Why do people get mad at you for using Wikipedia, but treat Google and AI chatbots like they're gospel?

In my opinion, these people aren’t thinking deeply. They had it hammered to them in school that wikipedia isn’t a valid source and so they’ve internalized that, but nobody properly explained to them that AI isn’t a valid source

You know some strange people.

I really want to know more about these specific people you’ve run into this with, particularly age, education level, and maybe political affliations (curious if it runs the gamut or not).

For my part, Wikipedia’s usually a good starting point ‘source’, like an encyclopedia would be. But the actual sources referenced by a given article, carefully evaluated, are much better. A Google Search (once you scroll past the AI summary) can also yield good sources. I don’t bother with LLMs at all, too many issues with accuracy.

End of the day, these are all signposts to actual sources, not sources themselves. What you find through any of them need to be evaluated by where they are getting their information. It also depends on the topic and level of discussion. I’m personally OK with quoting Wikipedia about a general piece of trivia, but if I’m trying to make a serious argument about something it’d be silly to rely on it if I don’t know how strong the source behind it is. Could be well-researched and rock solid, could be bullshit with a flimsy reference no one’s caught yet.

Very few do. There’s your answer

I know not a single person who hates Wikipedia.

You wanna hear ironic? My dad got me to install GrapheneOS on his Pixel because google was trying to get him to activate the AI. Now dad is using the google search. I explained its all AI junk “but its easy” is his reply.

This isn’t really a question this is more like a rant with a question mark

Years of “Wikipedia is not a source” without critically thinking about what that means or when to apply it. The same people who will say that will ignore that it was meant for research papers, but somehow forgot what makes sources credible. It’s really a suffering from success thing. The phrase was just said so often it became part of people’s thoughts. Sort of like the “five dollar footlong” thing with Subway.

I have literally never encountered anyone who got mad at me for using Wikipedia. There are certain people who will still repeat what they learnt about it in school 20 years ago when they were told “don’t use Wikipedia as a source” and then they stopped listening. But even those people see the benefits.

I had a teacher forbidding Wikipedia as a study source and a class formed by over 80 students quietly aquiesced. It took one question of why wasn’t Wikipedia a valid source for general context to help in forming a broad stroke idea on a subject to nearly make the teacher go into a fit on how it was inacurate and unproperly revised. Wich was not the point.

First… are the people bringing this up really into social media? Or conservative, by chance?

There’s three potentially confused things:

• Oldschool “Wikipedia isn’t a primary source.” I learned this in middle school. It’s technically true.

• There’s slightly newer accusations of a liberal Wikipedia bias. Hence the attempt to create Conservapedia. There’s a tiny nugget of truth, perhaps, but not to the outrageous extent suggested.

• THEN there are modern attempts to discredit Wikipedia as a whole. Mind my tinfoil hat, but I’d argue it’s largely algorithmic and Big Tech driven, as it’s a high profile information source they cannot control, a place where things are documented they don’t necessarily want in the limelight.

There’s some overlap too, like Musk’s motivations, rants, and actions falling into category 2 and 3. Or some hijacking of point 1.

One point 1, the academics have gone real quiet about that in the face of the modern information apocalypse. It’s still true, but it’s like complaining about rain while drowning in a tsunami. The pot-stirrers lost point 2.

…And Big Tech is gonna win on point 3.

They control everyone’s information bubble now. They can make people distrust Wikipedia, as you have seen with your own eyes.

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.

Nonsense, sorry. The most people I know like Wikipedia, and distrust or even hate anything even remotely related to LLM/“AI” valuing their own precious priceless lifetime.
And, if by “Google” you mean the “Google Search”, then may I ask, how is it wrong to use a great search to try finding the actually accountable information?

There are options to hide the “AI-Generated”:
- https://udm14.com/;
- Hide Google AI Overviews extension;
- How do I disable all AI features in Chrome?;
- https://justthebrowser.com/;

Yet, wait… sources you say? Let’s send a prompt to the dead machine:

Wikipedia is good for getting a good overview of a topic, but like any other source, should not be used alone. Wikipedia by itself is bad, an article by itself isn’t good, even the most accurate source should never be used alone. Always refer to multiple sources. Don’t trust one Google result, use many. Ideally don’t only use Google results, use other engines too (metasearch engines like SearXNG instances are great for this). Use Wikipedia, Britannica, or whatever other wiki in combination with each other. Feed into multiple news sources, not just one or two.

I don’t think many people are trusting the first Google result while also disliking Wikipedia, since for many topics, Wikipedia is the first result you see!

As for LLMs, it’s a case of convenience and laziness. They summarise information to a readable format (often leaving out important details) that are easily digestible (but often lacking in context) compared to some of the longer Wikipedia entries (or most other sources in general)