These teachers were not wrong about it - people do treat Wikipedia as an authoritative source of information.
What makes Wikipedia work anyway is a conflation of two things:
- Volunteers keeping it correct put in more effort than people trying to sneak in lies on purpose. There are many reasons why this is a case, one of which is, there's really not much to gain trying to mess with most Wiki pages.
- Whether or not a typical person is correct about something doesn't matter much.
- In cases where being correct does matter, it's usually easy to discover you're wrong. Life isn't a quiz show, you don't lose if you answer incorrectly - you get smacked in the face by wrong results, conflicting facts, inconsistent knowledge, and you get to course-correct. You ask around, grab a textbook, and fix your facts.
The second point is big and somewhat sad: it truly does not matter whether or not a random person has an accurate view of the world. Beliefs that have noticeable or immediate impact on one's life tend to be automatically corrected (see point 3) until they're good enough - all the rest of the knowledge serves a single purpose: social grooming. It doesn't matter if a news story, or a piece of trivia, is true - as long as you can tell it to someone and have a nice conversation, it's achieved its purpose. People who care about the truth for the sake of truth are the exception, not the norm.
Back to the topic of GitHub Copilot: code does not serve a social grooming function. Pretty much all code matters at face value, because it directs machines to do things. When Copilot feeds you bad code (or you mindlessly copy stuff from StackOverflow), the result is called a bug. The way reality corrects it is by the system failing, and someone having to debug it. This is expensive, so you want to minimize that.
I generally agree with two reservations. First I find that there are two types of inaccuracies on Wikipedia. Mistakes that I sometimes fix, and bias that is not worth fixing because people trying to sneak in bias are dedicated and have a lot of free time. See e.g. edits made by the user named Erik on this article[1]. They've been persistently making the same edit for years and the only reason we can see it is that they don't obfuscate their activity by using different usernames.
Second, I'm optimistic that most bugs are found before code is even committed, so people will quickly learn that generated code needs to be carefully reviewed. I don't have access to Copilot, but if I did, I presume the way I'd use it is that I'd always comment out the generated code and just use it as a quick reference.
I'm part of a small forum that used to insert small wrong facts in Wikipedia. I think it's basically impossible nowadays but some of them still stand and have been copied in books and articles.
Ad the now-deleted critical sibling comment: Note that OP implied the edits were innocent, likely made by teenagers having a laugh. The misedits, which OP didn't say they made themselves, presumably didn't hurt anyone and taught a lot of people to be critical of what they read.
Yes I should have specified that it was about unimportant and inconsequential things, like the nickname of a variant of a culinary ingredient, coming usually from meta-humor from the forum.
What makes Wikipedia work anyway is a conflation of two things:
- Volunteers keeping it correct put in more effort than people trying to sneak in lies on purpose. There are many reasons why this is a case, one of which is, there's really not much to gain trying to mess with most Wiki pages.
- Whether or not a typical person is correct about something doesn't matter much.
- In cases where being correct does matter, it's usually easy to discover you're wrong. Life isn't a quiz show, you don't lose if you answer incorrectly - you get smacked in the face by wrong results, conflicting facts, inconsistent knowledge, and you get to course-correct. You ask around, grab a textbook, and fix your facts.
The second point is big and somewhat sad: it truly does not matter whether or not a random person has an accurate view of the world. Beliefs that have noticeable or immediate impact on one's life tend to be automatically corrected (see point 3) until they're good enough - all the rest of the knowledge serves a single purpose: social grooming. It doesn't matter if a news story, or a piece of trivia, is true - as long as you can tell it to someone and have a nice conversation, it's achieved its purpose. People who care about the truth for the sake of truth are the exception, not the norm.
Back to the topic of GitHub Copilot: code does not serve a social grooming function. Pretty much all code matters at face value, because it directs machines to do things. When Copilot feeds you bad code (or you mindlessly copy stuff from StackOverflow), the result is called a bug. The way reality corrects it is by the system failing, and someone having to debug it. This is expensive, so you want to minimize that.