So, there I was, trying to remember the title of a book I had read bits of, and I thought to check a Wikipedia article that might have referred to it. And there, in “External links”, was … “Wikiversity hosts a discussion with the Bard chatbot on Quantum mechanics”.
How much carbon did you have to burn, and how many Kenyan workers did you have to call the N-word, in order to get a garbled and confused “history” of science? (There’s a lot wrong and even self-contradictory with what the stochastic parrot says, which isn’t worth unweaving in detail; perhaps the worst part is that its statement of the uncertainty principle is a blurry JPEG of the average over all verbal statements of the uncertainty principle, most of which are wrong.) So, a mediocre but mostly unremarkable page gets supplemented with a “resource” that is actively harmful. Hooray.
Meanwhile, over in this discussion thread, we’ve been taking a look at the Wikipedia article Super-recursive algorithm. It’s rambling and unclear, throwing together all sorts of things that somebody somewhere called an exotic kind of computation, while seemingly not grasping the basics of the ordinary theory the new thing is supposedly moving beyond.
So: What’s the worst/weirdest Wikipedia article in your field of specialization?
that’s so much better! I didn’t think anything sensible could be derived from the article — now it’s a fair summary of the sources and a dire warning that the reader is entering crank town.
check out that talk page though! I have no idea how this thing survived all the scrutiny it got as far back as 2009. I do like when someone barges into the page with a “but wait, the new Burgin preprint will clear up any confusion from the computer science orthodoxy who don’t understand his work!” and the only reply was essentially “we’re not confused, we just think it’s garbage”