Wikipedia has been dealing with AI and bots since someone made a 2000 census article writer in 2003. Hopefully they are resistant to the rise of Chatbots
my understanding from an English professor is less about its reliability of information, but more its reliability regarding citing sources. you can’t cite something that consistently changes
That might be one reason why some warned against using it, but I definitely had teachers in middle school and high school that explicitly said not to use it because it could be changed by anyone including people who could be wrong or lying.
The schools should have used wikipedia as an opportunity to teach media literacy. You don’t use wiki as your source, you go to the cited sources and investigate those. Use the cited sources a in your school reports.
And the ability for folks to change it and provide inaccurate sources. It’s peer reviewed for the most part and academia wants officially peer reviewed sources.
It’s also just often completely inaccurate. The standards it uses to cite works make them pretty much useless: any good information on Wikipedia is on there by accident.
That is wildly inaccurate and you know it. There are like 6.5 million articles on Wikipedia and the majority (since people are pedantic, we’ll say 50.1%) are well cited and accurate
Anything controversial on any topic especially current events are extremely biased and strictly controlled by editors.
There are countless examples across the site. I won’t mention any because someone will say “that’s not controversial” because they share the same bias as the editor that “owns” the page.
I was always told not to quote Wikipedia. They told everyone this because people would constantly quote Wikipedia and then someone would edit it so that the paragraph was now different. It was a right pain even if the information was correct.
What you do is you check Wikipedia’s sources and then quote those sources. Hopefully they’re quoting academic papers and not blog posts because otherwise you’re just kicking the cam down the road.
Quote the sources or the source’s sources of Wikipedia. You would not believe how bullet proof this is against plagiarism if you do your citations correctly.
I hated in high school that teachers always said the internet isn’t a good source.
In college I finally realized that websites were poor sources because they change and move, whereas a published book, edition, and page number won’t change. But that doesn’t mean you can’t use the Internet to find a good source - you just need to cite the source itself and not the site.
Everything I’ve published is published digitally, but the journals still have editions and page numbers. When someone cites my work, they need to cite that information - not the website that may change names or shut down.
So now I’m mostly mad that teachers don’t explain why websites shouldn’t be cited. It makes good sense in that context.
There’s still good and plenty fuckery that can happen with citing books, though. Depending on the obscurity of the book, whether or not it’s out of print, or just has been outright destroyed, it might be really hard to access a copy, and check the source, especially if someone doesn’t have access to the internet archive or library genesis, i.e. digital scans of said book. There are reprints and new editions, sometimes not noted by the author of the citation (the author might have no way of knowing, depends), which can change or remove quoted passages. The internet also contains the ability to mass copy anything you want, and cite that copy, like what the internet archive does with the wayback machine, so if you have a citation of a webpage it’s probably a good idea to copy that in time and then spread it around anyways just for the sake of posterity and accessibility, especially if it’s obscure or is likely to be changed or removed. Same as you might for a book, except much easier, it’s much harder to copy a whole book in context and spread that around compared to a webpage.
I think it definitely was a huge breakdown in academic’s to adapt to new technology, and it is at the core of a lot of the societal problems we face today. Of course, a lot of the reasons for this were by design at the hands of a few corporate actors, and they share a lot of culpability.
There are philosophical underpinnings too - a lot of academics are still caught up on modernism (which would rightfully distrust new internet sources in favor of legacy sources of proven idealistic knowledge) vs. Postmodernism, which would provide a framework to recognize the truth in these systems.
One thing to keep in mind is that computers and the internet are still extremely new, and we are still figuring them out. It has only been a decade and a half where everyone has a general purpose, internet connected computer in their pocket.
Not fully trust, but I trust it more than some listicles and low-quality SEO-boost sites.
When I want to learn something new, I often come to Wikipedia, or Britannica, or YouTube to get to know the subject. And generally, they will recommend me with some valuable reference to dig deeper.
Everyone’s all over the place on this. There are multiple levels of fact-checking, moderation, contributions, etc. incorpated into Wikipedia. Which is the entire point. Having a decentralized encyclopedia where people collaborate, fact check, curate, and contribute is the design goal. Wikipedia is the exact solution for keeping someone from creating a ministry of truth.
My problem with wikipedia is that all the information is being stored in the same website. Since it appears first when you search for anything, it becomes the only way to fact check things for people. Since most won’t scroll past wikipedia and just trust it, the information posted there becomes the objective truth. If someone in control of the site wishes to make modifications, and does them properly, he can alter truth.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m just a paranoid guy on the Internet, I do believe that wikipedia is doing a lot of good. It’s, as you said, a healthy and complete hub of information online. Like the library of Alexandria. It just scares me that there is only one hub like this. There should be equally big libraries of information, to allow contrast.
Eh, it’s got no commercial control and is generally ran democratically. Probably a King Charles III situation where it’s a good system for now and the foreseeable future but not something that might be a good idea long term
Wikipedia was useful for me as a grad student because I could look up a topic and there would be a whole lot of citations I could follow. I never used them as a source, but rather as a curated forum of information.
I’ve been doing exactly the same thing with LLMs recently.
"Tell me about "
“What are the big problems their industry is trying to solve?”
“Who are their biggest competitors?”
“What’s the worst/best thing about them?”
Questions like that often give me a great framework to look up specific questions, find relevant articles and get a handle on the sources that are likely to be useful.
Very careful. I never use anything from them directly. I just use them to give me a starting point on what to look for.
For example, if the AI tells me that some company is know for their low latency database, I’ll look around for primary sources on the latency of the database compared to other vendors. I’ll also look for evidence to the contrary.
You’d be impressed by how good I was at finding PDFs of original articles on random sites. Turns out that when you go to grad school in the third world and don’t have access to the journals in the same way as you are accustomed, you learn how to do it for yourself.
This was back in 2010-ish. Don’t know if it works the same way now, there are probably better ways to go about it. Not sure if sci-hub existed at that time. Will remember that going forward.
Wikipedia is like our dear friend. It gives us general information, good advice, and direction in life, but never gets too deeply in it. The choice is ours to make.
The people who tell you not to trust Wikipedia aren’t saying that you shouldn’t use it at all. They’re telling you not to stop there. That’s exactly what they told us about encylopedias too.
If you’re researching a new topic, Wikipedia is a great place for an initial overview. If you actually care about facts, you should double check claims independently. That means following their sources until you get to primary sources. If you’ve ever done this exercise it becomes obvious why you shouldn’t trust Wikipedia. Some sources are dead links, some are not publicly accessible and many aren’t primary sources. In egregious cases the “sources” are just opinion pieces.
Just look in this thread. I’m not talking about writing college papers. I’m talking about the boomers saying you can’t trust anything you read on the internet.
For example there were pages that would state that “Scholars agree that the gospel of ____ was not written by _____ but was written by an anonymous author” when the original sources never discredited the original claim of authorship, but were essentially “I can’t be sure who wrote it”, never actually saying/discrediting that it wasn’t written by said evangelist.
I think the anonymous perspective belongs there, but when the original source says “I cannot be sure who wrote it” then that’s not saying it wasn’t written by them.
Anecdotal, but I’ve never had a teacher tell me why Wikipedia wasn’t a good source. Similarly, I’ve never had a teacher educate students on how to properly use resources like Wikipedia as a starting point for sources. All my peers and I heard was “Wikipedia is bad, never use it, it’s not reliable, don’t trust anything from it.”
I wish I had been taught why and how earlier, but I had to learn why and how myself.
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