Technology

Wales’s quote isn’t nearly as bad as the byline makes it out to be:

Wales explains that the article was originally rejected several years ago, then someone tried to improve it, resubmitted it, and got the same exact template rejection again.

“It's a form letter response that might as well be ‘Computer says no’ (that article's worth a read if you don't know the expression),” Wales said. “It wasn't a computer who says no, but a human using AFCH, a helper script [...] In order to try to help, I personally felt at a loss. I am not sure what the rejection referred to specifically. So I fed the page to ChatGPT to ask for advice. And I got what seems to me to be pretty good. And so I'm wondering if we might start to think about how a tool like AFCH might be improved so that instead of a generic template, a new editor gets actual advice. It would be better, obviously, if we had lovingly crafted human responses to every situation like this, but we all know that the volunteers who are dealing with a high volume of various situations can't reasonably have time to do it. The templates are helpful - an AI-written note could be even more helpful.”

That being said, it still reeks of “CEO Speak.” And trying to find a place to shove AI in.

More NLP could absolutely be useful to Wikipedia, especially for flagging spam and malicious edits for human editors to review. This is an excellent task for dirt cheap, small and open models, where an error rate isn’t super important. Cost, volume, and reducing stress on precious human editors is. It's a existential issue that needs work.

…Using an expensive, proprietary API to give error prone yet “pretty good” sounding suggestions to new editors is not.

Wasting dev time trying to make it work is not.

This is the problem. Not natural language processing itself, but the seemingly contagious compulsion among executives to find some place to shove it when the technical extent of their knowledge is occasionally typing something into ChatGPT.

It’s okay for them to not really understand it.

It’s not okay to push it differently than other technology because “AI” is somehow super special and trendy.