From Katyanna Quach at UK Register:
A team within Google Brain – the web giant’s crack machine-learning research lab – has taught software to generate Wikipedia-style articles by summarizing information on web pages… to varying degrees of success.
Glitches remain:
We are still a very long way off from effective text summarization or generation. And while the Google Brain project is rather interesting, it would probably be unwise to use a system like this to automatically generate Wikipedia entries. For now, anyway.
Also, since it relies on the popularity of the first ten websites on the internet for any particular topic, if those sites aren’t particularly credible, the resulting handiwork probably won’t be very accurate either. More.
Google Brain is trying to solve a comparatively unimportant problem: Summarizing information that is probably correct.
But, as noted earlier, one can easily access information that is probably correct about—for example—Peoria, Illinois, from the folks who compile the US Census. They are not a horde of enraged trolls. And rule by trolls is the unfixable problem at Wikipedia.
The Google software might be some help. The trolls would need to get hold of all the popular sites in order to control the algorithm. That is a bit more challenging than blogging up a storm on welfare in Mom’s basement.
Assuming they perfect their system, here is a suggested fix: Provide software that shows us the data as such but, with a touch of one key, gives us the trolls’ version. No one is telling them they can’t do it but the rest of us don’t need to pay attention to it.
See also: Notes from Wikipedia, the information age’s public landfill: Cofounder thinks IFebruary 19, 2018D article “appallingly biased”
Is Wikipedia actually a “censor”? Maybe something more ominous… Wikipedia isn’t so much a “censor” as an alternate world.
Is it time to walk from Wikipedia? (kairosfocus)