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Honestly, wikipedia is one of the greatest things to ever exists, and possibly the single best thing that internet has done for civilization.
this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2026
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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.
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.
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 🤷🏻
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...
That's why you cite wikipedias sources and not wikipedia, teachers hate this one little trick.
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.
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".
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.
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.
they also combine junk, form opinion pieces+ blogs.
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.
Nah, the sources are mostly reddit. Wikipedia would be too god a source for LLMs
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.
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I don’t think these are the same people, to be fair.
True, but the post also never says they are.
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.
Doi.org?
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.
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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 ;(
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.
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 ~~charm~~ raccoon on cocaine
As a 35 year veteran of “Internet arguments”
Breitbart is still around?
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