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?

  • @selfAEnglish
    3•4 months ago

    well, I’ve found another one dredging the lambda calculus bits of Wikipedia. behold, the Plessey System 250 article, which appears to describe a heavily fictionalized and extremely cranky version of what I’m assuming is a real (and much more boring) British military computer from the 70s:

    It is an unavoidable characteristic of the von Neumann architecture[citation needed] that is founded on shared random access memory and trust in the sharing default access rights. For example, every word in every page managed by the virtual memory manager in an operating system using a memory management unit (MMU) must be trusted.[citation needed] Using a default privilege among many compiled programs allows corruption to grow without any method of error detection. However, the range of virtual addresses given to the MMU or the range of physical addresses produced by the MMU is shared undetected corruption flows across the shared memory space from one software function to another.[citation needed] PP250 removed not only virtual memory[1] or any centralized, precompiled operating system, but also the superuser, removing all default machine privileges.

    It is default privileges that empower undetected malware and hacking in a computer. Instead, the pure object capability model of PP250 always requires a limited capability key to define the authority to operate. PP250 separated binary data from capability data to protect access rights, simplify the computer and speed garbage collection. The Church machine encapsulates and context limits the Turing machine by enforcing the laws of the lambda calculus. The typed digital media is program controlled by distinctly different machine instructions.

    this extremely long-winded style of bullshitting (the church machine limits the Turing machine by enforcing the laws of lambda calculus? how in fuck do you propose it applies alpha or beta reduction to a fucking Turing machine?) continues on the article’s talk page, where 3 years ago a brave Wikipedian looked up the actual machine in question and poked holes in essentially every part of the article — the machine did have an OS (and a bunch of other normal computer shit the article claims it could function without), didn’t seem to implement any form of lambda calculus (or Church machine, whatever that is) on hardware, and is overall not a very interesting machine other than whatever security features it implemented for military work. the crank responsible for this nonsense then promptly flooded the Wikipedian with an incredible volume of nonsense until he went away.

    e: I checked the crank’s user page and it gets so much worse