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?
oh fuck, the above section was so bad that our own David Gerard took it out back and shot it, rest in peace to the time cube of CS. the rest of the article is vastly more sane without the Turing machines section (Solomonoff induction is a real thing, though not in the way that the Rationalists would like it to be), so let this saved copy of the old version serve as a companion to the insanity of the super-recursive algorithms article
it helps when they fail to cite anything at all
unfortunately, there is a lot of absolute bilge that achieves the low bar of being in a peer-reviewed paper, which they then festoon this sort of rubbish with. sigh. thankfully this didn’t even manage that.