Forum Talk:Competitors and Press

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Google search results...

I noticed something that alarmed me.

Over the years I drafted many articles on the small, non-WMF wiki wikialpha.org. Since my return to the Citizendium I have ported a couple of dozen articles originally drafted on wikialpha to the Citizendium.

Citizendium is older, larger, and frankly, a lot more serious than wikialpha. So when both wikis had an article on a topic Citizendium's were showing up first. Then, a couple of days ago, when I was away from home, on my cell phone, I used google, thinking it would find the Citizendium article I was looking for. It didn't find it, it only found the wikialpha article, which I had not kept up to date.

Just now I googled Leila Boujnane, an article I started here three months ago. Google didn't find it.

Is this a temporary glitch? A well known problem - but temporary? Did a site-wide __NOINDEX__ get accidentally instantiated? I am going to ping Pat, because this could be serious.

Cheers! George Swan (talk) 03:31, 27 August 2022 (CDT)

• Okay Very High Temperature Reactor, the most recent article started by User:David MacQuigg, in May, showed up.

But Rainer Maria Rilke, started by Pat, in June? Did not show up.

Catherine Hooper, Stephanie Mack, which I started in March, showed up.

I started Steven David on April 1st. Steven David/Definition shows up. But Steven David does not.

I ported Mateo Sabog from wikialpha on April 2nd. It didn't show up, and neither did any of its subpages.

• I know articles I had recently started WERE showing up in the google results a week or two ago. George Swan (talk) 04:01, 27 August 2022 (CDT)

• My first draft of the Leila Boujnane article initially had a __NOINDEX__ on it, which I removed about ten minutes later, after I concluded there were enough references to support an article about her.

I'll be more careful about that. George Swan (talk) 11:31, 2 September 2022 (CDT)

My impression is that Google is using AI to assess the quality of articles and thus deciding where to rank them in relationship to other sites. Some of Citizendium's articles are ranking quite well (such as Google:one+way+encryption). I note that it is often not the first sentence that Google thought was newsworthy to show in its summary. That's why I think they use AI to rank the articles.Pat Palmer (talk) 09:47, 6 February 2023 (CST)

Another note: recently, Sergei did some work to help us regenerate the sitemaps for Citizendium. I am running this program periodically, and now, a lot of the above articles ARE showing up in search results, such as Google:Mateo+Sabog. So I think Sergei's work helped.Pat Palmer (talk) 09:57, 6 February 2023 (CST)

Interesting research paper

See [1]. At a quick glance, the paper itself seems to be non-free access. Peter Jackson (talk) 04:54, 6 February 2023 (CST)

A tempest in a teapot, to me. Despite Wikipedia's insistence that every single sentence has to point to a source somewhere, they still get much wrong and omit important historical information due to bias that can't easily be detected or measured--such as a town disassociating itself from an unsavory past.Pat Palmer (talk) 09:51, 6 February 2023 (CST)

Indeed. "Verifiability" is a fraud. You can verify in principle, & often in practice, the existence of sources supporting the article. But you cannot conceivably verify the non-existence of sources contradicting it. Peter Jackson (talk) 04:58, 7 February 2023 (CST)

WP v ChatGPT

Readers regard them as equally credible, but the latter as clearer: [2]. Peter Jackson (talk) 05:11, 4 October 2023 (CDT)

!

[3] Peter Jackson (talk) 05:00, 8 November 2023 (CST)

ArbCom

[4] Peter Jackson (talk) 04:57, 20 November 2023 (CST)

Thanks for this link and the one from the section above it. Much food for thought. It seems like there is already a deliberate push explicitly for AI to generate missing content on WP--yikes! As for ArbCom and conflict management in WP, it is pretty clear that there is a tight knot of inner circle Wikipedians who bully anyone they want to and even boast about how their credibility is so high in the community that they are unchallengeable. I have encountered, and been threatened by, such. This year on Wikipedia, my edit attempts have been reverted more than 50% of the time by anonymous trolls. Their reasons for rejecting well-sourced additions included spurious excuses such as it would make an already long article too long. I also ran afoul of WP's complex Notability rules. The WP Notability requirements were needed to stop self promoters and PR hounds, but those rules are instead stopping much useful content and not stopping much harmful, hateful content about violence and crime. Wikipedia has continued to become worse and worse for most contributors over time. Honestly, who knows if AI generated content would make it worse or better? I say so with only a bit of tongue in cheek.Pat Palmer (talk) 08:02, 20 November 2023 (CST)

Interestingly, they seem to be ignoring this: no discussion, nobody popping up saying "I told you so", no mention added to their articles on ArbCom & Criticism of WP. Occam's Razor suggests nobody reads Signpost.

Now, in the middle of an election, ArbCom has suspended 1 of its own members for leaking. Whistleblower? See [5] for rather opaque discussion. One charge is that he (?) confirmed someone's guess as to why they'd been blocked, which they weren't supposed to know. Peter Jackson (talk) 06:03, 30 November 2023 (CST)