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 reliable), 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!
At the time teachers said that, it was not the “world’s premier encyclopedia” though.
Hahaha
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.
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.
And not only that, they’ll consider its response more reliable if they can see it cited sources… which are almost always Wikipedia.
And they can still hallucinate even if they cite an article.
Nah, the sources are mostly reddit. Wikipedia would be too god a source for LLMs
Your commentary on this meme makes no sense. No these were not brought to us by the same people
You won’t always have a calculator with you.
So far I have had a calculator on me 24/7 for the last 20 years.
To be honest not using a calculator is so I don’t have to wait a minute for you to get out your phone, find the app, type It in, realize you typed it wrong, and then finally type it right just to do 4x5.
Like do you HAVE to be able to do this in your head? No, but it’ll make everything else we have to do a LOT less fucking annoying if you put in any effort because otherwise every step of everything you are going to do will be go to this thing and ask it what this is.
And most of math is mostly “can you learn something you might not enjoy and then use it to do other shit that takes longer than 10 seconds?” Most things aren’t particularly individually important. Idc if you remember the area of a triangle when you’re 45 but if you can’t learn something as easy as multiple the two numbers and divide by two and be able to use that then you’re gonna have bigger issues when you have to do literally anything.
Counterpoint: making things less annoying for neurotypicals years later is less important than allowing people with learning disorders and other related disabilities to easier keep up with their peers and build familiarity with the tools like the ones they’re going to rely on for the rest of their lives.
To be all egocentric and stuff, I’ll use myself as an only tangentially related example:
Growing up with undiagnosed ADHD, I had horrendous fine motor control coupled with a profound difficulty with retaining focus on anything that saps my already chronically low dopamine levels, which made anything I have to write by hand much shorter and of much lesser quality than what I’m otherwise capable of.
Being part of the first group of students to be allowed to do our written exams on a (pre-vetted and not connected to the internet) computer helped me IMMENSELY without giving me any unfair advantage.
Not really a counterpoint, they’re talking about how a person can make their life easier by learning something. Your example is analogous.
You learned a different way to record the written word to make life easier. OP is talking about learning a different way to calculate numbers, to make life easier. They’re the same.
But what if you needed to do long division in the shower?
Mine is IP68 water resistant. It can handle the shower.
But what if you need to calculate the square root of pi while swimming to the bottom of the Mariana Trench?
Wikipedia still isn’t a reliable source, you have to locate the point of your argument and then find the listed source in the citations on the Wikipedia page.
Wikipedia is a great place to find sources, but not as a soruce.
This drove me mad growing up.
Encyclopedia (classroom copy, dated 1983): rarely updated or vetted by outside sources, perfect, basically the second word of god
Online encyclopedia: heresy and lies, you can’t trust it, do your own research
Me: “this seems fucking moronic”
I got around this rule in school by just using the sources that Wikipedia pages used, and got full marks for it, even though I did the exact thing that they said can’t be trusted. But the fact that if you publish an encyclopedia, it’s gospel, but if you print it out, it’s trash, just enrages me.
For stuff that really matters, absolutely. Get your basic overview, get your sources, and then find an actual expert.
For 95/100 daily searches? Wikipedia is fine. I don’t need peer review for “why is this city named what it’s named?”
Not even. A lot of the time the sources are laughable.
All the more reason to link to them directly.
As a 35 year veteran of “Internet arguments”
To be fair good LLMs do produce like ten diverse sources when permitted to search the web in response to a question
Faux Nooz, when we want you to think, we will tell you what you think.
MEIRL
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.
This honestly shouldn’t be surprising. Tech is often untrusted at first.
This caused the dot com bust and likely will fuel the AI bubble. New cool tech comes out and actually does cool stuff, people hate it, distrust it, don’t want to use it, meanwhile others think it’s the wave of the future and throw all their money at it.
And there’s one big problem with that, the last thing specifically… they throw their money at something new before a market is ready to trust and adopt it, and they do so in an unsustainable way. Unsustainable investments cause bubbles. This is money that can’t keep getting pumped into the tech, money that a lot of startups depend on.
People didn’t think you’d ever spend money on weird websites, trust credit cards to be entered online. So many groundbreaking ideas busted in the dot com bubble because they came too soon, not because they were bad ideas. WebVan was online groceries! Groundbreaking idea that was literally 30 years ahead of its time, and now they failed, but who does what they tried to do? Amazon, yes the little online marketplace for books Amazon, the quaint little site where you can buy books over http.
The market needed credit card safety measures, needed PayPal, stripe, fraud detection and management, needed new technologies to build consumer trust. Eventually, we started using the internet to buy shit and it worked out.
Wikipedia used to be untrusted. Anyone can put anything there! Now teachers rather see wikipedia than AI bullshit. Same phenomenon really. It’ll take a while before the market adopts the tech and consumers trust it. Eventually they will, but not yet.
Wikipedia used to be untrusted. Anyone can put anything there! Now teachers rather see wikipedia than AI bullshit.
As a longtime contributor to Wikipedia, the teachers were categorically correct. 2000s Wikipedia was, broadly, a trashfire where citations were mostly an afterthought and there really weren’t standards. Some of the most bare minimum standards that make Wikipedia actually functional weren’t codified until c. 2006 and took easily over a decade to really take hold culturally. And unfortunately, the popularization of Wikipedia made the late 2000s pretty bad too; whereas the early 2000s were a largely benign wild west, the late ones saw a flood of near-unfiltered garbage that’s still being cleaned up today.
I’d still say not to trust Wikipedia today and use its sources instead for anything even slightly consequential, but back in peak Wikipedia scare days, “use its sources” was very often a nonstarter.
There are no unbiased agenda-free sources. Deal with it, embrace the post-truth endless swamp of noise, ads, shills, bots and lies we call “sources” and spare us the “my lies lie less lies than your lies”. What ia this? Propaganda awareness amateur hour?
Nah.
Sure, disinformation and propaganda are worse than ever.
But the truth is still out there.
And it’s worth looking for.
Some sources are still better than others.
Sure, but good luck proving it.
