BeepAt 25, Wikipedia faces a double threat: the rise of AI and the decline of local media— Human visitors declined in 2025, while AI crawlers are on the rise
brucethemoose“Dismissing Wikipedia” is my political litmus test.
To be clear, it’s never been a reliable source; we learned that in middle school. You take everything written on it with a grain of salt.
…But it’s still an oasis in a desert.
When some of my family started questioning its utility because of its “liberal bias,” like post-grad-educated family saying this as Fox News blares in the background, I knew things had gotten bad.
I haven’t seen any extreme left question it IRL, but I’m afraid that’s coming too, with how tankies a some terminally online bits of Reddit are skeptical of it.
RobotToasterI used to be an editor on there so have a lot of mixed feelings about it, there’s a lot of bullshit that goes on.
It’s good for hard sciences, but most articles on “soft” subjects like history do have a pro western liberal capitalist bias. Although the amount of bias usually depends on what senior editor decided he owns the article, despite “owning” articles being against the Wikipedia rules.
i wouldnt say good on non-phyiscs stem, often times its outdated and never fixed for years.
iktTo be clear, it’s never been a reliable source; we learned that in middle school. You take everything written on it with a grain of salt.
My understanding is if you’re not sure use the little numbers next to the quotes that you’re not sure about
But the vast majority of people seem to think the little numbers are just for show or something
This is what frustrates me. Wikipedia is one of the last places where sources are cited. I understand that sometimes the sources are not that great, but at least the claim comes with a source to verify. That’s a far cry from the nonsense spewed on say facebook.
Or Lemmy.
Information hygiene in the news subs is terrible, at least here on .world.
To be clear, it’s never been a reliable source; we learned that in middle school.
Someone must have skipped middle school when you didn’t learn what “citations” are.
We certainly did. We learned Chicago/APA style, types of sources, and how to make citations in reports.
And that Wikipedia is not appropriate as a source to cite.
And that Wikipedia is not appropriate as a source to cite.
That’s why you use Wikipedia as means of sourcing the citations. You look up an article, learn about it through Wiki, then further educate yourself on the topic through the citations.
Exactly!
Users generally don’t check citations though; they read and make a judgement. This is why Wikipedia, with all its flaws, is still such a valuable resource to me, as at least it’s built on citations.
Yeah. Funny how we have those guardrails for wikipedia, yet people still take ais as factual.
Google tried to do something similar with thier AI summaries, but every time I’ve looked at its “citations” they’ve said nothing that it said they did, or the exact opposite…
often time the “source” googles AI is from non-reputable sources like a block or someones opinion on a site.
Human brains just aren’t wired for citations. Especially outside academia I guess.
I think it would help if people were more “LLM literate” though, eg they took a lesson in school on how they work at a low level. Folks would be horrified they ever put so much trust in them.
asudox