alt Hacker News> kids were pushed to use AI for homework, now it is disallowed and frowned upon. In short mixed messaging.
in the early 2000s in california universities you'd get marked down for citing wikipedia. so the good souls told everyone "see the number in brackets[2] after what you're trying to cite the article for? just click that then click the archive.org or whatever link there, then cite that."
Now? i think wiki is considered a valid source? or has it flopped back to being "unreliable"?
Replies
ValentineC • today at 4:31 PM
I think Wikipedia's still considered unreliable, but the question that should be asked is whether the author even read the source in "the number in brackets" to ensure that it's even backed properly.
Just like how people should use AI for research, I guess.
It's not that it's unreliable, it's just lazy research. Wikipedia, like all encyclopedias, is a tertiary source, but ideally your essay should be a mix of primary and secondary sources, while Wikipedia discourages original research and prefers only secondary sources. Wikipedia itself recommends against citing it as research[0] for this reason.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_Wikipedia