Post · bonfire.cafe

Does anyone know how Duckduckgo (or google for that matter) get the summaries that accompany wikipedia articles when they show up in search results? There seem to be hallucinated rape allegations against a person in said summaries, but I don't know if it's hallucinated by AI, a random wikipedia editor, or something else.

(Specifically, what I think the AI/editor is getting wrong is that this person made rape allegations against someone else. She was not the subject of them.)

StarkRG@myside-yourside.net

@StarkRG@myside-yourside.net replied · 2 months ago

@shauna As far as I'm aware, DDG uses the wikipedia entry's introduction section for the summary. I have all their AI crap turned off, though. They have something called "Search Assist" that apparently generates summaries (which you should never trust).

Shauna GM

@shauna@social.coop replied · 2 months ago

@StarkRG the current intro section is different than the summary DDG shows, which is part of my confusion

StarkRG@myside-yourside.net

@StarkRG@myside-yourside.net replied · 2 months ago

@shauna My guess would be that they cached an earlier version. You can check the entry's history to see if there were any recent changes.

Nemo_bis 🌈

@nemobis@mamot.fr replied · 2 months ago

@shauna Last time I checked, #DuckDuckGo's "information module" (https://diff.wikimedia.org/2021/09/23/searching-for-wikipedia-duckduckgo-and-the-wikimedia-foundation-share-new-research-on-how-people-use-search-engines-to-get-to-wikipedia/) was (ir)regularly generated from #Wikimedia data dumps.

Both with DDG and Google it can happen that the "wrong version" (e.g. blatant vandalism) gets cached in the previews or other snippets and served to users even long after being removed from the actual article. Search in the history (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:History), optionally with a tool (like https://wikipedia.ramselehof.de/wikiblame.php ), to check where the text came from.

Shauna GM

@shauna@social.coop replied · 2 months ago

@nemobis

that's possible but a dead end for me personally. i'm not going to click through 500 revisions to see where the issue might be - unless there's a way to full text search the revision history of a page for key words?

Nemo_bis 🌈

@nemobis@mamot.fr replied · 2 months ago

@shauna Yes, https://wikipedia.ramselehof.de/wikiblame.php

Shauna GM

@shauna@social.coop replied · 2 months ago

@nemobis thank you! i did a search and it looks like this content is nowhere in the page's edit history. so i'm guessing AI summarizers are to blame

Kevin McCoy

@kmccoy@spacey.space replied · 2 months ago

@shauna Sometimes they come from wikidata, I had a weird bit of info sneaking into summaries that way once.

Shauna GM

@shauna@social.coop replied · 2 months ago

@kmccoy hmm I don't see the summary showing up in the wikidata item. Also it looks like Google and DuckDuckGo have different summaries for her (only DDG's hallucinates the allegations) which suggests the problem is not in wikipedia.

Kevin McCoy

@kmccoy@spacey.space replied · 2 months ago

@shauna Ah, gotcha. Sorry I couldn't help then. I'm happy to try and track it down if you'd like another set of eyes on it though it sounds like you're doing the same things I'd do.

Shauna GM

@shauna@social.coop replied · 2 months ago

@kmccoy no worries - thanks for the advice! it's good to know that relationship between wiki pages and wiki data exists

bonfire.cafe

A space for Bonfire maintainers and contributors to communicate

bonfire.cafe: About · Code of conduct · Privacy · Users · Instances

Bonfire social · 1.0.0-rc.2.21 no JS en

Automatic federation enabled