The people telling you Wikipedia wasn’t a valid source were teachers who wanted you to learn to verify information. The people telling you to “just ask chatgpt” are middle managers who just want to get their kpi up to justify their yearly bonus.
They were never the same people, and implying they are is very disingenuous.
The people telling you Wikipedia wasn’t a valid source were teachers who wanted you to learn to verify information
They should have told their students to use the sources cited on Wikipedia (when credible), not pretended that the entirety of the world’s premier encyclopedia is only a wretched hive of vandalism and misinformation.
They were never the same people, and implying they are is very disingenuous.
The “don’t believe everything you read on the internet” (90s) to “reads a lot of clickbait articles” (~2010 and beyond)) pipeline is real, though.
Both of my parents are examples of that, though my dad is center right by Danish standards and my mom is left wing, so none of the articles are from Faux News or Breitbart, thank FSM!
They should have told their students to use the sources cited on Wikipedia (when credible), not pretended that the entirety of the world’s premier encyclopedia is only a wretched hive of vandalism and misinformation.
Unusual straw man because that is what we do.
I was unaware of the change since it’s been a long time since I was in school myself. My bad 🤷🏻
I don’t know what sort of school, and I wasn’t coming after you, but educational attainment gets shot on a lot.
A significant proportion of our training is understanding information. Where it comes from, how useful it is, etc. Trust in information is vital to our existence.
At the time teachers said that, it was not the “world’s premier encyclopedia” though.
Yes and no: teachers have been saying that for awhile, and some still say it…
my older bro use it annoyingly so much, he thinks its th primary problem solver for all your questions, and hes in tech. i was thinking dude use your brain. even directly going to a reddit post is “better”, since likely someone has asked that direct question you are asking and already answered, an LLM cant differentiate that they just combine it into one summary.
I still find it bananas how someone can work in tech and be happy with LLMs. I’m a software developer, and when I’m forced to use an LLM I just want to cry. It takes more time to tell it what to do, than if I’d done it myself, and if I miss a part of it, then it’ll fill in the blanks and make absolutely wild assumptions.
That’s why you cite wikipedias sources and not wikipedia, teachers hate this one little trick.
That’s literally what the teachers wanted you to do
Wikipedia is not a valid academic source. However, it is a great source to lead into valid academic sources.
its good for like a small summary
That’s exactly it! Almost like reading an abstract to a paper.
to lead into valid academic sources.
this is called an index btw
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Wonder why we were taught to stay away from wikipedia instead of being taught how to use it properly 🤔. Idk how to verify sources so i trust wikipedia at face value, sorry ;(
It just isn’t easy at all. If someone editorializes a Wikipedia article, they can:
- make claims without citation,
- cite a source which does not support the claims,
- misrepresent a source by citing it out of context, and
- perhaps most devious of all: Just not talk about aspects that they don’t like.
You could write an entire Wikipedia article on Adolf Hitler with perfectly cited sources, which never mentions the genocide, the warmongering, that he lost the war etc…
You can use Wikipedia as an entrypoint for research, but you have to actually read the sources and find additional sources, independently from that.
You could, but it would be reverted within 24 hours.
And by hours I mean minutes.
Perhaps even seconds if it’s during CET waking hours.
It depends al lot in the subject and the amount of people with some knowledge about it. About hitler it would last only a very short time, but there have been prank pages that survived for months
True. I was thinking about the Hitler one in particular, as I’m sure someone would quickly notice such an extensive edit on such a notable topic.
In fact, I wonder if there are bots or something for detecting these edits…
But by that time, the network had been active for almost a decade and had been able to make some considerable changes to the public record.
Plenty of examples like this.
Wikipedia is manipulated garbage on anything with political relevance.
IDK why people keep defending it.
I would earnestly invite you to go create an account, and earnestly attempt to create disinformation. Choose a really subtle one, not a blatant one like your example. Be devious, take your time, keep trying. I think you’ll be surprised.
Plenty of examples like this.
Wikipedia is manipulated garbage on anything with political relevance.
IDK why people keep defending it.I’ve tried to create an account to correct misinformation, but it turned out a clique of editors had the article locked down so they’d just revert any changes to it, they then proceeded to dox me.
i saw that on certain entries of wikipedia. around certain biological topics, or stem topics.
Yeah, “Don’t trust Wikipedia” always has been like “don’t trust books” because it literally is at least on par and even references sources. We literally can’t do original research on everything ourselves and even just verifying the sources is infeasible for most topics because it’s not just a list but a forest of deep-rooted trees. It takes decades to learn to know what’s real and what’s just a commonly believed lie. Sometimes someone proves the empirically validated assumptions of the past wrong, and then we get new tech like GPS… That said: Don’t trust AI. It’s not as good as the humans filling Wikipedia - yet.
Hearing “don’t talk to strangers online” from people who post their SSN on Facebook.
Wikipedia isn’t a valid source for academic research. For all other purposes it’s very useful and even in academia it’s often a good starting point.
One of the most important reasons to cite journal articles and books with an ISBN instead of web links never gets mentioned.
Web links change all the time. Page numbers and paragraphs do not. Your sources shouldn’t die when AWS does a migration or a website changes its name.
A good starting point maybe, but too many people also treat it as the end point, and as basically scripture in general
Honestly, wikipedia is one of the greatest things to ever exists, and possibly the single best thing that internet has done for civilization.
I would point out that both things are not valid sources, but both can lead you to valid sources with Wikipedia being the generally better option.
You can ask chatgpt to give you academic sources and it will link you, Buuuut it’s a coin flip if they will be real links, or even actually useful. I did find some very good academic sources using chatpgt, but chatgpt is not a search engine, and its results need scrutinized.
Wikipedia will have all of their sources listed at the bottom of the article and those are already human verified.
Still, nothing beats a good old jaunt into an academic database for random finds.
Remember: the people saying, “Wikipedia isn’t a valid source” accepted some random PDF sharing website with 10 popup ads, which you got to after clicking “Accept the risk” as a “valid source”.
Chatgpt can prove the claims it makes by creating APA references for every remark it makes. I see it in student work all the time. Works like a
charmraccoon on cocaineI don’t think these are the same people, to be fair.
True, but the post also never says they are.
Yes feedback from humans can be incoherent.
In aggregate
Your commentary on this meme makes no sense. No these were not brought to us by the same people
Hahaha
👍
All encyclopedias are bad sources. Be they wiki or not. They are not in depth enough on a topic to be useful in a paper.
That’s why you check the sources cited by the encyclopedias, which tend to be more in depth and credible than the encyclopedia entries themselves.
It’s not a “encyclopedia bad” problem as much as a lack of going just one layer deeper to get to the data itself.
