Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2024-10-19

Comments

The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2024-10-19. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

Contest: A WikiCup for the underdeveloped world (6,109 bytes · 💬)

• Congratulations to the participants and coordinators of the project! It was great seeing these under-represented lists come through FLC, and I'm sure coordinators of the other review processes felt the same. Hope to see it again next time! --PresN 13:56, 19 October 2024 (UTC)
• The DCWC coordinators will be looking this talk page, so please feel free to offer comments or feedback to bring to our attention, or add on at the contest talk page! —TechnoSquirrel69 (sigh) 14:20, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

Underdeveloped world? Really? “Underdeveloped” in what?

Using this term is derogatory and perpetuates negative stereotypes. It implies a hierarchy where certain countries are inherently superior to others, which is simply not accurate. The fact that the IMF uses these backward, colonial legacy terminologies doesn’t mean we should replicate them. So-called “underdeveloped” countries have rich cultures, strong communities, and innovative solutions to local challenges -- lessons that “developed” countries could learn from if they were humble enough. What happened to using acceptable terms like “Emerging Economies” and “Majority World”? --Masssly (talk) 15:32, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

i'm using the term in the same way the author of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa does. i do not appreciate the insinuation that i believe that "certain countries are inherently superior to others" or that i don't believe that exploited countries have rich cultures - that is precisely the opposite of the entire point of this contest which i co-coordinated. ... sawyer * he/they * talk 15:34, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

I don't believe that there was any bad faith, nor an insinuation that certain countries are inherently superior to others; but for now, I've changed the wording to 'emerging economies' and 'Global South'. I understand this is discussed in the body, but basing the use of 'underdeveloped' on a book written in 1970s does not reflect the language that should be used in the 2020s. The change I did is intended to be implemented as a temporary fix, and anyone is free to further change the wording. Svampesky (talk) 16:35, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

"global south" is a perfectly fine alternative for the title - indeed, it's what i initially suggested for the contest's name. however, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is not merely a book from the 1970s, it's a foundational text still referenced today by scholars of colonialism and read in college classrooms. i used my language deliberately, to convey a specific meaning: that most of the countries that this contest focused on (& indeed the vast majority of articles improved during the contest were relating to Africa or Asia) have been underdeveloped by external colonial and capitalist forces, not through their own fault. however, apparently my meaning is not obvious to everyone. i have slightly tweaked your rewording to re-add "postcolonial" as it is, in my opinion, an essential aspect of the division which forms the basis of this contest. ... sawyer * he/they * talk 16:51, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

I agree that "Global South" is okay to use here. Just be aware that (as any such broad geographic term) is also not immune to Wikimedians endlessly discussing its connotations and precise definition. In particular, there is a rather hare-brained notion (seen just a few days ago on Foundation-l) that the term "Global South" was imposed by "Westerners" or is somehow super racist and colonialist, whereas in reality it had been promoted to its current wider usage by activists from, well, the Global South who were motivated by pretty much the kind of concerns Masssly outlines above about other terms that refer to development status (or imply a ranking, like Third World).

This Wikimedia affiliate - founded and led by non-white people from the Global South - continues to use it prominently: https://whoseknowledge.org/about-us/

Regards, HaeB (talk) 18:17, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

i'm aware of the discourse and agree with your disagreement. personally i prefer the term "global south" but as i say in the article, there are practical reasons we ended up going with the IMF's obviously problematic "development" rankings - rather ironic that it's the IMF, isn't it? i also disagree with the suggestions for alternative names Masssly has made - "emerging" is, in my opinion, euphemistic and inaccurate, and "majority world" is incredibly vague. anyways, i'm fine with the changes that have been made and acknowledge that i could have used clearer terminology, but i absolutely stand by my above statements and reasoning. in the same vein, i would have a lot more patience for this discussion if it didn't start out with the insinuations made in the initial comment. ... sawyer * he/they * talk 18:44, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

Humour: The Newspaper Editors (361 bytes · 💬)

• Ah, The Signpost — where neutrality goes to die, and product placement thrives. Impressive consistency, if nothing else. Ktkvtsh (talk) 16:58, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

In the media: Off to the races! Wikipedia wins! (429 bytes · 💬)

The Jewish Journal article on the WP page on Israeli apartheid is quite ridiculous, to be honest. Chill, not everyone who portrays Israel harshly is some sort of Hamas supporter. --Firestar464 (talk) 18:30, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

News and notes: One election's end, another election's beginning (504 bytes · 💬)

Regarding AELECT, a discussion on voter guides ended with consensus that neither prohibits nor encourages voter guides, as long as they're not linked from the AELECT pages. Editors who find them useful may find a handy list at User:Novem Linguae/Essays/2024 administrator election voter guide#See_Also, among other locations. Soni (talk) 16:51, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

Recent research: "As many as 5%" of new English Wikipedia articles "contain significant AI-generated content", says paper (4,537 bytes · 💬)

• "We have therefore been encouraged to omit any identifying information in the specific pages we discuss". A commendable approach to ethics (even if, as noted, not perfect). Unlike some other cases I can think of... --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 12:21, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

  I would encourage you though to look beyond your personal experience (with a controversial paper whose central subject was the longtime impact of your and several other editors' activity on a particular historical topic area) and also consider the wider impact on open science practices here.

  To be clear, my main problem with the statement quoted in the review is not that they e.g. leave out the specific user name of that editor who created five articles on English Wikipedia, detected by both tools as AI-generated, on contentious moments in Albanian history (btw, the paper goes further into the administrative actions taken against that user). I might have done the same. Rather, it is that they take this as an excuse not to adhere to the good practice (which has become more prevalent in much of quantitative Wikipedia research over the years) to publicly release the data that their paper's central conclusion is based on, which would include the output of the detectors for particular articles (without user names).

  This not only prevents Wikipedians from using that data to improve Wikipedia (by reviewing and possibly deleting AI-generated Wikipedia content that the authors spent quite a bit of money on detecting - in the "Limitations" section, they describe their experiments as "costly"). It also makes it impossible for the community to discuss the performance of the AI detection method used by the paper in concrete examples (apart from those very few that were cherry-picked to be presented in the paper). After all, going back to the example of that paper from last year that (understandably) still seems very much on your mind, the fact that it had provided extensive concrete evidence for its claims across many specifically named articles and hundreds of footnotes was also what enabled you to dispute that evidence in lengthy rebuttals.

  Regards, HaeB (talk) 17:39, 19 October 2024 (UTC) (Tilman)

• Regarding "The Rise of AI-Generated Content in Wikipedia" link, which randomly sampled "2,909 English Wikipedia articles created in August 2024", I am puzzled about several things:
  • Why aren't the data pools (table, top of page 2) exactly the same size - say, 2,500 each, since these data pools are samples of larger data sets?
  • The authors say that their August 2024 sample came from Special:NewPages, which - of course - doesn't include deleted pages. But it makes a big difference if the authors did real-time collection of data during August, or took a snapshot in (say) early September, and this isn't specified. [Footnote 1, the link to "data collection and evaluation code", might provide the answere, but it returns a 404 error message.]
  • Footnote 2 provides the source of the article's set of Wikipedia pages collected before March 2022, which are (from that source) datasets of "cleaned articles", stripping out "markdown and unwanted sections (references, etc.)". But the table at the top of page 3 includes "Footnotes per sentence" and "Outgoing links per word" - where did that information come from?
  • And speaking of that table, perhaps it's just me, but I find it extraordinarily hard to believe that new articles in August 2024 (with the sample limited to those over 100 words) contained, on average, 1.77 outgoing links per word. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 18:14, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

• There needs to be an RFC on the use of Artificial Intelligence formally consigning it to the dustbin and banning off those who use it. Even as we speak there are some in the Foundation who think it's a great idea to facilitate the use of AI so that drivebys find it easier to "contribute." Carrite (talk) 19:48, 19 October 2024 (UTC)