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So much more reliable (lemmy.world)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/memes@lemmy.world
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[–] 17 points 2 months ago (9 children)

Wikipedia is by design not citable, unless you include the revision number, but it contains all the sources to cite.

are people actually citing AI? i wonder how that would look like, it certainly sounds like: "my mom said..."

tl;dr: i never saw a problem in using Wikipedia (even at it's beginning), but it's an awesome to to get started with a topic, same counts for AI I guess.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    No encyclopedia is citable. They're not primary or secondary sources.

    You can’t use tertiary sources in academic research because they’re just aggregation of references. You need primary sources whenever possible, and secondary sources when primary sources are unavailable.

    Which is where going down to the references and grabbing the primary sources there comes in handy, because you can cite those.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    Thank you for being the one to say this; it’s usually me. I typically also address the idea, espoused by far too many teachers, that ‘you can’t cite Wikipedia because it’s an unreliable source’. Where that statement is obviously wrong as Wikipedia nor any encyclopedia is a source, rather it’s a resource, but also, Wikipedia is the most accurate encyclopedia to date due to its ability to be updated on a whim. Which serves to offset the ‘half-life of facts’ that understandably effects the accuracy of written encyclopedias.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago

    Yeah that's a big failing on the teachers, not explaining why you can't cite Wikipedia. It's not hard to explain "you can't cite wikipedia directly because it isn't a source. It's just a collection of references, and you need to go cite the primary source, and here is where wikipedia lists their sources for each claim and how you can cite them".

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    This is online discussions, people use links. Similarly copy and paste from AI output. Online isn't as formal or regulated as published works.

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