When talking to other people and bringing up sources, it’s common for them to say “I don’t like that website” or “it’s not trustworthy”. On Lemmy, this is most commonly said about Reddit, where you will be questioned if you use it as a source of knowledge or show off something you did there. Wikipedia is another one.
However, the other day, me and a friend noticed something. The most discredited websites all correspond to the most neutral websites. Minus its overt traditionalism, Reddit is pretty neutral and doesn’t promote a specific leaning. Wikipedia is another one, as the whole point of Wikipedia was that it could be a source of knowledge made by the people and for the people. Recently ChatGPT became something a lot of people consult, and nowadays you get a lot of ridicule for mentioning things like asking it for advice or going to it to check on something. Quora is a fourth example, in fact it currently has a “spammy” reputation that I don’t see the inspiration for. I don’t know, this all seems too big a coincidence in our world.
Do these websites (and other ones) really inspire being looked down upon as much as the people around you claim, and which ones do you have the most and least amount of issue with? And why?
The wikipedia one seems nuts to me. Like you literally can cross-check the sources if you think it is making a wrong claim.
People are quick to say “but everyone can modify it!” as if claims made by other souces arent made by basically random guys as well.
It’s mostly a holdover from the early days of the internet I think. I remember in the olden days when Wikipedia was fairly new, and the amount of contributors back then were much smaller and the rigorousness with which sources was provided was also completely different. I was in what, middle school back then, and every teacher would remind us for every assignment: “remember that Wikipedia is not an admissible source”. I think the reputation remains from those days, basically. In today’s day and age I consider Wikipedia a fairly reliable source, honestly.
I also think its important to note the thing that wikipedia itself has an article about, which is that it is an encyclopedia.
You wouldn’t cite the encyclopedia in a scientific paper, or even a university hand-in. It’s just bad praxis. However, you would absolutely check the encyclopedia if you wanted to quickly gain a basis of knowledge on a topic.
When the source is readily available. A lot of stuff is not online and books go out of print and may be hard to track down. There’s a sizable set of bad actors on Wikipedia who rely on this by quoting passages from out of print books out of context to support their stance.
That being said, this is a minor problem and WIkipedia is an acceptable source of general knowledge. Claiming it’s a bad source of information would apply to any other lay-level source including the Encyclopedia Britannica.
That being said, I would note that obscure articles can often be dominated by a small number of editors with specific ideological axes to grind. As long as you know the bureaucratic processes of Wikipedia, and have an infinite amount of energy to waste arguing with people in the Talk pages, you can get away with quite a bit. Not outright misinformation, but portrayal of fringe academic theories as mainstream, and vice-versa.