Here in my southeast European shithole I’m not worrying about my tax money, the upgrade is going to be pretty cheap, they’re just going to switch from unlicensed XP to unlicensed Win7.

Yep, but I didn’t mention that because it’s not a part of the “Wayback Machine”, it’s just the general “Internet Archive” business of archiving media, which is for now still completely unavailable. (I’ve uploaded dozens of public-domain books there myself, and I’m really missing it…)

You can (well, could) put in any live URL there and IA would take a snapshot of the current page on your request. They also actively crawl the web and take new snapshots on their own. All of that counts as ‘writing’ to the database.

I don’t get the impression you’ve ever made any substantial contributions to Wikipedia, and thus have misguided ideas about what would be actually helpful to the editors and conductive to producing better articles. Your proposal about translations is especially telling, because the machine-assisted translations (i.e. with built-in tools) have already existed on WP long before the recent explosion of LLMs.

In short, your proposals either: 1. already exist, 2. would still risk distorsion, oversimplification, made-up bullshit and feedback loops, 3. are likely very complex and expensive to build, or 4. are straight up impossible.

Good WP articles are written by people who have actually read some scholarly articles on the subject, including those that aren’t easily available online (so LLMs are massively stunted by default). Having an LLM re-write a “poorly worded” article would at best be like polishing a turd (poorly worded articles are usually written by people who don’t know much about the subject in the first place, so there’s not much material for the LLM to actually improve), and more likely it would introduce a ton of biases on its own (as well as the usual asinine writing style).

Thankfully, as far as I’ve seen the WP community is generally skeptical of AI tools, so I don’t expect such nonsense to have much of an influence on the site.

As far as Wikipedia is concerned, there is pretty much no way to use LLMs correctly, because probably each major model includes Wikipedia in its training dataset, and using WP to improve WP is… not a good idea. It probably doesn’t require an essay to explain why it’s bad to create and mechanise a loop of bias in an encyclopedia.

Even though they could just make their own Lemmy communities, or ask to be appointed as mods of existing ones…