This user’s entire history (username included) is spent signal-boosting attacks against Wikipedia. (Incidentally, they just deleted one from this very community because they got called out for it). This user is a ridiculous troll and should be banned from communities for their transparent, bad-faith agenda. I’m sure if there’s a story worth posting, somebody other than “wikipediasuckscoop” can post it. It’s so transparent that in an age where the Internet is blanketed with far-right disinformation, one of the last remaining bastions of truth that refuses to compromise and bend to said disinformation will come under attack by bad-faith, far-right actors desperately flailing to discredit it. This user doesn’t give a single shit about gender equality; they simply aim to discredit a resource standing in the way of their agenda.

A gender gap is a longstanding and severe issue on the English Wikipedia, but there’s a lot this article leaves out about its monumental and ongoing efforts to increase its coverage of women and to welcome more women into the project. This especially includes WikiProject Women in Red, far and away Wikipedia’s largest collaborative project whose entire purpose is to create new biographies about women. A large part of this biographical underrepresentation stems less from a bias in the editors themselves and more from the way that historical women have often been left out of published, reliable sources, and it’s taking scholars enormous efforts to bring those women to the surface today. It also says: “just 10-15% of its editors are female.” What this fails to acknowledge is that there’s an option simply not to declare your gender at all. To be clear, the ratio is atrocious, but 10–15% is likely an underrepresentation: women may be substantially less likely to self-declare their gender on the Internet than men. The Wikimedia Foundation has outreach, activism, etc. focused specifically on recruiting women to the project and has for well over a decade now. Wikipedia really is trying, and its experienced editors are constantly aware of this.

The article does put forth three hypotheses for why this gap exists, but I don’t think they put forth compelling evidence for the hypothesis that it exists because of the culture on Wikipedia or that it’s – in general – Wikipedia’s “fault”.

This user’s entire history (username included) is spent signal-boosting demonstrably false, bad-faith attacks against Wikipedia. I have no idea how this post has a ratio of 28–0 when the article’s premise is that the ADL of all organizations is a good arbiter of what is antisemitic when it comes to coverage of Israel’s genocide in Palestine. The article starts with “This past March, researchers from the Anti-Defamation League accused Wikipedia of biased coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

Newsflash: it isn’t. The ADL consistently treats anyone who dares to challenge Israel’s genocide as antisemitic. This user is a ridiculous troll and should be banned from communities for their transparent, bad-faith agenda. I’m sure if there’s a story worth posting, somebody other than “wikipediasuckscoop” can post it. It’s so transparent that in an age where the Internet is blanketed with far-right disinformation, one of the last remaining bastions of truth that refuses to compromise and bend to said disinformation will come under attack by bad-faith, far-right actors desperately flailing to discredit it.

Edit: I’d like to point out that when the article says “propagandists” (i.e. people opposed to Israel’s genocide) and arbitrarily delineates them from “editors”, what it’s failing to point out (likely because a) its author doesn’t understand shit about fuck or b) its author doesn’t care) is that any article related to a conflict between Israel and Arab countries is extended protected by default (on top of other heavy editing restrictions). This means that it can only be edited 1) on a registered account 2) which is at least 30 days old and 3) which has made at least 500 edits. This isn’t 2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334 typing “Izreel sux lololol” or even just some random sockpuppet account trying to insert anti-Israel bias. You have to be an experienced editor to make changes to these articles. Every single one of these even remotely controversial public changes is put under a microscope and discussed ad nauseum by other experienced editors on the corresponding talk page – not just to make sure that it’s covered without bias per NPOV but that its claims are suitably backed by reliable, independent sources.

Seems like it’s the most active one too.

Please see this comment. Even in the event this source isn’t LLM-generated, it’s bottom-of-the-barrel garbage; it’s a Blogger “written by” some rando who doesn’t even put in the effort to cite a single source. “Generating a discussion” is exactly the sort of poor, engagement-centric rationale that awful social media companies use to allow and promote dangerous, unsourced crap. I moderate a community for veganism, a cause I deeply believe in and want discussed and thought about. I would remove trash like this even if it were saying everything I wanted to hear and attracting thousands to the community and generating the biggest discussion in recent memory on the basis that I don’t want our community to be a part of this unprecedented era of misinformation where vibes are treated as a substitute for critical thinking. I don’t give a single shit about engagement in the communities I moderate if it means platforming uncited, likely LLM-generated swill like this, and I feel like that’s a reasonable expectation to hold other moderators to.

The number of posts per day shouldn’t matter either; if anything, that should make it easier to vet posts like this. If a post can’t meet some reasonable minimum standard of quality, it shouldn’t exist. Lastly, “if you don’t want to see garbage, drown it out with quality” categorically doesn’t work. This is a failed experiment. Literally every platform that allows garbage (see: every major social media platform) devolves into garbage because it’s so, so much easier to create and then unthinkingly post – then the overwhelming majority don’t actually read it to evaluate its quality. If a platform gets big enough on the back of quality posts and isn’t maintained, the quality content inevitably gets outcompeted by slop. It shouldn’t be the user’s job to make sure that better things get posted; it should be the moderator’s to foster an environment where quality actually matters.

(I never insinuated OP is a bot; I said the article itself is likely LLM-generated.)

One of the most obvious hallmarks of LLM slop is platitudinous garbage. LLMs especially like to punctuate stories with some asinine fucking quasi-lesson that I would write as a conclusion to a fifth-grade essay – not something I would write as a trained professional. “This/these X remind us/show that [very obvious thing].” Another one of these quasi-lessons about the Streissand effect found here.

There’s almost always no such thing as “conclusively LLM”, but when you have such an obvious hallmark (I’m sure if I wanted to waste more time entertaining this “but what if it isn’t?”, I could find many more; I specifically checked the conclusion because it’s such a common tell), it arouses suspicion.

Then you get into what “Amusing Planet” really is: a Blogger site run by the person who “wrote” this article – Kaushik Patowary. There’s no evidence Patowary has a background in literally anything. Which in fairness, you don’t have to, but when you write about such a wide range of subjects and then you see this next bit…

Patowary fails to cite literally any of his sources through inline links or a references section like decent publications do. Assuming Patowary doesn’t know enough about 1916 shark attacks to write off-the-cuff about them, he would be going out to find this information. Not only is citing trivially easy if you’re doing original research because you have all (or at least some) of the sources right there, but it actively makes it easier as a writer to make sure what initially publish is correct and to make future corrections. Patowary does this very occasionally such as in this article, but it’s really, really bad that the ostensible majority of recent articles that don’t cite anything.* The absolute bare minimum Patowary could do is sloppily put like two or three links into a references section, and yet he almost always doesn’t. As someone who writes, it’s harder to write original prose without creating a references section; it’s as much to my mind for the author as it is for the reader.

So we have 1) to my mind, preponderance of evidence, and 2) even in the rare event it’s not LLM slop, this would be regular Blogger slop that isn’t fit for an educational community because the research is anemic at best with almost/literally zero effort to cite resources used. Citing sources is literally the most basic step any even semi-credible resource should use. It’s complete, useless garbage if it is or isn’t LLM-generated; it’s just that it’s more likely the former and that the former is much worse.

* [1], [2], [3], [4] (they sourced the LG website and literally none of the other stuff; great job), [5], etc.

While shark attacks remain rare, these statistics remind us that, despite all our knowledge and precautions, the sea is still wild. [this is their conclusion]

Okay, so this article is definitely just LLM slop and we should blacklist landfills like “amusing planet dot com” from what’s supposed to be an informative community, right?

I read this as “incinerate”. A principled, pragmatic opposition to the death penalty in any case I can think of is the only reason I would disapprove.

Not only that, but we make it goddamn trivial for not just Wikipedia but for other Wikimedia projects. Doing this is just stealing without attribution and share-alike like the CC BY-SA 4.0 license demands and then on top of that kicking down the ladder for people who actually want to use Wikimedia and not the hallucinatory slop they’re trying to supplant it with. LLM companies have caused incalculable damage to critical thinking, the open web, the copyleft movement, and the climate.

Sort of, but not really. Peat accounted for 2.9% of its electricity generation in 2021 (page 14).

As someone who very much wants to see wind and solar power, it’s weird to me how much this article harps on about wind and nothing else. Not mentioned anywhere in the article is that expanding nuclear energy helped Finland considerably in its shift away from coal (page 3) and is its largest source of electricity (page 147), accounting for about 1/3 of its total electricity production (page 147). One of the other largest ways Finland has shifted to renewables in the last 20 years is biomass (page 20, page 82).

Finland has been rushing to add more wind, and that was seen as an important step to helping increase renewables in the energy mix (page 84), but as of 2022, it accounted for an extremely minimal portion of said energy mix (page 82). I would be interested to see how doubling the figure seen on page 87 where wind accounted for ~10% of renewables (not electricity generation in general, just renewables) from 2020 somehow made its share jump to 25% of all electricity production as the OP’s article claims. I trust the IEA pretty firmly here.

It’s also just dumb that imagery taken from a street isn’t doing anything privacy-invading or illegal yet they still feel the need to coddle paranoid NIMBYs. Street View can sometimes be useful for OSM, since you might’ve been there but forgotten to document something, are too far away, etc. Street View as a concept works to the public’s benefit, although Google owning it and it being proprietary isn’t good. I can see this removal feature being a good thing by probably one out of every thousand times it’s actually used, namely in the case that you have some kind of stalker (even then, though, satellite view 99% of the time would give you a concerning amount of info compared to Street View).

Good thing Trump can’t force Europe to stop expanding renewables and switch back to Russia’s swill.

I really don’t think this is true. It might push some politically engaged users to Firefox, but unlike Musk, most people don’t know who Thiel is, and as long as he keeps it that way, nobody will care.

Justice Department is 100% lobbing this over to JD Vance’s buddy Peter Thiel who’s going to enshittify it even further and turn it with its massive install base into a tool for techno-fascism.

So basically anything that makes it more useful than just doing it yourself.

Not even close, but okay.

Dude fuck off.

The great thing about RISC-V if you care about sovereignty in an age where CPUs run the world is that it’s an open standard. Contrast this with x86 which is owned in some part by US-based Intel and some part by US-based AMD as well as ARM which is owned by Japanese-owned, UK-based Arm Holdings. If you want to use x86, you’re shelling out license money to Intel and AMD, and if you want to use ARM, you’re shelling out license money to Arm Holdings. You never truly “own” what you’re producing.

Yeah, uBlock Origin not working would take me from liking YouTube a fair bit to making it unusable.

• I use Proton but keep legacy Gmail accounts around to ensure I still have access to accounts I may have forgotten about or people I knew a long time ago sending a stray email. The only other usage is logging into YouTube.
• I use a Captcha solver extension.
• I use uBlock Origin to block all their ads.
• I don’t use their DNS.
• I use DDG over their search engine and Firefox over their browser.
• I don’t use Google Drive or their office suite (I think the latter is abysmal to use tbf).
• I use DeepL over Translate.
• I use NewPipe for YouTube on mobile and have a subscription to Nebula.
• I no longer use Google Maps, opting for OSM instead.
• I still use Android and unfortunately can’t unlock the bootloader but have degoogled as far as I know how, including never even registering a Google account with it (F-Droid + Aurora Store).

YouTube is far and away the biggest means by which I interact with Google, and that falls off a cliff if I’m forced to interact with a mess of their ridiculously shitty ads every time I have to use it. uBO has likely saved hundreds of hours of watching ads over my lifetime (and probably thousands of dollars from not being subconsciously influenced by ads), and I’m not paying a subscription fee to such an unethical company to get rid of the ads. This would bring me from YouTube as a timewaster to YouTube only as strictly necessary. Even though I don’t support them directly through ads, I do support them by supporting creators I like monetarily, by sharing links and maintaining the network effect, and by giving them plenty of metadata by interacting with their service. If they do this, they ensure that I continue to monetarily support competitors like Nebula and permanently lose a grip they’ve had on me since I was a kid.