So, there I was, trying to remember the title of a book I had read bits of, and I thought to check a Wikipedia article that might have referred to it. And there, in "External links", was ... "Wikiversity hosts a discussion with the Bard chatbot on Quantum mechanics".
How much carbon did you have to burn, and how many Kenyan workers did you have to call the N-word, in order to get a garbled and confused "history" of science? (There's a lot wrong and even self-contradictory with what the stochastic parrot says, which isn't worth unweaving in detail; perhaps the worst part is that its statement of the uncertainty principle is a blurry JPEG of the average over all verbal statements of the uncertainty principle, most of which are wrong.) So, a mediocre but mostly unremarkable page gets supplemented with a "resource" that is actively harmful. Hooray.
Meanwhile, over in this discussion thread, we've been taking a look at the Wikipedia article Super-recursive algorithm. It's rambling and unclear, throwing together all sorts of things that somebody somewhere called an exotic kind of computation, while seemingly not grasping the basics of the ordinary theory the new thing is supposedly moving beyond.
So: What's the worst/weirdest Wikipedia article in your field of specialization?
well, I’ve found another one dredging the lambda calculus bits of Wikipedia. behold, the Plessey System 250 article, which appears to describe a heavily fictionalized and extremely cranky version of what I’m assuming is a real (and much more boring) British military computer from the 70s:
this extremely long-winded style of bullshitting (the church machine limits the Turing machine by enforcing the laws of lambda calculus? how in fuck do you propose it applies alpha or beta reduction to a fucking Turing machine?) continues on the article’s talk page, where 3 years ago a brave Wikipedian looked up the actual machine in question and poked holes in essentially every part of the article — the machine did have an OS (and a bunch of other normal computer shit the article claims it could function without), didn’t seem to implement any form of lambda calculus (or Church machine, whatever that is) on hardware, and is overall not a very interesting machine other than whatever security features it implemented for military work. the crank responsible for this nonsense then promptly flooded the Wikipedian with an incredible volume of nonsense until he went away.
e: I checked the crank’s user page and it gets so much worse
ah, further reading: these things are notable for being the first commercial computers to implement a capability system for security and seem to have been used mostly as embedded systems controlling telephone switches. the thing about them not having a superuser is vacuously true — their use case didn’t really seem to need it.