[COFF] [TUHS] Re: Wikipedia anecdotes - LLM generalizations [was On the unreliability of LLM-based search results (was: Listing of early Unix source code from the Computer History Museum)

[Dan Halbert]

On 5/27/25 16:52, Noel Chiappa wrote:
>      > From: Paul Winalski
>
>      > Wikipedia quite rightly wants citations for stated facts and this
>      > practice goes a long way to prevent inaccuracies. But I recall one
>      > instance where it actually caused the establishment of a factual error.
>
> Not rare; this pattern was the subject of an XKCD strip, "Citogenesis":
>
>    https://xkcd.com/978/
>    https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/978:_Citogenesis
>
> The latter URL has a very similar story to the one you gave.
>
> 	Noel
I had to go to considerable lengths to fix a misspelling of my father's 
first name in a short Wikipedia article about my mother (not written by 
me!). The original article cited a newspaper engagement notice with the 
misspelling. After some effort, I found another citation that identified 
him sufficiently in context to use as a cite for his correct name.

Dan H.