Hello everyone ,
There have been concerns raised lately over issues with the Auto tl;dr bot which creates summaries of news articles from several known sites, however only really ABC news is applicable here. Relevant threads:
- Truck stowaway ‘lucky to be alive’ after travelling nearly 400km on metal racks beneath B-double (no problem with summary - just discussion of concerns)
- Small modular nuclear reactor that was hailed by Coalition as future cancelled due to rising costs (Australian Politics)
There are also many other occurrences (I haven’t been keeping track), if there are some you would like appended to this list comment with a link below.
Most concerns are that the bot misses important information and/or gives a misleading summary. I’d like to see where people sit on the issue and how we could potentially deal with it. There are a few options I can think of:
- Remove the bot (through a ban)
- Get @dalekerrigan@aussie.zone to comment a disclaimer underneath all of its comments
- Get @dalekerrigan@aussie.zone automatically delete all comments by the bot which have been reported (may open door for abuse)
- Do nothing
I don’t hate the bot - it can be useful, and I like the concept, however, just like us it gets things wrong.
Anyway feedback is welcome, if you have an opinion on this please comment below so I can judge where we all stand on this and try to make the right decision
It has about a 60% usefulness ratio in my opinion but I’d suggest option 2 an auto comment disclaimer that it often leaves relevant stuff out AND to downvote it when the summary isnt useful.
The latter because a) it’s a signal to later readers that the summary is misleading and b) if the maintainer is monitoring (prob not) that’s a clue as to which summaries need to be looked at
Yeh, agree with approach, seems sensible
This is equivalent to option 4 IMO.
No one will heed the disclaimer. I mean the disclaimer basically means the whole thing is pointless - you need to read the article I’d you want to be sure you’re not missing something very important.
Down votes are meaningless. No one will look at the down votes and conclude that in that specific case the summary is unreliable.