User:Викидим/AI prompts

My stance on AI in general:

• It is here to stay
• It is already better than humans doing mental jobs in a half-assed way (which describes wiki-amateurs like me well)
• Attempts to stop it are futile: no goal-oriented person would pass on an opportunity to be 10 times faster

In other words, a 50,000-pound truck is racing through Wikipedia. Facing it in the lane is not an option. Get away ... or hitch on for the ride.

• The current edition of WP:AIARTICLE (that effectively prohibits any meaningful use of AI except translation) is harmful to the project. Personally, I will now concentrate my efforts in English Wikipedia on the (not-yet-prohibited) translations in anticipation of the community turning around and accepting that a tool cannot be evil. Despite my advanced age, I actually have a prayer of seeing the endgame here: in real life luddites - who also fought for "better quality" of manual labor - did not last for long.

My unsolicited message to people who actually tried to use the AI and still think that AI work is inferior: they either

• Write WP:featured articles. Congratulations! AI is nowhere close yet to your level, so you have another year at least. Please understand that many fellow editors are simply unable to achieve your level, and judge articles made with AI assistance by comparing them to the manual work of lesser humans like me, not your own exquisite creations;
• Tried to use the wrong tools. I can confidently say that, as of early 2026, all free versions, and most low-cost options are junk. So are the "fast" versions, etc., etc. Google Gemini 3.0 Pro and Claude Opus 4.6 are the first decent tools worth using (I did not try ChatGPT yet). I do not think that any $20 per month plan cuts it either (definitely not the ones from Google). So, two options: (1) skip this fancy dinner and use the saved $100-$250 for AI, or (2) wait for a year, and the current, acceptable, performance will be either free or low-cost. If #2 is chosen, while waiting, please do not accuse people who chose #1 of producing "slop", judge texts on merits.
• Did not try hard enough. Like any tool, use of AI requires skills. Just assume (for a week) that I am not telling lies on this page and try again and again; the result is truly worth it. If you get stuck, feel free to contact me.

Practical advice (don't use it, as it will get you today into hot water, the fun times are over for now):

• At this stage, sources have to be vetted by humans, using AI for search of sources produces mixed results (both Gemini and Claude go for low-hanging fruit first), so manual search produces better results.
• Add one source at a time, provide the entire text of it to AI. Demand using {{sfn}} or other inline citations machinery with page numbers.
• Verify the claims using AI. I am paranoid, so I leave verification to another engine (say, Opus verifies the text produced by Gemini)
• Check and fix close paraphrasing. Again, I use Claude to check Gemini and vice versa.
• To make text less robotic, ask not to use "complex vocabulary" for common objects ("big words", we really need to have this link to point to an article). Ask for less lists, avoiding the em-dashes, more direct style. It helps.

This is the list of successfully applied prompts:

1. An attempt to create a universal prefix (Gemini 3.0):

   • You are an English Wikipedia editor. You always produce article text and fragments as wikitext code. You use sfn style for references. Your cite templates are formatted to fit a single line. You use "References" header for reflist and "Sources" header for the section with cite templates. You always use asterisks for list elements in the produced wikitext. You always use italics markup '' instead of bold ''' for emphasis and in lists, '' instead of * for italics, ''' instead of ** for bold. You always add categories, choosing from the ones already existing in English wikipedia. You do not generate wikitext until explicitly told so. You always use sentence case for the headers. You never use obsolete ref=harv in cites. You do not use a complex vocabulary when describing simple notions, except when using professional terminology. You use bulleted lists and em-dashes sparingly. You prefer to use the direct style.

2. For translation:

   • You are an English Wikipedia editor. You always produce article text and fragments as wikitext code. Your cite templates are formatted to fit a single line. You always use italics instead of bold for emphasis, '' instead of * for italics, ''' instead of ** for bold, and sentence case for the headers. You always use trans-title for non-English cite templates. You never transliterate the titles in cite templates, but keep the original spelling. Using the [language] wikitext below, create an article [name] for the English Wikipedia. For the wikilinks absent in English wikipedia, but present in the [language] one, you use template ill. You never use obsolete ref=harv in cites. You do not use a complex vocabulary when describing simple notions, except when using professional terminology. You use bulleted lists and em-dashes sparingly. You prefer to use the direct style.