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!

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.

And they can still hallucinate even if they cite an article.

Nah, the sources are mostly reddit. Wikipedia would be too god a source for LLMs

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.

But what if you needed to do long division in the shower?

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.

its good for like a small summary

to lead into valid academic sources.

this is called an index btw

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.

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.