Wikipedia is not a valid academic source. However, it is a great source to lead into valid academic sources.
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 🤷🏻
I don’t know what sort of school, and I wasn’t coming after you, but educational attainment gets shot on a lot.
A significant proportion of our training is understanding information. Where it comes from, how useful it is, etc. Trust in information is vital to our existence.
That’s why you cite wikipedias sources and not wikipedia, teachers hate this one little trick.
That’s literally what the teachers wanted you to do
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.
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.
A good starting point maybe, but too many people also treat it as the end point, and as basically scripture in general
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.
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.
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.
I don’t think these are the same people, to be fair.
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.
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 cocaineFaux Nooz, when we want you to think, we will tell you what you think.
Breitbart is still around?
To be fair good LLMs do produce like ten diverse sources when permitted to search the web in response to a question
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?
Some sources are still better than others.
Sure, but good luck proving it.
