All posts tagged: crowdsourcing

Iranians Don’t Have a Missile Alert System, So Volunteers Built Their Own Warning Map

Iranians Don’t Have a Missile Alert System, So Volunteers Built Their Own Warning Map

Published by skeptic

Since Donald Trump’s war on Iran started more than three weeks ago, United States military forces have allegedly attacked more than 9,000 sites, creating a climate of fear and constant uncertainty for Iranians in Tehran and across the country. Without an advanced warning system from the government, and amid the longest internet shutdown in Iran’s history, Iranians are left in an information void. Even before Israel and the United States began dropping bombs, Iran’s lack of a public emergency alert tool and severe state-controlled digital oppression has impacted tens of millions of citizens. Since the 12-day Israel-Iran war last year, though, a group of Iranian digital rights activists and volunteers has been working to fill the gap with a dynamic, regularly updated mapping platform called Mahsa Alert. The project can’t replace real-time early alerts that could come from a coordinated government service, but the tool sends push notifications when Israeli forces warn about attacks, details some confirmed strike locations, and offers offline mapping capabilities. “There is no emergency alert in Iran,” says Ahmad Ahmadian, the …

A Wikipedia Group Made a Guide to Detect AI Writing. Now a Plug-In Uses It to ‘Humanize’ Chatbots

A Wikipedia Group Made a Guide to Detect AI Writing. Now a Plug-In Uses It to ‘Humanize’ Chatbots

Published by skeptic

On Saturday, tech entrepreneur Siqi Chen released an open source plug-in for Anthropic’s Claude Code AI assistant that instructs the AI model to stop writing like an AI model. Called Humanizer, the simple prompt plug-in feeds Claude a list of 24 language and formatting patterns that Wikipedia editors have listed as chatbot giveaways. Chen published the plug-in on GitHub, where it has picked up more than 1,600 stars as of Monday. “It’s really handy that Wikipedia went and collated a detailed list of ‘signs of AI writing,’” Chen wrote on X. “So much so that you can just tell your LLM to … not do that.” The source material is a guide from WikiProject AI Cleanup, a group of Wikipedia editors who have been hunting AI-generated articles since late 2023. French Wikipedia editor Ilyas Lebleu founded the project. The volunteers have tagged over 500 articles for review and, in August 2025, published a formal list of the patterns they kept seeing. Chen’s tool is a “skill file” for Claude Code, Anthropic’s terminal-based coding assistant, which …

You’ve Never Heard of China’s Greatest Sci-Fi Novel

You’ve Never Heard of China’s Greatest Sci-Fi Novel

Published by skeptic

Ma’s moment arrived in 2011. On July 23, two high-speed trains collided near Wenzhou, killing 40 people. The accident traumatized the nation for what it seemed to reveal about the costs of China’s breakneck pace of development. A prominent essay captured the mood, its title becoming a rallying cry: “China, Slow Down, Wait for Your People.” The prose read almost like prayer: “China, please stop your flying pace, wait for your people, wait for your soul, wait for your morality, wait for your conscience!” Ma and other Industrial Party voices responded with a counteroffensive. The solution wasn’t to slow down but to double down, they said—to learn from mistakes, to push through the difficult phase when new technologies were still being mastered. And key to their campaign was Lingao itself. The writing of it became a phenomenon across Chinese internet forums in the 2010s: Its open source ethos and collaborative methods deeply appealed to China’s burgeoning tech community. Beyond regular meetups among core contributors, Lingao’s creation fostered the formation of China’s “keyboard politics”—online communities where …

Crowdsourcing Wikipedia’s encyclopedia: Best ideas of the century

Crowdsourcing Wikipedia’s encyclopedia: Best ideas of the century

Published by skeptic

Hostility and discord are hallmarks of the internet more so than collaboration and cooperation. So the fact that a public encyclopaedia, editable by anyone, has become one of the most useful repositories of knowledge in the world is, frankly, unbelievable. “Thank God it works in practice, because it would never work in theory,” says Anusha Alikhan at the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that runs Wikipedia. The website was set up in 2001 by Jimmy Wales, who remains involved today, and Larry Sanger, who left the project the following year – but continues to criticise it from afar. He recently wrote that the site had been “hijacked by ideologues”. Needless to say, Sanger’s view isn’t shared by most. Every month, Wikipedia’s 64 million articles in more than 300 languages receive 15 billion visits. At the time of writing, it is the ninth-most visited website in the world. “The fact that it is now one of the most trusted resources on the web is not something that anyone could have contemplated, but we’re here,” says Alikhan. Fostering trust on …