Brought to you by the same people that told you not to believe everything you read on the internet and now only read click bait headlines from Fox or Breitbart
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
... in the way that what you just typed is because dislexia exists and thus how dare you make written words? Sure.
But like yeah, big surprise when teaching kids you've gotta take everything into account. Dyscalculia is highly dependent on the kid and isn't something you can really just use a universal design for learning on as they do need more specific help. Even then, the general idea of the kid is gonna need to put in effort will apply, their effort might look different, but its still their effort.
Students struggling with dyscalculia generally have been putting extra effort to understand and keep up their entire life.
Brains and ability vary wildly, some people do not have an internal dialogue, some people do mot have the ability to visualize, some people do not understand metaphors, and some people never develop the ability to get accurate results when doing mental calculations. Sometimes, no amount of trying harder is effective, saying just try harder is both ableist and insulting.
A calculator is simply a tool that helps reduce the struggle and associated stress while improving accuracy. To deny that tool is not just ableist, but also cruel.
Again their effort might look different, which means yeah if that kid has dyscalculia and a calculator helps, then yeah that is no problem. However, dyscalulia is also just... weird. Its highly different in different students and iirc it does tend to go away eventually. Effort is important in that, but so is being understanding of how tiring dealing with it can be, so breaks in that increased effort for that student (be it calculator or other tools or just literal breaks) is important. And my point with the snark on writing being: Of course you can find issue with any general statement if you just decide to throw something hyper specific into it, yes of course there are always exceptions, but those can be dealt with on an individual as needed basis.
My problem is not with calculators. Its with refusing to put in effort to learning something because you've decided something could do that for you and so there is zero reason to learn anything at all. However, even for those who struggle, a calculator takes you out of the problem, often multiple times per problem, and makes re-entering that problem, remembering where you were, what you were doing, and how you were doing it harder for many with disabilities as well. The goal of effort in not using calculators is to keep you inside the problem, so you don't break your chain of thought and can more easily finish the entire problem. Obviously, that takes time as at the start it will actually take you out of the problem longer as you have to do those in your head, but as you get used to it that helps build the mental connections needed.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I've tried to create an account to correct misinformation, but it turned out a clique of editors had the article locked down so they'd just revert any changes to it, they then proceeded to dox me.
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.
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.
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
This honestly shouldn't be surprising. Tech is often untrusted at first.
This caused the dot com bust and likely will fuel the AI bubble. New cool tech comes out and actually does cool stuff, people hate it, distrust it, don't want to use it, meanwhile others think it's the wave of the future and throw all their money at it.
And there's one big problem with that, the last thing specifically.. they throw their money at something new before a market is ready to trust and adopt it, and they do so in an unsustainable way. Unsustainable investments cause bubbles. This is money that can't keep getting pumped into the tech, money that a lot of startups depend on.
People didn't think you'd ever spend money on weird websites, trust credit cards to be entered online. So many groundbreaking ideas busted in the dot com bubble because they came too soon, not because they were bad ideas. WebVan was online groceries! Groundbreaking idea that was literally 30 years ahead of its time, and now they failed, but who does what they tried to do? Amazon, yes the little online marketplace for books Amazon, the quaint little site where you can buy books over http.
The market needed credit card safety measures, needed PayPal, stripe, fraud detection and management, needed new technologies to build consumer trust. Eventually, we started using the internet to buy shit and it worked out.
Wikipedia used to be untrusted. Anyone can put anything there! Now teachers rather see wikipedia than AI bullshit. Same phenomenon really. It'll take a while before the market adopts the tech and consumers trust it. Eventually they will, but not yet.
Wikipedia used to be untrusted. Anyone can put anything there! Now teachers rather see wikipedia than AI bullshit.
As a longtime contributor to Wikipedia, the teachers were categorically correct. 2000s Wikipedia was, broadly, a trashfire where citations were mostly an afterthought and there really weren't standards. Some of the most bare minimum standards that make Wikipedia actually functional weren't codified until c. 2006 and took easily over a decade to really take hold culturally. And unfortunately, the popularization of Wikipedia made the late 2000s pretty bad too; whereas the early 2000s were a largely benign wild west, the late ones saw a flood of near-unfiltered garbage that's still being cleaned up today.
I'd still say not to trust Wikipedia today and use its sources instead for anything even slightly consequential, but back in peak Wikipedia scare days, "use its sources" was very often a nonstarter.
it's really difficult to find good sources. books? written by random dude. wikipedia? written by random dudes. school books? written by a government that wants you to be a docile worker. where do you get information from?
books are valid sources, if your looking at books written by opinions and on fiction thats on you. there are plenty of non-fiction books out there with valid research sources.
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?
92 Comments
Zorque@lemmy.world · 132 pts · 59d
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.
Viking_Hippie@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 47 pts · 59d
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.
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!
tyler@programming.dev · 5 pts · 59d
At the time teachers said that, it was not the “world’s premier encyclopedia” though.
Venator@lemmy.nz · 3 pts · 58d
Yes and no: teachers have been saying that for awhile, and some still say it...
a_non_monotonic_function@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 58d
Unusual straw man because that is what we do.
Viking_Hippie@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 1 pts · 58d
I was unaware of the change since it's been a long time since I was in school myself. My bad 🤷🏻
a_non_monotonic_function@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 57d
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.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today · 4 pts · 59d
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.
Dojan@pawb.social · 3 pts · 58d
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.
MML@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 58d
That's why you cite wikipedias sources and not wikipedia, teachers hate this one little trick.
BrainInABox@lemmy.ml · 3 pts · 58d
That's literally what the teachers wanted you to do
AmbitiousProcess@piefed.social · 99 pts · 59d
And not only that, they'll consider its response more reliable if they can see it cited sources... which are almost always Wikipedia.
CorrectAlias@piefed.blahaj.zone · 30 pts · 59d
And they can still hallucinate even if they cite an article.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today · 7 pts · 59d
they also combine junk, form opinion pieces+ blogs.
ChilledPeppers@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 10 pts · 59d
Nah, the sources are mostly reddit. Wikipedia would be too god a source for LLMs
idunnololz@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 59d
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.
crunchy@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 4 pts · 59d
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.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today · 0 pts · 59d
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.
ThePantser@sh.itjust.works · 47 pts · 59d
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.
TowardsTheFuture@lemmy.zip · 17 pts · 59d
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.
Viking_Hippie@lemmy.dbzer0.com · -1 pts · 59d
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.
Gorgritch_umie_killa@aussie.zone · 12 pts · 59d
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.
TowardsTheFuture@lemmy.zip · 3 pts · 59d
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)
Vandals_handle@lemmy.world · -1 pts · 59d
Dyscalculia exists. Does that fact that make your argument ableist?
TowardsTheFuture@lemmy.zip · 4 pts · 58d
... in the way that what you just typed is because dislexia exists and thus how dare you make written words? Sure.
But like yeah, big surprise when teaching kids you've gotta take everything into account. Dyscalculia is highly dependent on the kid and isn't something you can really just use a universal design for learning on as they do need more specific help. Even then, the general idea of the kid is gonna need to put in effort will apply, their effort might look different, but its still their effort.
Vandals_handle@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 16d
No, not my meaning at all.
Students struggling with dyscalculia generally have been putting extra effort to understand and keep up their entire life.
Brains and ability vary wildly, some people do not have an internal dialogue, some people do mot have the ability to visualize, some people do not understand metaphors, and some people never develop the ability to get accurate results when doing mental calculations. Sometimes, no amount of trying harder is effective, saying just try harder is both ableist and insulting.
A calculator is simply a tool that helps reduce the struggle and associated stress while improving accuracy. To deny that tool is not just ableist, but also cruel.
TowardsTheFuture@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 16d
Again their effort might look different, which means yeah if that kid has dyscalculia and a calculator helps, then yeah that is no problem. However, dyscalulia is also just... weird. Its highly different in different students and iirc it does tend to go away eventually. Effort is important in that, but so is being understanding of how tiring dealing with it can be, so breaks in that increased effort for that student (be it calculator or other tools or just literal breaks) is important. And my point with the snark on writing being: Of course you can find issue with any general statement if you just decide to throw something hyper specific into it, yes of course there are always exceptions, but those can be dealt with on an individual as needed basis.
My problem is not with calculators. Its with refusing to put in effort to learning something because you've decided something could do that for you and so there is zero reason to learn anything at all. However, even for those who struggle, a calculator takes you out of the problem, often multiple times per problem, and makes re-entering that problem, remembering where you were, what you were doing, and how you were doing it harder for many with disabilities as well. The goal of effort in not using calculators is to keep you inside the problem, so you don't break your chain of thought and can more easily finish the entire problem. Obviously, that takes time as at the start it will actually take you out of the problem longer as you have to do those in your head, but as you get used to it that helps build the mental connections needed.
NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io · 5 pts · 59d
But what if you needed to do long division in the shower?
popekingjoe@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 59d
Mine is IP68 water resistant. It can handle the shower.
Emerald@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 59d
Not when your fingees are all wet trying to touch the screen
popekingjoe@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 59d
Skill issue.
Axolotl_cpp@feddit.it · 1 pts · 59d
I can use my phone even with wet fingers and with a screen protector
Viking_Hippie@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 3 pts · 59d
But what if you need to calculate the square root of pi while swimming to the bottom of the Mariana Trench?
FiniteBanjo@feddit.online · 30 pts · 59d
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.
ilinamorato@lemmy.world · 39 pts · 59d
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?"
wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world · 13 pts · 59d
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.
saltesc@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 59d
Not even. A lot of the time the sources are laughable.
FiniteBanjo@feddit.online · 6 pts · 59d
All the more reason to link to them directly.
Lushed_Lungfish@lemmy.ca · 28 pts · 58d
Wikipedia is not a valid academic source. However, it is a great source to lead into valid academic sources.
IAMgROOT@lemmy.wtf · 8 pts · 58d
its good for like a small summary
Lushed_Lungfish@lemmy.ca · 4 pts · 58d
That's exactly it! Almost like reading an abstract to a paper.
gandalf_der_12te@feddit.org · 7 pts · 58d
this is called an index btw
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today · 0 pts · 58d
dogs0n@sh.itjust.works · 23 pts · 59d
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 ;(
Ephera@lemmy.ml · 13 pts · 59d
It just isn't easy at all. If someone editorializes a Wikipedia article, they can:
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.
MousePotatoDoesStuff@piefed.social · 10 pts · 59d
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.
trxxruraxvr@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 59d
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
MousePotatoDoesStuff@piefed.social · 1 pts · 58d
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...
Bloomcole@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 59d
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.
yakko@feddit.uk · 5 pts · 59d
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.
Bloomcole@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 59d
https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2026-01-14/london-pr-firm-rewrites-wikipedia-for-governments-and-billionaires
Plenty of examples like this.
Wikipedia is manipulated garbage on anything with political relevance.
IDK why people keep defending it.
BrainInABox@lemmy.ml · 1 pts · 58d
I've tried to create an account to correct misinformation, but it turned out a clique of editors had the article locked down so they'd just revert any changes to it, they then proceeded to dox me.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today · 1 pts · 59d
i saw that on certain entries of wikipedia. around certain biological topics, or stem topics.
homes@piefed.world · 18 pts · 59d
As a 35 year veteran of “Internet arguments”
Kaligalis@lemmy.world · 12 pts · 58d
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.
Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world · 12 pts · 59d
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.
chiliedogg@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 59d
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.
ZkhqrD5o@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 58d
Doi.org?
BrainInABox@lemmy.ml · 1 pts · 58d
A good starting point maybe, but too many people also treat it as the end point, and as basically scripture in general
SeeMarkFly@lemmy.ml · 10 pts · 59d
Faux Nooz, when we want you to think, we will tell you what you think.
nullspace@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 58d
Hearing "don't talk to strangers online" from people who post their SSN on Facebook.
ulterno@programming.dev · 8 pts · 58d
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".
darthsundhaft@piefed.social · 8 pts · 59d
MEIRL
StarryPhoenix97@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 59d
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.
abbadon420@sh.itjust.works · 7 pts · 59d
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 cocaineA_Chilean_Cyborg@feddit.cl · 4 pts · 57d
Honestly, wikipedia is one of the greatest things to ever exists, and possibly the single best thing that internet has done for civilization.
CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de · 4 pts · 58d
I don’t think these are the same people, to be fair.
JackbyDev@programming.dev · 1 pts · 58d
True, but the post also never says they are.
protist@retrofed.com · 4 pts · 59d
Your commentary on this meme makes no sense. No these were not brought to us by the same people
Erna_muse@lemmy.zip · 3 pts · 59d
Yes feedback from humans can be incoherent.
MathiasTCK@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 59d
In aggregate
terranoid@lemmy.cafe · 2 pts · 59d
This honestly shouldn't be surprising. Tech is often untrusted at first.
This caused the dot com bust and likely will fuel the AI bubble. New cool tech comes out and actually does cool stuff, people hate it, distrust it, don't want to use it, meanwhile others think it's the wave of the future and throw all their money at it.
And there's one big problem with that, the last thing specifically.. they throw their money at something new before a market is ready to trust and adopt it, and they do so in an unsustainable way. Unsustainable investments cause bubbles. This is money that can't keep getting pumped into the tech, money that a lot of startups depend on.
People didn't think you'd ever spend money on weird websites, trust credit cards to be entered online. So many groundbreaking ideas busted in the dot com bubble because they came too soon, not because they were bad ideas. WebVan was online groceries! Groundbreaking idea that was literally 30 years ahead of its time, and now they failed, but who does what they tried to do? Amazon, yes the little online marketplace for books Amazon, the quaint little site where you can buy books over http.
The market needed credit card safety measures, needed PayPal, stripe, fraud detection and management, needed new technologies to build consumer trust. Eventually, we started using the internet to buy shit and it worked out.
Wikipedia used to be untrusted. Anyone can put anything there! Now teachers rather see wikipedia than AI bullshit. Same phenomenon really. It'll take a while before the market adopts the tech and consumers trust it. Eventually they will, but not yet.
TheTechnician27@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 59d
As a longtime contributor to Wikipedia, the teachers were categorically correct. 2000s Wikipedia was, broadly, a trashfire where citations were mostly an afterthought and there really weren't standards. Some of the most bare minimum standards that make Wikipedia actually functional weren't codified until c. 2006 and took easily over a decade to really take hold culturally. And unfortunately, the popularization of Wikipedia made the late 2000s pretty bad too; whereas the early 2000s were a largely benign wild west, the late ones saw a flood of near-unfiltered garbage that's still being cleaned up today.
I'd still say not to trust Wikipedia today and use its sources instead for anything even slightly consequential, but back in peak Wikipedia scare days, "use its sources" was very often a nonstarter.
omodasonya3@lemmy.zip · 2 pts · 59d
Hahaha
omodasonya2@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 57d
👍
omodasonya2@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 41d
.
ParlimentOfDoom@piefed.zip · 2 pts · 59d
All encyclopedias are bad sources. Be they wiki or not. They are not in depth enough on a topic to be useful in a paper.
Viking_Hippie@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 4 pts · 59d
That's why you check the sources cited by the encyclopedias, which tend to be more in depth and credible than the encyclopedia entries themselves.
It's not a "encyclopedia bad" problem as much as a lack of going just one layer deeper to get to the data itself.
NM_Gringo@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 58d
Breitbart is still around?
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today · 1 pts · 59d
if you are writing essays, or papers, yea you will hear this.
gandalf_der_12te@feddit.org · -5 pts · 58d
as if a book written by any random dude would be any better source
gandalf_der_12te@feddit.org · 3 pts · 58d
it's really difficult to find good sources. books? written by random dude. wikipedia? written by random dudes. school books? written by a government that wants you to be a docile worker. where do you get information from?
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today · 0 pts · 58d
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today · 1 pts · 58d
books are valid sources, if your looking at books written by opinions and on fiction thats on you. there are plenty of non-fiction books out there with valid research sources.
ryannathans@aussie.zone · -7 pts · 59d
To be fair good LLMs do produce like ten diverse sources when permitted to search the web in response to a question
Pudutr0n@lemmy.world · -22 pts · 59d
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?
otter@lemmy.ca · 15 pts · 59d
Some sources are still better than others.
Pudutr0n@lemmy.world · -11 pts · 59d
Sure, but good luck proving it.
TheTechnician27@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 59d
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuDqNLgVHv8
MousePotatoDoesStuff@piefed.social · 5 pts · 59d
Nah.
Sure, disinformation and propaganda are worse than ever.
But the truth is still out there.
And it's worth looking for.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today · 0 pts · 59d
maybe you are looking at only Opinion based sources.
BrainInABox@lemmy.ml · 1 pts · 58d
Yeah? Which completely unbiased sources are you recommending?