Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2023 April 16

= April 16 =

Google treating un-verified Wikipedia statements as if they had been verified
Look at the Mean Girls: The Musical article. Somebody added a release date recently and I put a template indicating the fact that I can't find a citation for this unverified statement. But when I do a Google search on "Mean Girls" movie musical release date, it reveals this release date that it got from the Wikipedia article, as if it had been verified and isn't just a claim somebody made. (Please study the article's recent history; specifically the edit just before I put the template in the article.) Georgia guy (talk) 14:09, 16 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Google searches for web pages, not verified facts. --174.89.12.187 (talk) 14:48, 16 April 2023 (UTC)
 * ...including as part of that statement the statement that it ignores "citation needed" templates when it deals with Wikipedia. Georgia guy (talk) 14:50, 16 April 2023 (UTC)
 * It seems so. Do you have a question? FWIW, if I'd found that while doing RC patrol, I probably would have reverted the edit altogether. A release date that far out is worthless. Matt Deres (talk) 15:05, 16 April 2023 (UTC)
 * The question form of what I revealed is: why doesn't Google pay attention to "citation needed" templates?? Georgia guy (talk) 15:14, 16 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Maybe it will in the future when it puts in a more intelligent analysis of what it reads. But then again if that is a large language model like GPT-4 it will be quite liable to just make up a 'fact' for what you asked for and attribute it to Wikipedia! NadVolum (talk) 17:08, 16 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Why would you expect it to understand wording conventions of usage that are specific to a single web site? It just looks for sites that contain words relevant to what you searched on. 174.89.12.187 (talk) 21:24, 16 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Why would it ? Our magic incantations mean nothing to google ;) —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 08:31, 17 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Replying also to the IP just above: fair enough, but Wikipedia is extremely valuable to Google - and to other search engines. To satisfy your users, you want to return good quality material for whatever is searched for: Wikipedia provides a better-than-average to extremely good link for about six and a half million such items. It's why we're typically one of the very top returns for pretty much anything we have an article on. For the folks that can make my phone translate script in real-time to dozens of languages, parsing stuff like would be child's play if they thought about doing it.  Matt Deres (talk) 14:05, 17 April 2023 (UTC)
 * The release date has been removed. Problem solved. Shantavira|feed me 08:20, 17 April 2023 (UTC)