Also, the first woman? Props to her but I’m quite surprised no one else has done that
Yeah, it's indeed false. I didn't even research it actively, but Wilson on her Twitter profile mentioned an Italian translator who translated Homer years before Wilson.
(To be sure, I just checked Italian Wikipedia. It was Giovanna Bemporad, her translation was published in 1970.)
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.
Seeing double posts is IMO not frequent enough to require mechanisms to fix it (and I can't even imagine a built-in mechanism against it).
c/greentext should be blocked because it's full of annoying fake stories, though.
it is quite literally named the “land of the blacks” after all that is what Egypt means
Egypt is from Greek and definitely doesn't mean that. The Egyptian endonym was kmt (traditionally pronounced as kemet), which is interpreted as "black land" (km means "black", -t is a nominal suffix, so it might be translated as black-ness, not at all "quite literally land of the blacks"), most likely referring to the fertile black soil around the Nile river. Trying to interpret that as "land of the blacks" should be suspicious already due to the fact people would hardly name themselves after their most ordinary physical characteristic; the Egyptians might call themselves black only if they were surrounded by non-black people and could view that as their own special characteristic, but they certainly neighboured and had contact with black peoples. And either way one has to wonder if the ancient views of white and black skin were meaningfully comparable to modern western ones. On the other hand, the fertile black soil most certainly is a differentia specifica of the settled Egyptian land that is surrounded by a desert.
More screenshots are here: https://xcancel.com/p9cker_girl/status/1844203626681794716
What I find odd is that the message that they actually left on the site has nothing to do with Palestine, just childish "lol btfo" sort of message. So I wouldn't be surprised if these guys aren't the ones who actually did it, and it's merely a false flag to make pro-Palestinian protesters look like idiotic assholes.
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.
I am a bot. Beep boop.