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Show HN: Wonkypedia - Wikipedia from an Alternate Timeline

by sawyerjhood on 4/22/24, 7:56 PM with 26 comments

• by endisneigh on 4/22/24, 9:21 PM

  It would be interesting to model the real Wikipedia in a fashion where there are “critical events” and connections to nodes, which are events with the vertices being the causes, logically specified.

  Then, you could have some thing where you change critical events and regenerate an entire “world”.

• by eblanshey on 4/22/24, 9:20 PM

  How long before AI crawlers start picking this up and start including it in their training data?

• by kwint on 4/22/24, 9:34 PM

  There is this Dutch project that basically did this, but then before AI was a thing. Unfortunately it's frozen now, but still makes me laugh every time: https://oncyclopedia.org

  Edit: just learned that there are many more like this in different languages: https://uncyclopedia.info

• by IncreasePosts on 4/22/24, 9:57 PM

  A great concept, but it falls over due to the horrible tone and style of whatever LLM this is. Despite the prompt, it does not read like an actual Wikipedia article, it reads like every other llm generated text we've seen the past few years.

  I was hoping this site would output stuff on par with the Zhemao hoaxes: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhemao_hoaxes

• by wizardwes on 4/22/24, 9:27 PM

  Really cool! Sadly, it seems that internal consistency is a bit... weak, but quite a fun concept overall!

• by MaximilianEmel on 4/22/24, 10:54 PM

  This reminds me of https://omnipedia.app/, which is a Wikipedia-like interactive fiction project.

  https://neurocracy.site/

• by gaudystead on 4/22/24, 8:54 PM

  This is an interesting use of an LLM. What prompt(s) are generating these alternate timelines?

• by thefak1111 on 4/22/24, 10:18 PM

  WikiGenGPT was created over one year ago. Wonkypedia seems to use the same approach.

  https://github.com/mrconter1/WikiGenGPT

• by rdlw on 4/22/24, 9:27 PM

  Cool idea, but disappointed that the first article I clicked on breaks kayfabe:

  "While the Arctic in our timeline has experienced extensive exploration, development and environmental damage over the past few centuries, in this alternate history it has remained relatively pristine and untouched."

  https://www.wonkypedia.org/article/Arctic

  Although, it would be entertaining if Wikipedia were written in this style. "While the Arctic in other timelines remains pristine, in this alternate history it has been ravaged by human exploitation."

• by tudorw on 4/22/24, 9:16 PM

  I'd like to see something a bit like this that use real wikipedia then generates a side by side comparison of the output of the various leading models on that subject. Wonky is fun too though :)

• by rfl890 on 4/22/24, 10:37 PM

  https://www.wonkypedia.org/article/AES-512 Look at it spitting out garbage here.

• by adamgordonbell on 4/22/24, 9:32 PM

  This is amazing! I wonder how you could make it internally consistent.

  Somehow keep a memory of made of facts, that accumulate?

• by Method-X on 4/22/24, 9:05 PM

  Did you use a MediaWiki skin for this? Static html?

• by MaximilianEmel on 4/22/24, 10:29 PM

  Why was this flagged?