14 hours
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- 2 hours
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.
- 6 hours
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 cocaine - Zorque@lemmy.worldEnglish11 hours
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.
- 6 hours
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.
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!
- 7 hours
At the time teachers said that, it was not the “world’s premier encyclopedia” though.
- 13 hours
And not only that, they’ll consider its response more reliable if they can see it cited sources… which are almost always Wikipedia.
- 3 hours
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.comEnglish2 hours
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.
- 9 hours
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
- 6 hours
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.
- 11 hours
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 ;(
- 9 hours
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.
- 6 hours
i saw that on certain entries of wikipedia. around certain biological topics, or stem topics.
- 9 hours
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.
- 2 hours
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. - 6 hours
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
- 9 hours
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.
- 2 hours
Plenty of examples like this.
Wikipedia is manipulated garbage on anything with political relevance.
IDK why people keep defending it.
- ThePantser@sh.itjust.worksEnglish13 hours
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.zipEnglish11 hours
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.
- TowardsTheFuture@lemmy.zipEnglish2 minutes
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)
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.
But what if you need to calculate the square root of pi while swimming to the bottom of the Mariana Trench?
13 hoursWikipedia 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.
- 12 hours
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.
- protist@retrofed.comEnglish10 hours
Your commentary on this meme makes no sense. No these were not brought to us by the same people
Faux Nooz, when we want you to think, we will tell you what you think.
- ParlimentOfDoom@piefed.zipEnglish12 hours
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.
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.
- terranoid@lemmy.cafeEnglish13 hours
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.
