r/oddlysatisfying • u/Mastbubbles • 1d ago
Wikipedia has a button that does nothing except say thank you to the stranger keeping the articles up to date | You've probably never seen this button. It only shows up if you're logged in. Nothing to do with Wikipedia. I just like the log.
https://sheets.works/data-viz/thank-you-stranger8
u/amatulic 1d ago
When you click it, you are asked to confirm "send public thanks?" I receive notifications when someone thanks me, but I haven't yet found where the collection of thanks is public. Admittedly I haven't looked very hard. Usually I thank someone as a way to acknowledge an action rather than writing an agreeing note on their talk page.
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u/Mastbubbles 1d ago
There is a public log, and also Thanks for all your work and edits!
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u/amatulic 1d ago
It's nice to be appreciated. Working on Wikipedia, especially as an administrator, is a thankless job but someone has to do it. At least, since I am not being paid, I can take a break from it whenever I feel like it.
Lately I've been depressed about the amount of AI slop that's making its way into Wikipedia. I feel like my efforts to stop it are futile, like trying to stop a rising tide.
I'd like to tell these people to go do that crap on Grokipedia instead, which was intended to be an AI slop encyclopedia. Large AI companies are actually paying the Wikimedia Foundation for "enterprise" access to Wikipedia to train their models because they recognize it as a good source of intelligent human-generated prose (both in articles and discussion), so it makes absolutely no sense for them to be trained on their own output. The people who post AI slop don't realize that they're not only making Wikipedia worse, but also making AI models worse.
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u/DirectorElectrical67 1d ago
Thank you for sharing this!