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Friday, March 31, 2023

Two Great Web Tools: summarize.tech and Indie Wiki Buddy / BreezeWiki

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Never watch a video essay or suffer from a Fandom Wiki ever again.

This isn't... normally the type of thing I'd write an article on, but it's definitely adjacent to the topics we'd talk about on KoopaTV, and makes your life as a videogame fan engaged in gaming culture much better. So I'd like to share TWO tools in ONE article that are amazing, useful, and you'll want to start incorporating into your web browsing experience right away.

summarize.tech


There are lots of people out there—and they are probably correct, unfortunately—that tell me that KoopaTV shouldn't be a text-based blog. The days of most people READING things are long over. People watch and listen to people talk, influenced by “video essays” on platforms such as YouTube. I detest video essays. They're a reason I was on Team Book instead of Team Film. Video essays are inefficient at conveying information. They most often don't take advantage of the times where video is the most useful medium of conveying information, since they're more like lectures or podcasts than real videos. And because of how YouTube works, content creators make their video essays artificially lengthy, beyond the fact that it just takes longer to listen to someone talk than it is to read what they have to say.

Enter summarize.tech, a free AI-powered video summary tool powered by ChatGPT and created by Pete Hunt. You put in the URL of your YouTube video and it'll spit out a summary, with an option to see section summaries in five-minute increments, useful for very long videos.

For example, you can quickly get the plot of Mekkah's 22:29 “Fire Emblem Fandom has a Problem with Archetypes” YouTube video in a couple of minutes of reading the summary. The summary gets to the point that Mekkah is saying archetypes are useful for quickly communicating ideas, but often the fandom gets bored and tries to invent new archetypes that don't communicate anything useful, or try to force a square character into a circular archetype hole, which devalues what archetypes are trying to convey. Boom, you just saved twenty or more minutes of your day, and if you think from the timeslot detailed summary that it's worth watching the whole video, you can of course still do that.


Note that the summaries are created based on the closed captioning/sub-titles attached to a video. If the video lacks that text data, then summarize.tech can't generate a summary. You should also be warned that in most videos with sub-titles, they are the auto-generated sub-titles that YouTube will create with its embedded speech-to-text program, and those sub-titles often have problems, especially when it comes to the names of things. Since summarize.tech is using AI to summarize an AI-created thing, that introduces several potential points of failure. For example, in the summary of Mekkah's video, it inaccurately describes the existence of “three main archetypes” (which might be referring to Est, Jeigan, and Gotoh, but Mekkah doesn't say only those archetypes have merit), and misidentifies the “Fire Emblem Wiki” as the “final Defender Wiki”. It works best when the content creator goes and creates real sub-titles and doesn't just rely on auto-generated ones. (And putting the effort into doing that is actually better for the video as a matter of searchability.)

Anyway, I'm a big supporter in making video essays more similar to essays than videos. I... do recognise that similar tools exist that you could use to, say, convert a written KoopaTV article into a summary, but I don't feel terribly threatened by that. The strength of our writing style ought to dissuade people from doing that, since they'll be missing out. And KoopaTV articles aren't usually super-lengthy unconsumable menaces anyway.

Indie Wiki Buddy / BreezeWiki


I mentioned the Fire Emblem Wiki in the previous part of this article, which segues nicely into the second useful tool: the Indie Wiki Buddy browser extension by Kevin Payravi, available for Firefox and Chrome. This browser extension can hide results from Fandom domain wikis, can redirect you from Fandom domain wikis to independent wikis, and you can also toggle an option to get you to the “BreezeWiki” (or “antifandom”) version of a Fandom wiki if you have no other option. That version strips down all of the gunk and crap Fandom puts on their wikis.

If you are wondering why this extension is so good, you need to understand why Fandom wikis are bad. Read this KoopaTV article for a pretty clear description with visual examples on that. But I'll provide another example.

Let's say you've heard about Dr. Turner Grey causing a car accident to stop his nurse from talking. It's completely preposterous FAKE NEWS and you wanted to read more about Dr. Turner Grey to learn the truth. If you put Dr. Turner Grey's name into a search engine like DuckDuckGo (...or Google...), the first result will be the Ace Attorney Wiki (on Fandom). If you click that unprepared, you'll get this mess at the top of the page:


Ace Attorney Fandom Wiki Turner Grey ads autoplaying videos sidebars pop-ups
Turner Grey's article on the Ace Attorney Fandom Wiki.


The subject of that video there isn't Turner Grey. Nothing in that picture looks like it's about Turner Grey besides the sort of greyed out name at the top. And as you scroll through the page, you're victimised by all kinds of freaky pop-ups and unrelated garbage. It's a poor experience. But if you have the Indie Wiki Buddy browser extension installed with the options set to on, you'll instead get this:

Ace Attorney Wiki Turner Grey BreezeWiki Fandom antifandom Indie Wiki Buddy extension
Wouldn't you rather browse this instead?


Now, unfortunately, Ace Attorney doesn't have a decently existing non-Fandom wiki, so you'll still come across it in your search engine and won't be redirected or notified about the existence of an alternative wiki. However, you will get redirected to a mirror of your choice of the Ace Attorney Wiki using BreezeWiki, such as on the antifandom.com domain, which strips away all of the useless gunk that Fandom stuffs onto its pages. You can see the scrollbar is shorter too, because the Fandom version has a bunch of extra crap at the bottom that BreezeWiki omits. Your page will load faster and your experience is better.

If you were searching something for Fire Emblem, for example, and had Indie Wiki Buddy on, your search results would omit the (bad) Fire Emblem Wiki (on Fandom) and show the (good and independent) Fire Emblem Wiki instead, which has a better browser experience as well as superior information quality.

Both summarize.tech and Indie Wiki Buddy are great tools that handle two worrying and rising problems in the videogame community: the increase of intellectual discussion being put into video essays that are designed to disrespect your time, and the rise of information consolidation on platforms run by corrupt corporations like Fandom. Of course, I recommend them.



Ludwig wasn't compensated to write positively about anything in this article (or compensated for any other reason, either). They're also free to use. Feel free to share other tools in this vein in the comments section that have helped make your life a bit better! Ludwig is also happy that KoopaTV avoids annoying and repetitive video essays, as well as avoids obnoxious web design elements that get in the way of the content. KoopaTV also isn't run by a corrupt corporation, and is instead run by the ethical and honest folks in Koopa Kingdom's government.


Artificial intelligence can summarise KoopaTV articles... but it can also write them. Is that a good thing? Read one yourself.

2 comments :

  1. Turner Grey was one of my favorite characters despite being a complete joke, he's kinda like Penny Nichole's in being so underutilized. Although I guess for Grey it's kind of justified.

    I would much rather read something than watch a video, sometimes the voice over is too slow or if they are reading a tweet or something I'll end up reading it much faster myself then anxious to skip ahead. In my biology class we are encouraged to watch some biology podcasts for extra credit, but i always just read the transcript, it's so much easier and i feel as though i pay more attention seeing it all laid out before me.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. How is the extra credit evaluated? Do you need to write a report or something about the contents of the podcast?

      Delete

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