Honestly I think it comes from a misunderstanding regarding secondary sources vs primary ones. Wikipedia, as well as encyclopedias and textbooks, are secondary sources. It’s not good practice to cite secondary sources without primary ones, but a lot of people (namely, teachers) don’t grasp why which leads these sources to get classified as bad.
That, plus Wikipedia is accessible without the usual gatekeeping and money behind what textbooks and encyclopedias have, which adds to the sources “credibility.” Money means marketing, including constant email campaigns targeting people like me trying to validate whatever textbook they’re peddling. (And in case you wonder if they’re evil, they sometimes offer kickbacks to adopt their expensive textbooks for my university classes).
Fedi users already get that, though, as that’s a common problem FOSS usually has. Point is, wiki lives in a weird place because no, you shouldn’t cite it just like you shouldn’t cite textbooks, but yes, it’s perfectly valid so long as you check those sources. And, speaking from experience, some students really don’t understand as I see citations for so much worse.
I’m on the fence about not citting primary sources. And especially in the sciences, where it’s actually the slow, boring, long process of many publications and many datat sets coming together to conclude something 'in the aggregate '. Like I’ll usually go to a review or meta analysis paper as a citation, because it’s combining and comparing the results across studies.
And really, a living document like Wikipedia is more like that kind of review or meta analysis paper.
I’m not disagreeing that were taught to go for primary sources, but in some ways, they’re actually less reliable than secondary sources if those secondary sources are taking in a a broader collection of primary sources, which something like Wikipedia is.
Actually, are you sure a meta analysis isn’t a primary source? Having worked on one in the past, you’re often having to reanalyze data and the finished product is quite unique.
Even “structured literature reviews” I think count as primary sources, since the author adds to the literature their own perspective and they are generally peer reviewed.
That said, when you cite things professionally, you will often have hundreds of sources. Most researchers, legal scholars, etc., just keep a database of their citations for easy callback. It’s important because at the upper levels, different authors might speak of the same objective findings in two different ways and with two different frameworks, so the aggregate loses that.
It’s not something non-professionals necessarily need to care about, but you do want to train undergraduates on that proper methods so they’re ready if and when they go to graduate school.
I agree that in general meta analysis stands apart, but I brought it up because it’s so often coupled with a deep review of material like a review article would hold. It’s also totally valid to cite a review article as a primary source, but I tend not to prefer this in my writing. My reasons for this are two fold, first, one of my memories was a curmudgeon who insisted on going all the way back through any chain if claims and citations to find, originally source, and reevaluate each claim. And, in doing so, regularly found irregularities and misattributed statements or just straight up mysteries of where the hell someone got something from. Its a pita, but it pays to be detail oriented when evaluating claims a domain has just accepted as table stakes.
This litterally happened to me recently where I was trying to figure out how this, fairly well known author had determined the functional form they were fitting to a curve. And like, three or four citations deep and a coffee with a colleague of theirs later, it turns out “they just made that shit up”.
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Oh, snap, it is so on!
Very clear.
Secondary examples include:
Dictionaries, Encyclopedias (also considered tertiary);
Tertiary examples include:
Dictionaries and Encyclopedias (also considered secondary);
They do have a handy table later though:
| Primary | diaries - world war |
| Secondary | biography - world war |
| Tertiary | encyclopedia - world war |
Wasn’t arguing I just posted the link to source from the wiki article like my teachers would have wanted 😜
Back when I was in school they outright censored Wikipedia. Fuck that shit
Same here, but everyone used it by…just siting the sources at the bottom of the page. It was honestly the dumbest logic ever. Professors telling you, you can’t use Wikipedia because anyone can edit it, but being ok with the literal source the Wikipedia article used for its info…just made zero sense.
Censorship sucks, giving credit rules.
Good stuff. I’ll switch it
Very cool of you to do so!
It’s the right thing to do, unless there’s an obvious reason as to why it’s censored
And then there’s the scots language wiki;
afaik Wikipedia shut down the Greenlandic language version to prevent this exact situation, apparently the language used there was getting very poor
The quotes used in the article sound like something Groundkeeper Willie would say. Im not sure why anyone would take them seriously.
Man why people so mean. I highly doubt he did actual damage
I think this person has possibly done more damage to the Scots language than anyone else in history.
Apart from Christopher Lambert in Highlander.
Lambert, Lambert, what a prick.
The famous French Highlander!
The saddest part is when I was in college we weren’t allowed to use Wikipedia as a source (even if we listed its sources in the works cited) but today citing ChatGPT would be accepted.
Instead of listing the source on wiki, why not just use hard link and avoid wiki to being with?
The point of the lesson is to hide your tracks or show that you’re not completely lazy. Would you just list “library” as a source? They don’t care you use wiki, they care you incorrectly listing sources.
We did. I’m just saying the professors were all like “do not use Wikipedia as a source” but never suggested using the citations from the article nor seemed to notice. I’m speaking strictly on a high level about what was considered an acceptable citation.
Wikipedia pages are synopsis’s and have a viewpoint of the person writing them. You use wiki like a library to find the sources to use and cite.
Why would they suggest and tell you how to “cheat” the system? If you’re not smart enough to realize Wikipedia isn’t a source itself, you are exactly why this lesson needs to be done lmfao.
Wiki would be like asking the librarian what the book is about, then using them as the source, you realize how silly this sounds now yeah?
Ok, fine. I’m not critiquing their directive. Just saying what it was at the time. Ergo, I’m not making the news, just reporting it.
The point is that Wikipedia (in theory) doesn’t make any argument about anything. It simply mirrors or summarizes information. Using Wikipedia as a source is somewhat similar to listing “the notes I made during class” as your source. Your source list is not meant to simply list where you got the information from, but actually list the origin of that information.
It’s STILL like that. I’m sorry for explaining why they specifically do something.
You wouldn’t use the librarian as a source, but all the books she told you about can be listed. Then write what they said and see if they notice.
Same situation, different era.
Citing ChatGPT would definitely not be more accepted than Wikipedia anywhere. You may get away with it, but that doesn’t mean it’s actually accepted.
but today citing ChatGPT
There is no way that’s true
I do not know about whatever institution the person above is talking about. However where I am at the moment you can use LLMs as a source, the citing of that is long and painful bit you could do it. I should note that it is heavily frowned upon by others to use generative ai, so most people I know use it as a summaryziation tool.
I’m not sure why this comment is downvoted, it’s not incorrect and also acknowledges that generative AI is a bad source.
Nearly every type of source, no matter how good it is, has an official way to cite it. There are even guidelines on citing in person conversations, social media posts, tiktoks, etc.
People are allowed to cite it, but that doesn’t mean they should be. Especially in an academic setting lol.
imo another big concern is that half the search results are now LLM slop. Someone might be trying to avoid generative AI and still end up citing a slop article that they didn’t realize was AI.
Sources:
https://guides.library.ubc.ca/GenAI/cite
https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/citations/personal-communications
summarization, in case you ever need it in a crossword puzzle
Thank you <3
Meanwhile, my cousin and her friend were listed as honorary citizens of our village for a few months.
“Yeah, did you read that on Wikipedia?”
Yes, I did.
Just like I used to read things at the library in the 90’s, and no-one would’ve thought to mock that. And one of the books I read was some Soviet scientists from the 50’s describing how spiritual auras work in real life.
Although that was in the 00’s I just didn’t have the internet all the time while in the army.
The point isn’t that Wikipedia is wrong, the point is that your research papers should cite primary sources published by the field instead of a generic encyclopedia. Even if the pages on encyclopedia are maintained by respected authors, it’s not immediately obvious, and the information is likely surface level and not worth citing.
The issue is not that Wikipedia is wrong, unreliable, superficial or not worth citing, the issue is Wikipedia is not a source.
Contrary to what schools teach for some reason, the ultimate goal of citing sources it to tell where the information comes from, not where one found it. By nature, Wikipedia or any other encyclopedia doesn’t create or analyse information, it just compiles it. No information can originate from Wikipedia, so Wikipedia is never the source of anything. The primary and secondary sources at the bottom of the page are.
I’m not saying you’re wrong in any way, but in my school days encyclopedia britanica was “a valid source” and Wikipedia was considered not. Despite them essentially being the same thing, and I recall at some point a study showing that Wikipedia was more accurate in general
Wikipedia in particular isn’t the problem here, it’s citing encyclopedias as sources (or any tertiary source in general)
Most teachers before college tend to ask for citation as “where did you find that information” to judge your work based on the reliability / their opinion of the reliability of those sources / their opinion of the “quality” of your research process. Which is understandable in the context of grading papers, but that gives the wrong idea to students about why citing sources is necessary.
In practice, citations are about information traceability and verifiability rather than some nebulous and often subjective “reliability” or “accuracy”.
Knowing that you found some information on some website is useless. What’s interesting is who originally came up with that information, how and why. From there, one can judge whether that information can be trusted. And trust in sources evolves with time, articles may get disproven or discredited, so it’s important to link to original sources rather than just saying “the editors of some encyclopedia said it was true at some point / found sources that they assumed were good at the time”
Why not just use chatgpt instead
Wow, I can’t believe that you are getting some flack for this. Numerous times I’ve read a Wikipedia article, followed the citation, only to discover that the Wikipedia contributor had cherry-picked from a paper, giving a misleading summary.
Or that the editor misquoted the source entirely. I’ve even found articles that are littered with “citation needed” that have persisted as such for weeks or months.
I think sometimes people unfairly discount Wikipedia’s utility and overinflate its problems, while others are too cavalier about them. Wikipedia is a useful starting point for research as long as the researcher has the knowledge required to evaluate articles and perform further inquiry into their sources.
I disagree. The problem was always teachers being afraid of technology. The whole point of a paper is to show that you know the material. If you write a paper and read an entire synopsis of the material and have to explain it in a way that improves not only your reading comprehension but also your writing skills, is that not the entire point of education?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_Wikipedia Wikipedia disagrees with you, although I do think it depends a lot on the level of education you’re at. In academia you rarely want tertiary sources if primary sources are available.
It turns into a game of telephone where you’re forth in line when you could just as well be second in line, since Wikipedia recommends using secondary sources for its articles.
I feel like this is one of those bell curve memes. At the start you see that it’s publicly edited and you turn away. Then you see the extensive source citations and why not? Then you get involved in editing Wikipedia and you see what constitutes a “source” and what happens on the talk pages. And you’re right back to not ever citing Wikipedia.
Seriously though, Wikipedia isn’t going to be nearly in depth enough for any research paper worth a damn after you do your first couple. And that’s because those are meant to teach you how to do research papers. Wikipedia isn’t as bad as AI but anyone who’s neck deep in a field will find problems with any Wikipedia page about their field. And it just gets worse the more politicized your field is. So the answer is as it always was. Go to the primary sources.
An encyclopedia is not a source. I don’t think you fully grasp what any academic paper’s source is. It must be a first-hand account or direct evidence. It is the research paper you mention, not the wiki article the paper was mentioned on. The problem isn’t teachers afraid of technology. You can’t use print versions of encyclopedia Britannica as a source either. Part of education is also knowing how follow academic rigor. Remembering and understanding are only the first two steps in the process. Applying (writing the paper) is the third step. But if you fail to understand primary sources and how to conduct academic research, then you will never be able to truly progress beyond that (leading to: analyze, evaluate, and create)
Growing up, pretty much all our hick schools had were encyclopedias; when wikipedia showed up it felt like they were just against the ease of it’s use. Smarter kids would still use the sources cited in Wikipedia, but teachers hated when you referenced a research paper because they couldn’t find it.
Eh. It really depends on the topic. I am a Wikipedia addict and I would never tell anyone that Wikipedia should be used for anything beyond surface level familiarity. Ideally you start with Wikipedia then move on to better quality sources. The problem with Wikipedia isn’t necessarily inaccuracy, but lack of information and bias. I’m not talking about right wing conspiracies saying Wikipedia is too liberal, but rather I am talking about things in history where a specific view is presented and alternate views are not. This is especially common in situations where modern scholars are questioning historically mainstream views. I suspect this is because the editors simply aren’t aware of these developments and are accessing more available older sources, but it can bring in bias. This can also happen in science and engineering as well. Plus there is the classic Wikipedia problem where some random B list Marvel superhero or star wars extended universe side character has an extremely high quality Wikipedia page and a relatively important historical to figure has a very basic overview. Wikipedia is incredible and one of the greatest achievements of Humanity, but it’s got some flaws and I don’t think that it’s wrong to tell students not to rely on Wikipedia. It’s kind of like all the same issues with ChatGPT but way less severe and way more subtle.
Nah fuck this attitude, if you ever tried to use Wikipedia for an actual research project you’ll know how dubious those “”“sources”“” can be.
It’s actuslly an exercise one of my TA friends sets for students when they’re just learning to research things properly. She gives them a claim on Wikipedia and and asks them to find the primary source for it. So they end up spending hours following chains of citations, until they are checking out old books from the library to try and find excerpts that some blog post that was cited in a paper that was cited in a newspaper, that was cited in a different blog post that was cited in another news article that was cited by Wikipedia claims exists, just to find out it doesn’t.
But seriously, don’t take Wikipedia seriously unless it cites a primary source directly.
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You’ll regularly find a link to a secondary source that contains a reference to a primary source. If you just want generically available historical, scientific, or broadly epistemological knowledge, its great. If you want an on-the-ground testimonial from an eye-witness, it may give you the start of a breadcrumb trail towards your destination.
That said, the bias endemic to Wikipedia is largely a product of its origins - primarily English, western media focused, heavily populated by editors from a handful of global north countries. If you want to learn about the history of a mayoralty in Saskatchewan going back to the 18th century, its a rich resource. If you want to find out the political valence of the major political parties of Nepal or Azerbaijan, you’ll find a much thinner resource.
Some of that is a consequence of the editors (or absence of them) around a particular topic. Some of that is a consequence of the moderators/admins graylisting or outright blacklisting sources. Newer sources - 404media, for instance - aren’t tracked while older sources that have changed management significantly and lost some of their trustworthiness - WSJ, CBS, National Geographic, as recent examples.
In this day and age, where newspapers will publish any bullshit dictated by their corporate / billionaire owners, and any idiot can publish a book, how do we know the sources themselves are even valid? Like just because it’s physically printed doesn’t make it any more true.
A problem with Wikipedia is that experts are not allowed to contribute to their areas of expertise because they’re “biased”. I know a professor at a top university who used to spend his free time editing Wikipedia outside of his specific area but in his broad area of expertise as a method of disseminating science knowledge to the public. When the higher-up Wikipedia editors found out who he was, they banned his account and IP from editing.
Having the lay public write articles works when expertise isn’t required to understand something, but much of Wikipedia around science is slightly inaccurate at best.
Can you share the author/topic?
Wikipedia welcomes expert contributors, but people editing articles about themselves is a big no-no. You’re also not allowed to do promotion of your pet theories, even if you’re “expert”.
Things appear to have changed; thanks for drawing my attention to that. I may start editing some articles in my broader area.
I can’t without doxxing myself more than I’d like. It wasn’t an article about himself, nor his research. This was about 10 years ago, so the rules may have changed. I’ll take a look and edit my post accordingly if so.
Wikipedia is unreliable for politically controversial topics, I’ve seen multiple articles on the Gaza genocide with specific claims citing fucking Times of Israel with no other supporting evidence whatsoever, Times of Israel has been caught lying more than once and shouldn’t be used as a source at all. Each article is only as good as the sources cited and they’re not all equally well sourced, it is entirely possible to insert false info into articles especially if you’ve got a well funded organization behind the effort, and even if it is eventually caught and corrected it will already have served as useful propaganda for anyone reading the article in the interim.
Wikipedia is wonderful… for most things.
The main demographic contributing to and editing English Wikipedia are young, highly educated white men from western countries. It will portray on average the bias that most of these people espouse. So it will have racist bias, misogynistic bias and pro-western bias.
That said, it’s still probably less misogynistic and less racist and less pro-western than your average outlet, because it filters out some of the most blatant false narratives and propaganda from conservative sources such as FOX.
That’s why I only get my information from lemmy comments that dont cite their sources
I only get my information from Hexbear comrades who share links ;)
When one takes a step back, it’s obvious that our own societies have their own ingrained systemic biases. All our journalists and other writers will have biases that they and us might not even notice are biases, since we believe they’re just fact.
AI datasets have run into this problem plenty of times, for example when government regulation has told insurance companies not to use factors like ethnicity or races in certain calculations, but it turns out that some ended up indirectly doing it anyway since postal codes approximated race in many regions. There are layers to systemic biases.
This is true for most articles, but anything to do with Israel, Palestine, or Zionism has been taken over by jihadists.
One of the core policies of Wikipedia, remaining from its inception, is neutrality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view
This fully applies to describing international conflicts and wars. If you find Wikipedia biased, there are two things you can do:
- Collect credible evidence, and suggest edits
- Check if you are biased yourself
jihadists
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jihad
Arabic word that means “exerting”, “striving”, or “struggling”, particularly with a praiseworthy aim
Curious choice of words.
Upset that your hasbara bot edits got rejected?
The above comment brought to you by the Iranian Ministry of Propaganda
No it generally makes sense to teach kids to not cite Wikipedia. Though it is consistently checked and updated you can look at the wiki link and drama for the Israeli genocide just to see a perfect example of why it shouldn’t be cited.
The great part of wikipedia is going to their actual resources ans reading and understanding those. What you were supposed to learn was HOW to research things and come to your own conclusions, not just how to cite information.
You know what, I was gonna agree because last time I was googling some sikh history as a sikh it seemed to be driding the indian governement but looking at the articles now it has correct casualty estimates. I swear last time I looked it was framed like the government estimate for casualties at 83 killed 900 injured was accurate, now it frames it like how every news article not on wikipedia did with 10k deaths being the likely estimate.
I see no mention of israel tho, which is odd since operation blue star was an israeli trained operation, had the isreali flag as the symbol and name lol. I can’t find the older article from india celebrating the anniversary of them working together, training soldiers to massacre civilians, but its out there somewhere, times india 1990s or 2000s.
Maybe im not looking hard enough but youd think the country that trained the operation and has the operation (blue star) named after their flag would pop up more in the article.
Sidenote my grandpa left india shortly after that time working on a ship and was lost at sea for a bit. He was saved by an isdf vessel and they were apparently nice and bought him a first class ticket on the plane to his destination in america. Just a nice reminder that not all people anywhere are bad, just like america might seem like a hellscape but the average person here isn’t the vocal maga person you see online, they just clock in.
I think it would be reasonable to teach kids to look at Wikipedia to find sources.
It’s not enough to just find sources they have to learn how to critically read them.
You shouldn’t cite wikipedia in a paper because it’s a tertiary source. Somehow that got lost in translation sometime in the 90s.
You shouldn’t cite any other encyclopedia either, because they’re “some guy” writing a paragraph or so about a thing. I think it was Britannica that Tolkein wrote a lot of the “W”'s for. I’m sure he did a great job, but it’s not exactly easy to fact check him either.
My historic house has a Wikipedia page, I’ve tried updating it with information I know is accurate (I mean, I live here), but it was always removed. Must have a primary source that’s not “individual research” like, you know, counting the bedrooms or fireplaces.
Which is what lead to me getting our city’s newspaper to interview me, print several facts and stories, and now that published article is a primary source.
During this process I realized that Wikipedia is pretty goddamn serious.
That is hilarious. At that point if I was annoyed enough, I’d do something like hang a picture in the house taking a dig at Wikipedia and then the interview could mention that and now it could be in the article about the house taking a dig at them.
if I was annoyed enough, I’d do something like hang a picture in the house taking a dig at Wikipedia and then the interview could mention that and now it could be in the article about the house taking a dig at them.
Yeah I was reading about the editing guidelines and they have a principle that surprised me at first:
Basically, you could edit an article with information you know is true (like your bedrooms or fireplaces), but truth is not the criteria that edits get tested upon. It must be verifiable by a source.
Pretty cool that you didn’t just give up and actually got the local newspaper to interview you! That’s awesome!
To a degree. But you also run into the classic XKCD problem of Citogenesis. This isn’t a hypothetical, either.
Had you, for instance, mentioned something you read about your own historical house on Wikipedia in the city’s newspaper, it would now be a cited piece of information that Wikipedia links onto.
There’s also the problem of link rot. When your small town newspaper gets bought up by ClearChannel or Sinclair media and the back archives locked down or purged, the link to the original information can’t be referenced anymore.
That’s before you get into the back-end politics of Wikipedia - a heavy bias towards western media sources, European language publications, and state officials who are de facto “quotable” in a way outsider sources and investigators are not. Architectural Digest is a valid source in a way BanMe’s Architecture Review Blog is not. That has nothing to do with the veracity of the source and everything to do with the history and distribution of the publication.
Really valuable input here, appreciate this comment!
I have a wiki editor account primarily for updating links on pages. I have also done a handful of minor edits on some obscure pages in my field, but primarily use it to update links and references. Link rot is the worst and I wish more people would help out with it.
When a link is dead, does Wikipedia allow you to change it to an archived copy of the webpage from before it was taken down?
Not sure. I have typically just done a Google search and refound the link under the same domain but with a different sub routing.
Even if the link isn’t dead, most citation templates that accept a |url= parameter also accept |archive-url=, |archive-date=, and |url-status=
Also, newly added links are automatically archived on the Wayback Machine iirc.
It would be nice if Wikipedia automatically integrated with WayBackMachine or some other archive service. Or even directly backed up the information when it was linked.
that published article is a primary source.
It’s not a primary source, that’s the whole point. It’s a secondary source, which takes information from the primary source and publishes it with some degree of verification.
The whole ‘no primary sources’ thing is simple if one considers that Trump and Musk are the primary sources on their own doings.
