No, this isn’t a case of different people having different opinions about different ways to obtain information during different times. More often than not, I find that the SAME people who act like Wikipedia is the most unreliable thing on Earth unironically trust the FIRST Google Search result they see, as well as everything they’ve ever seen in ChatGPT.
Need I remind you that Google is LITERALLY designed to cater to your biases? And it’s gotten WORSE because the first result you see is NOW AI-Generated. Also, Google is not a source! And AI Chatbots cite THEMSELVES as sources!
Wikipedia on the other hand is curated by REAL VOLUNTEER HUMANS who strive to be accurate as possible. I’m aware that Wikipedia is no stranger to agendas or vandalism, but these editors are quick and dedicated to be as accurate as possible. So much so that whenever a building is on fire, they LITERALLY label it as “Status: Burning”. Not burned… BURNING! Meanwhile, Google tells you to put glue on your pizza…
And yes, I know that Wikipedia is not a source. Like Google, Wikipedia is a GATEWAY to sources, and not a source in and of itself. But at the very least, Wikipedia DOESN’T try to give you what you will like, because you’ll get what is (most likely) the truth instead, backed up by several CREDIBLE sources that are constantly fact-checked by volunteer humans.
So why do people hate Wikipedia so much? And why do these SAME PEOPLE cite Google and ChatGPT as a source?
Wikipedia: it’s an encyclopedia. Fine for a general overview of a topic, but you need to follow it to primary sources if you want to make an authoritative argument.
Google: it’s got an AI summary at the top and a bunch of SEO’d results on the first pages.
LLMs: really good at translating a lot of content down into something that’s easy to read. Not necessarily easy to understand, not necessarily accurate, not citing it’s sources accurately, but easy to read.
So: where do people’s attitudes come from towards them?
We now have 25 years of Wikipedia. That means that for 25 years, anyone in school from K through university has had it drilled i to them “you can’t use Wikipedia as a primary source!” Which is often interpreted by kids (now adults) as “don’t trust Wikipedia!”
Google has been around for 28 years. When it started, the other search engines always missed things, had a bunch of ads, and were slow. Google was this fast clean interface that could instantly find whatever you were looking for on the world wide web, and the exact human created content you wanted would almost always be featured on the first page of results. People who grew up with that might be slow to catch on to the fact that Google today doesn’t do that. So they trust the results and assume the information they’re looking for must be there somewhere on the first page.
LLMs are new. They hold the promise of early Google in that they crawled all the source material for you and present a summary so you don’t even have to decide which link has the right answer. They haven’t been around long enough for a generation to be trained to distrust the messages they provide.