Wikipedia: "Add a Fact" LLM Future Audiences Experiment

en.wikipedia.org

41 points·joecobb··4 comments

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has...

Rings true to me.

That is fascinating as a way to back into article writing. So it just creates a structured talk page update on potentially relevant articles with the fact? Is the idea that you would use your talk history as a todo list to make edits? Because it’s unlikely the community would run with someone else’s fact suggestion unless the article had frequent discussion but not enough that most relevant facts had already been evaluated.

I come across many articles that could have a fact edited in by an LLM without much risk of worsening the prose. But that idea could have have been strongly opposed in their discussions.

My other thought was that this should be adding to Wikidata or that other project that represents WP articles as structured data.

There are at least two browser extensions that do this for Wikidata:

Wikidata for Web (aka Wikidata for Firefox):

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Tools/Wikidata_for_We...

and Wwwyzzerdd for Wikidata (which is by the same author as this one):

https://github.com/derenrich/wwwyzzerdd

The first lets you extract info from webpages and insert references for facts into Wikidata.

The latter lets you formalise relationships between items mentioned in Wikipedia pages e.g. on a page for a film it might say "directed by <person>" or "based on the book <book>" and you can check if that relationship is in Wikidata and add it if not.

Thank you. So many people would benefit from the bidirectional links between data and web.

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