Wikipedia started out as being extremely unreliable. So did Lycos, AltaVista, Yahoo, etc. Those things have matured over the 30+ years they’ve been around, but they didn’t start that way. The ability to research, confirm, and corroborate is an important part of life. It always has been and always will be.
Wikipedia didn’t start out hallucinating. Also unlike LLMs, Wikipedia isn’t being marketed as being capable of doing things it can’t do.
It’s not that good of a comparison.
Wikipedia started out as being extremely unreliable. So did Lycos, AltaVista, Yahoo, etc. Those things have matured over the 30+ years they’ve been around, but they didn’t start that way. The ability to research, confirm, and corroborate is an important part of life. It always has been and always will be.
Wikipedia did start having prank edits early on (and later malicious ones).
Didn’t Stephen Colbert talk his fans into keeping certain content on a specific Wikipedia article at some point?
Even then, Colbert didn’t realize the admins would just lock it.
The first thing you learn when using Wikipedia is to use the sources and control F