Wikipedia Sucks!

I did not realize that there was a publicly traded "cliff notes" for everything company with 3000 employees committed to making dumb people dumber by doing their homework for them. The stock is getting blasted today on the basis that they are losing growth due to Chatgpt.

The company did a 1 Billion dollar secondary stock offering in 2021 at $100 a share! and has continually puked thereafter.

Pre-market 9.32 −8.28 (47.05%)

https://www.chegg.com/

Perhaps Wikipedia was not a good homework service provider so Chegg stepped in as a venture where insiders got rich and small investors got fleeced. When Wikipedia came out there was a lot of fear that it would be a source for doing homework. Wikipedia is not good enough compared to a paid service, and the paid service is not good enough compared to new technologies.

The hype trajectory of the three products will be the same..

Lol, in my day you had to pay some local guy to write essays for class. How archaic. I never did that because I wasn't as stupid/drunk/crazy as certain classmates. You knew the jig was up when the instructor would give an assignment, and openly warn the class "If you pay Jerry So-and-so to write this for you, I'll know and it will be an automatic fail, his writing style is well known to the administration". Or words to that effect.

You don't remember the Turnitin study from 2011, that found WP was the leading source of plagiarism for schoolchidren, do you? We put an article about this on the book wiki. And found a BONUS: the Turnitin company had been paying someone to control their WP article. And they were being PROTECTED by administrator Daniel Case. At first Wikipedia nerds really hated companies like Turnitin, and used their WP articles to attack them. But the company got away with the paid editing, Case is STILL a popular administrator, and Turnitin eventually gave up and entered into a "partnership" with the Wikimedia Foundation in 2015. Ha ha.

There is even an "official policy page". Which appears to be dead/ignored today.

Why things like GPT are generating headlines and hysteria? Easy. Lazy schookids will always want to plagiarize/buy writing for their homework. "You can Google up anything you want!" As Feynman said long ago, having a PhD doesn't mean you're not an idiot. Cheap ML/AI/whatever software is revolutionizing this nasty little field, and the companies that made money off it, like Turnitin and dozens of others (major antiplagiarism scanners are listed in the policy page), are now losing their customers. Plagiarism detectors are usually a bit crude and seem to have a lot of trouble detecting GPT output. Look thru plagiarismtoday.com for some reports. No doubt those companies are now struggling with their own AI developments, just to fight off the free or low-cost text generators.

Bet you $100 that Chegg will be sued by school districts and universities. Give it time.