I wish I had the time or facility to take a snapshot of wikipedia now before the imminent deluge of Chat-GPT based updates that start materially modifying wikipedia is some weird and unpredictable manner.
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."
Otherwise you can find an archive there: https://archive.org/details/wikimediadownloads?and%5B%5D=sub...
edit, link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download
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.
There’s no “time or facility” constraint, only storage space.
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.