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?
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.