RedHatCarmen
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editHi RedHatCarmen! I noticed your contributions and wanted to welcome you to the Wikipedia community. I hope you like it here and decide to stay.
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Happy editing! Classicwiki (talk) If you reply to me here, please ping me. 06:18, 4 July 2024 (UTC)
- Thank You! @Classicwiki RedHatCarmen (talk) 06:53, 4 July 2024 (UTC)
AI edit summaries?
editHello! I'm Roxy, a volunteer editor on Wikipedia.
I'm curious if you could elaborate on how exactly you came to produce some of your recent changes, which look a lot like the output of an AI tool like ChatGPT. Using large language models to write Wikipedia is not strictly prohibited, but is discouraged, due to the various errors and biases it can introduce. It is absolutely vital that you personally review any changes published in your name, and strongly encouraged that you clearly label any changes as such.
Your first edit at Regulate (song) summarizes the song's text using 200 more words than the song itself does, and clobbers the existing references, and reads a bit like an ""increasingly verbose" meme. Your subsequent edits aren't nearly as egregious in terms of quality, but tend to clobber wikitext formatting, links, and citations, and have vague and loquacious summaries which are not particularly helpful. It strains my imagination to believe that a human wrote all of these. Please see Help:Edit summaries for advice on writing useful and concise edit summaries.
To the casual observer it looks like you're testing a bot and making rapid and not especially useful edits to a scattershot of articles, which is disruptive to the encyclopedia project, and disempowering for the humans forced to engage with an LLM's "amorphous sludge" writing. I do want to WP:assume good faith. It's possible I'm mistaken on the nature of these changes—perhaps English is your second language, or you're using a machine translation tool which is behaving oddly, in which case I apologize for assuming. You seem to have an advanced degree and an interest in improving gender and sexuality articles (an area I'm also particularly interested in), so you stand to be a very helpful contributor to the project, and I would like to see you stick around.
If possible, could you describe the process and any tools you're using to make your edits? –RoxySaunders 🏳️⚧️ (💬 • 📝) 08:24, 4 July 2024 (UTC)
- Hi Roxy! I apologize; I'm still in the process of learning about how best to follow Wikipedia practices. The Regulate edit was because I had seen that specific summary on an external web page and I did not realize that it was not an actual summary; so please make any changes to that as you wish. Yes, I am interested in gender and sexuality and have an advanced degree, and I am working on integrating changes from new 2024 academic journals and books on gender and sexuality. I am going to follow your lead and stick to only adding new sources and avoiding making sweeping changes. I appreciate you assuming good faith and I will ensure that all my edits follow that moving forward. @RoxySaunders RedHatCarmen (talk) 15:27, 4 July 2024 (UTC)
- I see! I feel terrible for my kneejerk reaction, then. Good luck as you continue to learn the ropes. If you have any questions about editing, feel free to ask at my talk page. Best wishes, –RoxySaunders 🏳️⚧️ (💬 • 📝) 15:35, 4 July 2024 (UTC)
- No, thank you! I was in the process of continuing my response here, so please do not feel terrible as you are commenting on something very valid. I was going to say that I was using AI to help with edit summaries because I often have challenges expressing my changes. I did not know that it was not considered a best practice on Wikipedia. I have since read the article and I see the real interest in not using LLM's. I will stick to writing all changes manually, sticking to topics I know, and being rigorous with my work. Thank you for not judging me too harshly as I am learning! @RoxySaundersRedHatCarmen (talk) 15:40, 4 July 2024 (UTC)
- Of course! We try to make it a practice not to bite the newbies, and you're clearly behaving in good faith. I'm relieved to know that some summaries were AI and I wasn't just spouting off on someone out of nowhere, ha-ha.
- If you make a change that only tweaks a handful of text, I would aim to summarize it in the format "Changed X to Y, because Z", so that editors reading page history or watchlists can quickly understand what's inside them and why. If an edit just fixes some typos, and a GPT spits out a four-sentence summary waxing philosophical about the importance of respectful language, that raises red flags that the change might be misrepresented or questionable.
- For example:
- Change definition to say "assigned male at birth" to "not assigned female at birth", because it is more inclusive. In the lede, put transgender woman first, followed by shorter trans woman.
- Add sentence about foo clarifying bar, based on a new source from journal Foobar. Delete old paragraph, because Barbaz is not a reliable source.
- Changed "John Smith was an evil radical traitor and despicable slime of a man" to "was a politician", to maintain the WP:Neutral point of view.
- Breaking down changes into the smallest possible bites is a best practice, although it can be kind of a handful. For more substantive edits where it would be inconvenient to describe every atomic change, you could use more broad descriptions phrases like:
- Copyedits to sections X, Y, and Z.
- Rewrote the Synopsis section, to improve brevity and clarity per MOS:SYNOPSIS.
- Fix some tone and MOS:EDITORIALIZING issues, for example, changed "Jane Doe tragically and unexpectedly died in a horrifying rollercoaster accident" to "died".
- I hope this helps. –RoxySaunders 🏳️⚧️ (💬 • 📝) 16:42, 4 July 2024 (UTC)
- Not to digress, but I'll also note that
not assigned female at birth
is different from how most sources define Trans woman, so to ensure verifiability and neutrality, it would need to be cited to a reliable source. There's actually an enormous document at Talk:Trans woman/Definitions that lists every known dictionary dictionary of trans woman, as part of a prolonged dispute about whether the article should say is a woman who or is a person who. Most reliable sources use assigned male at birth (or similar) as part of the definition, so we do as well. –RoxySaunders 🏳️⚧️ (💬 • 📝) 16:43, 4 July 2024 (UTC)- Thank you for clarifying! There's so much good stuff here to explore I love how well-thought out everything is and I'm excited to read and learn more. Thanks again! RedHatCarmen (talk) 00:28, 5 July 2024 (UTC)
- Not to digress, but I'll also note that
- No, thank you! I was in the process of continuing my response here, so please do not feel terrible as you are commenting on something very valid. I was going to say that I was using AI to help with edit summaries because I often have challenges expressing my changes. I did not know that it was not considered a best practice on Wikipedia. I have since read the article and I see the real interest in not using LLM's. I will stick to writing all changes manually, sticking to topics I know, and being rigorous with my work. Thank you for not judging me too harshly as I am learning! @RoxySaundersRedHatCarmen (talk) 15:40, 4 July 2024 (UTC)
- I see! I feel terrible for my kneejerk reaction, then. Good luck as you continue to learn the ropes. If you have any questions about editing, feel free to ask at my talk page. Best wishes, –RoxySaunders 🏳️⚧️ (💬 • 📝) 15:35, 4 July 2024 (UTC)