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Everyone should know, and yet I often see people, in HN comments for example, citing Wikipedia as if it means something. As the great Tycho has said, “The fact
by leephillips 4y ago
Everyone should know, and yet I often see people, in HN comments for example, citing Wikipedia as if it means something. As the great Tycho has said,
“The fact of the matter is that all sources of information are not of equal value, and I don't know how or when it became impolitic to suggest it. In opposition to the spirit of Wikipedia, I believe there is such a thing as expertise.”
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/12/16/i-have-the-power https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/12/16/i-have-the-pow...
- akolbe 4y agoAn additional factor here is that now chatbots like ChatGPT are trained on Wikipedia as well, in addition to search engines' knowledge graph panels and voice assistants bringing up Wikipedia texts in response to queries. It does make you wonder sometimes whether technological progress really does make things work better than before ...
- arp242 4y agoOn the other hand if I link to example.com, random-website.org, or even a published study, then that's also not a guarantee it's anywhere near accurate. Blindly trusting Wikipedia would be foolish, but so would blindly trusting anything else, or blindly mistrusting Wikipedia. Gathering reliable and comprehensive information on any topic you're not an expert on is hard, because you lack the background knowledge and expertise to judge the accuracy of something – basic critical thinking/bullshit detection helps, but will only get you so far. Wikipedia isn't perfect and has its share of issues, but it's not bad either.