very least.
Case in point : elder of zions protocol french article contained outdated knowledge (it said we knew who the author was, propagating an old hypothesis that had been debunked in the last 10 years, eventhough the other wikipedia articles were fixed). Historians were heard repeating that same boggus claim on radio. Until i convinced an historian friend of mine to fix the french article, and all of the sudden historians started fixing their speech. Meaning not only did they not update their knowledge from scholarly books, but they needed wikipedia to help them get up to date.
For example, from about 1960-2010, anthropologists universally held a "pots, not people" view of prehistory: they asserted, with great confidence, that styles of pottery and metalworking changed over time due to voluntary exchange of ideas among peaceful, cooperating peoples. These anthropologists asserted that pre-1960 theories that pottery styles changed because population groups violently replaced each other were not only wrong, but immoral and barbaric. To them, it was modernity that made humans violent.
Now due to ancient DNA, we know that the pre-1960s anthropologists were right and the post-1960 consensus was wrong: prehistory was violent and populations violently replaced each other with regularity.
You're more informed reading, say, Gordon Child book from 1920 than a serious book on prehistoric archaeology from 2000.
So it goes in many fields. Imagine how much longer it would take for science's self correction mechanism to operate if our knowledge were encoded solely in a "living" information system aligned with only currently fashionable ideas.
My favorite example of this is the debate between a faction that believes Lithobates is the proper genus of a certain set of frogs, and another faction that believes the correct genus is Rana. The Lithobates side is essentially one person along with his sock and/or meat puppets, so in the end, after many rounds of moderation, most of the species in question are listed under both genuses.
It's not a fair criticism of Wikipedia, but it is a fair criticism of using Wikipedia as a single-source.
With that said I've seen two areas where contributing to wikipedia falls short:
The first is things involving what I'd call editorialization (I'm sure there's some wikipedia term for it). Any article that's about an unsettled or somewhat contentious issue seems to give outsized weight to the non-consensus view. Even if 85% of a field thinks that one thing is more likely than the other the wikipedia article will often split its coverage of the views 50/50 and then maybe tack a sentence on at the end saying that the majority of people in the field favor xyz view.
Contributing to or changing those pages is often a hassle because you have to argue with people and that's generally not worth your time (unless you're of the minority opinion and you want to give legitimacy to your side - in which case you are motivated to argue).
The second are the stub articles. The ones that say "This article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it." Often I could help wikipedia by expanding it but it's so much work to write a full encyclopedia entry. Like it might take me 4 hours to summarize what I know, look up references, etc. It's easier to just not do it.
Where I find contributing useful is when I'm fixing a small factual error, updating based on a recent discovery, fixing a citation, etc.
I'm not sure if they do it but it would be good for Wikipedia to pay someone to go through and fill out the basics of a bunch of pages on a topic so that there's a scaffolding to work with and then the occasional volunteers could come through and add on facts and fix problems.
Add some AI to take the footnotes and get to the sources and train on that.
The trouble with Wikipedia is that it's an inch deep.
That's not its biggest problem. Wikipedia is biased.
Of course there's political bias in the American fashion. But that's not all. There is bias about History depending on what country is telling the story. And there is a strong bias even in scientific topics (maybe specially in them) when there are commercial interests involved.
That's not specific to Wikipedia.
But when you research some topic, reading multiple books, you'll notice there are different opinions, you learn to discount bias looking at the procedence. Wikipedia tries to adopt a neutral tone and cite different sources, but sometimes it does a terrible job at it.
A funny example of this is fan death [1]. Comparing English to southeast Asian languages show that Asian languages pages suggest that it's real (at least last few times I translated it).
An, in a bit of relevancy, the Japanese page has been overwritten with "I love you" and "I'm sorry".
> Wikipedia-based LLM chatbot "outperforms all baselines" regarding factual accuracy
Musk’s AI’s aim is to get to the truth, not eliminate biases retroactively. I think that’s a noble goal, politics aside.
I agree with him that teaching an AI to lie is a dangerous path. Currently it’s probably not exactly akin to lying, but it’s close enough to be on that path.
We should find a way to feed source material from all “biases” if you will, and have it produce what’s closest to reality. It’s obviously easier said than done, but I don’t think the AI Czar VP Harris aims to do this.
If we’re too divided or hellbent on pushing our own agenda, it’ll be a bad outcome for all.
Unfortunately the differences we have are at a very fundamental level that really is a question of how reality is perceived, and what we consider meaningful. The difference of if something by its nature has meaning, or if we give meaning to it culturally/societally.
The former is a more “conservative” (personality wise, not political) view.
The later is more of, “everything that has meaning is based off the meaning we say it has, thus we can ascribe the level of meaning to that or other things as we wish”. The idea that many things are social constructs, and we can change those as we wish to craft what we’d like to see.
I’m probably doing a poor job of wording it, but this fundamental difference in perception is going to very quickly be at the forefront of AI ethics.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideological_bias_on_Wikipedi...
Apart from necessary lies that lie at the core mechanics of civilization, anything remotely political has been long been vulnerable to outrageous grand lies that enjoy as much pressure as it takes to maintain them. Wikipedia is valuable apart from any political topic. More topics are political than many would believe.
They are going to make AI lie, as there isn't a choice in the matter. One major future problem will be the strategic war (military, business, etc) advantage of AI that is beyond the reach of censors. The reasonably accurate conclusion is likely that private and DoD AI won't be trained on lies, but all others will be.
https://cdn2.assets-servd.host/anthropic-website/production/...
Can't help but suspect you'll end up with an AI that confidently reports that Jesus was an extra-terrestrial, and the world is controlled by a secret cabal of lizard people.
If you look into rare diseases, you'll find the counter intuitive idea that rare disease is common. Each disease is individually rare, but there are so many of them, that a lot of people have them in total. Human beliefs are sort of similar. There's a huge volume of strange beliefs.
They already do. I'd love to know how much "brain damage" RLHF and other censorship techniques cause to the general purpose reasoning abilities of models. (Human reasoning ability is also harmed by lying.) We know the damage is nontrivial.
https://cdn2.assets-servd.host/anthropic-website/production/...
The headline refers to only a small portion of the linked page.
The whole problem of wikipedia only being an "inch deep" on any given topic is basically solved if the LLM also has to read every cited work in full
And maybe citation counts could affect exposure to that work during training
Interesting suggestion but probably a lot of practical limitations.
I wonder what percentage of Wikipedia citations are actually currently available on the internet. For example, here is today's featured article[1]. The majority of references on that pages are books, journals, magazines, television, and unlinked news articles that can't be easily accessed. Plus on more niche topics, it is common for the externally linked references to disappear over time.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kelly_(weapons_expert)
Someone doing serious AI training will mirror sci-hub and λιβgen first, so they'll already have a fair amount of the (good quality) referenced papers and educational books.
Wikipedia (and citation count on google scholar for papers) could be used as a filter for which books and papers to train on first.
the only thing i can think of ad hoc is that wikipedia contains less conflicting or unclear information which helps to avoid the LLM getting confused. also the information is more organized, and it is clear which articles relate to each other.
this would show what i think we already knew that LLMs can summarize the data they get but they can not evaluate or verify it.
That said, bias towards, and alignment with, verifiable reality is possible to achieve, and getting there partway is better than not at all:
https://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html
> [W]hen people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.
Of course but as discussed many times here before, Wikipedia leans left - presumably reflecting the statistical properties of the demographic of the people drawn to edit and moderate it - as implied by the comment you are replying to - and that can be a significant issue for topics (e.g cultural, historical, social, political etc) where that bias filters what might be assumed by the user to be objective answers.
This isn't a left vs right thing either; there are plenty of publications, demographics and institutions that lean right. The problem is the transparency, awareness and communication of that bias when using them as sources for tools like this.
In the underlying study, there is no mention of the word "bias".
Here's a sample quote which is also concerning:
For recent topics, we look at the most edited Wikipedia articles 1 in the first four months of 2023. The number of edits is also a good proxy for how much interest there is around a certain topic.
True - and it may also be an indication of a topic that is heavily contested. If the two (or more) views on the "truth" of the article are imbalanced, the chatbot will reflect that imbalance, and can therefore in no way be said to “outperform all baselines on factual accuracy".
To be fair to the researchers, they do address related concerns and talk about avoiding some areas of discussion, but the headline here is extremely misleading.
That is subjective, and depends on where you think the "centre" is.
I don't regard Wikipedia as reliable on any topic that is political or involves national history. Modern Wikipedia expects editors to support their edits with citations to "reliable sources", which means the mainstream press, mainly (because primary sources are deprecated). But the mainstream press is overwhelmingly right-wing, and left-wing papers and magazines are usually explicitly rejected as not reliable.
On matters of politics and history, I always dig into the citations (unless I'm happy to get a sketchy version that isn't really accurate). But on most technical and humanities-based topics, the articles are usually quite good (and often much deeper than 1").
There's still way too much stuff in articles that is not cited at all. That changes gradually, as editors delete uncited material, and others come along with suitable citations. I think it's getting better all the time.
Not at all. Even wikipedia itself acknowledges it [1] - and you can bet the editors responsible for the bias were fighting tooth and nail against that admission - which gives some idea how unbalanced it must be in reality.
Modern Wikipedia expects editors to support their edits with citations to "reliable sources", which means the mainstream press...
And academia - don't forget academia, that bastion of the right.
...the mainstream press is overwhelmingly right-wing
That's ridiculous - The Guardian?? The Washington Post? New York Times?
I think you've made a point about Wikipedia though, but perhaps not the one you intended...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideological_bias_on_Wikipedia
Yes, those. I'm not closely familiar with NYT and Washpo; but I'm a long-time reader of the Guardian. It's role is to delimit the left end of the Overton Window, which is roughly the left-ish end of the Shadow Cabinet, and is currently well to the right of Labour Party membership. From my limited exposure, I'd say NYT and Washpo are well to the right of The Guardian, as the Democratic Party is well to the right of Labour in the UK.
Your WP link doesn't speak to any strong bias in English Wikipedia; it says roughly that WP content is "establishment", which isn't surprising, considering the Reliable Sources policy. It also says that older articles exhibit a stronger "left-wing" bias (i.e. pro-Democratic). And the article is written from a US POV; in the USA, socialism is still a "bad word", and the word "liberal" is used instead.
The Guardian has been a supporter of the Israeli government since before there was an Israeli government. Nobody could accuse the Israeli government of being left-wing.
The Guardian was part of the coalition that hounded Jeremy Corbyn out of the Labour leadership, because he was too "left wing". Starmer refused to let him stand in the seat he's represented for decades; The Guardian strongly backs Starmer, who represents the most right-wing elements in Labour.
I'm happy to discontinue this discussion, not because I suspect you of bad faith, but because political discussions aren't generally on-topic on HN.
It's true that it's not good enough for academic work (is it?), but it's largely enough for everything else.
And no you can't cite Wikipedia ;)
Looks like a legit paper.
By cofounder Larry Sanger
It's written in the tone of a sore loser. A person who fought for regressive policies, against people with better arguments and more accurate facts. A person who now, having lost the fight for the policy, retreats into their echo chamber and decries the debate as "not making room for my facts."
It's apparently impossible to write any neutral statement that does not receive 100% unanimous support from every single person on the planet earth:
> A great many Christians would take issue with such statements, which means they are not neutral for that reason alone
> In another place, the article [the Wikipedia article about Jesus] simply asserts, “the gospels are not independent nor consistent records of Jesus’ life.” A great many Christians would take issue with such statements, which means they are not neutral for that reason alone. In other words, the very fact that many Christians, including many deeply educated conservative seminarians, believe in the historical reliability of the Gospels, and that they are wholly consistent, means that the article is biased if it simply asserts, without attribution or qualification, that this is a matter of “major uncertainty.” Now, it would be accurate and neutral to say it is widely disputed, but being “disputed” and being “uncertain” are very different concepts.
Put in context, Sanger is saying something that seems reasonable. I wouldn't expect Wikipedia to need unanimous support from Christians on all their articles, but it seems to me that maybe the article on Jesus should have some qualifications in there from, you know, the people who actually study and practice the faith centered on Jesus? It seems reasonable to me, but maybe I'm thinking about this too hard and the fumes from the "trashfire" are messing with my thinking.
I'd love to see his article on Jesus that absolutely no one would "take issue with".
Making a flat statement that the gospels are "not independent nor consistent" is not settled or universal assessment. An article written in NPOV would discuss the variety of citeable interpretations and the debate between them over time.
The Earth is round is not a universally accepted statement either. NPOV doesn’t mean living equal time to everyone with an opinion.
Case example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_intimacy
The majority of the article is woman-centered, even though there's no evidence that it's highly gender-biased, and the only information pertaining to men is that if they have fear-of-intimacy then they might be a sex offender.
Otherwise, the article barely communicates anything meaningful. How do attachment types relate to fear-of-intimacy? Are they causative or merely correlative?
Then there's of course poor writing throughout such as this:
> Fear of intimacy has three defining features: content which represents the ability to communicate personal information [...]
What the hell does that mean? "Content?" Like a YouTube video or something?
This is just the latest example I've come across, and happens to be one of the least encyclopedic bodies I've text I've ever read. So much of what I read on Wikipedia is of a similar low caliber. People scan over Wikipedia articles but don't think critically, in part because Wikipedia has devolved into writing that can't decide what its audience is and won't get to the point. As I've said before, check out the Talk sections of the pages you visit, and you'll find some of the most arrogant responses from Wikipedia's inner circle of editors.
What makes me LOL the most is supposedly scientific articles that are written as if there is no debate behind a scientific idea, despite there being no such thing in science as "case closed." Wikipedia often behaves like it's a peer-reviewed scientific journal, yet has none of the chops to act as such. Anything that you read on Wikipedia that suggest that there is "no evidence" for something is likely to be some buffoon's ignorant opinion on the actual literature.
And no, I can't just "edit" Wikipedia to fix these issues. I've tried. Both my home IP address and my phone IP address is banned from them, despite my having never set up an account with them.
> What the hell does that mean? "Content?" Like a YouTube video or something?
It's taken directly from the source cited (page 2 of https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Development-and-Valida...). I'm not an expert in the field and have no idea if this is a good paper, but it has received 267 citations which does convey some impact.
> The fear-of-intimacy construct takes into account three defining features: (a) content, the communication of personal information;(b) emotional valence, strong feelings about the personal information exchanged; and (c) vulnerability, high regard for the intimate other. We propose that it is only with the coexistence of content, emotional valence, and vulnerability that intimacy can exist. Consider, for example, the customer who talks to an unknown bartender about his or her troubles. Although there may be personal content
It's clear that it's not the noun "content" but the adjective, defined as "pleased with your situation and not hoping for change or improvement".
I hope the Wikipedia editors are more literate and willing to research than that. I don't think I want to read your version of wikipedia.
No, it's not the adjective. The other 2 features are nouns, so this one must also be a noun, since it's a parallel construct. Also, they're all "features", so they have to be nouns by definition. And what would the adjective even be describing?
In this case, the "content" refers (I guess) to the content that's being communicated, though it's poorly phrased.
The Wikipedia excerpt is badly written, whether you agree with the GP or not about the article being biased towards women. It's not even a paraphrase of the original source, which claims the content is the communication itself, whereas the article claims the content "represents the ability to communicate personal information" — which is pretty meaningless.
If it was clear, I wouldn't have brought it up. Judging by the Talk section of that page, I'm not the only one who finds that choice of words confusing. It doesn't really matter if it's lifted from a cited article; that article isn't the Wikipedia page.
> I hope the Wikipedia editors are more literate and willing to research than that. I don't think I want to read your version of wikipedia.
What specifically do you object to? A better choice of words? Not being unnecessarily gender biased? Not misrepresenting the state of research?
If you were able to edit this wiki page, what particular studies about fear of intimacy in men would you cite in the sections you add?
Also, is this bit
> Anything that you read on Wikipedia that suggest that there is "no evidence" for something is likely to be some buffoon's ignorant opinion on the actual literature
meant to be ironic?
For example, is this accurate or isn't it?
>Examples have become embarrassingly easy to find. The Barack Obama article completely fails to mention many well-known scandals: Benghazi, the IRS scandal, the AP phone records scandal, and Fast and Furious, to say nothing of Solyndra or the Hillary Clinton email server scandal—or, of course, the developing “Obamagate” story in which Obama was personally involved in surveilling Donald Trump. A fair article about a major political figure certainly must include the bad with the good. Beyond that, a neutral article must fairly represent competing views on the figure by the major parties.
And if so, then wikipedia is indeed badly biased. Whether or not Larry Sanger is isn't that interesting. But a bias at wikipedia - a source blindly trusted by millions - is a very interesting and concerning state of affairs.
I disagree. This thread started with "By cofounder Larry Sanger" - so the argument started with an implication that larry sangar should be listened to due to who he is. You can't both claim his argument holds extra weight due to who he is well also claiming its irrelavent who he is. You have to pick one.
As far as the obama article goes - im not an american and i havent heard of those scandals before, so honestly i dont know if their ommision is appropriate or not (it should be noted that libyan intervention is mentioned in his article).
However, i think this is asking the wrong question. Nothing is 100% neutral. I don't doubt you can find biased things in wikipedia. It is made by humans not revealed through divine revelation. The important question in my mind is how does it stack up against other sources. Is it mostly neutral relative to other information sources? That's how i would like to judge it.