I don’t think these are the same people, to be fair.
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
Hearing “don’t talk to strangers online” from people who post their SSN on Facebook.
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”.
Breitbart is still around?
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.
Yes feedback from humans can be incoherent.
In aggregate
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.
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.
That’s why you cite wikipedias sources and not wikipedia, teachers hate this one little trick.
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.
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.
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 cocaineAnd not only that, they’ll consider its response more reliable if they can see it cited sources… which are almost always Wikipedia.
You are lucky if you can get it to even cite wikipedia. I found a lot of the time I can’t even find the “facts” it pulls from the source it cites at all.
And they can still hallucinate even if they cite an article.
they also combine junk, form opinion pieces+ blogs.
People love confident voices that will do all the thinking for them. I’m really into weight training and fitness, and the amount of times I see someone share a clip from a “science-based” fitness influencer and say something like “I didn’t check the sources but they cite all these studies” is wild.
and once I saw a comment on reddit that replied to another comment with a Google AI overview screenshot, and said “AI said its source is [site] so I believe it.” The summary had a clickable link to the source in the text and they couldn’t even do that.
Nah, the sources are mostly reddit. Wikipedia would be too god a source for LLMs
even if the cited sources is not enough info, it encourages you too search for more updated articles sources, thats what i do with wiki pages.
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.
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.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…
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 saw that on certain entries of wikipedia. around certain biological topics, or stem topics.
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.
No you are talking about using a tool to help/supplement your learning. That is good.
I am responding to people saying they should never learn anything in the first place because a calculator could do it for them.
There ARE some things (like in stats) that you will just use a calculator for because it’s a HUGE waste of time otherwise (like Standard Deviation especially), but refusing to put in effort on things like multiplication, which will get used like 5 times in one problem, means you are taking yourself out of the problem 5 different times to use something else. For the ADHD kid there’s no way your focus is staying on that problem if you have to go elsewhere (especially to a phone which has infinite distractions) 5 different times.
Then when we need to use the actual concept to do something else, like factoring, those who actually learned and know the patterns will be able to solve the puzzle almost instantly. What multiplies to 64 and adds to 16 SHOULD be an easy 8 and 8, but on a calculator you’re doing 64/1=64 1+64≠16, 64/2=32 2+32≠16, 64/3 has a decimal so no, 64/4=16 4+16≠16, etc until you find the answer that works. (Which is fine, if you need to, and generally how I will START teaching it, but again the reason for doing it using the brain is so you learn those patterns and can then not have to remove yourself from the problem but actively engage in the problem by trying to use the patterns or things you’ve learned)
Dyscalculia exists. Does that fact that make your argument ableist?
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.
Not when your fingees are all wet trying to touch the screen
I can use my phone even with wet fingers and with a screen protector
Skill issue.
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.
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?”
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.
Not even. A lot of the time the sources are laughable.
All the more reason to link to them directly.
if you are writing essays, or papers, yea you will hear this.
