Tim Bray on Grokipedia

Wondering if the project will get better from the pushback or will just be folded like one of Elon's many ADHD experiments. In a sense, encyclopedias should be easy for LLMs: they are meant to survey and summarize well-documented material rather than contain novel insights; they are often imprecise and muddled already (look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_tree and see how many conventions coexist without an explanation of their differences; it used to be worse a few years ago); the writing style is pretty much that of GPT-5. But the problem type of "summarize a biased source and try to remove the bias" isn't among the ones I've seen LLMs being tested for, and this is what Elon's project lives and dies by.

If I were doing a project like this, I would hire a few dozen topical experts to go over the WP articles relevant to their fields and comment on their biases rather than waste their time rewriting the articles from scratch. The results can then be published as a study, and can probably be used to shame the WP into cleaning their shit up, without needlessly duplicating the 90% of the work that it has been doing well.

> can probably be used to shame the WP into cleaning their shit up

what if your goal is for wikipedia to be biased in your favor?

No no no, you see, you got it all wrong. If the Wikipedia article on, let’s say, transsexualism, says that’s an orientation, not a disease—then that’s leftist bias. Removing that bias means correcting it to say it’s a mental illness, obviously. That makes the article unbiased, pure truth.

It only seems to be a problem for bigots like you. Trans folks just want to live their lives. Why can’t you leave them the fuck alone?

You can’t hold an entire group of people responsible for the actions of a few extremists, unless you want to stop Christians and Muslims as well. And don’t get me started on all the shit men pull off worldwide, yet I don’t see you rallying against heterosexuality?

This is the more extreme end of the scale of a general pattern of harassing women for saying "no". Whether that be "no you're not a woman" or "no you're not a lesbian" or "no you can't come in here it's female-only".

At least most Christians and Muslims accept that others don't believe in their religion and, for the most part, don't force them to act as if they do.

> At least most Christians and Muslims accept that others don't believe in their religion and, for the most part, don't force them to act as if they do.

Just like most trans people accept that others don’t understand their way of life, and, for the most part, don’t force them to act as if they do.

Yet you can’t acknowledge that and pretend all trans people are some kind of opaque mob.