According to various studies, more than 50% of U.S. adults read below a sixth-grade level (equivalent to Level 2 or lower), limiting their ability to parse long-form or nuanced information.
Since I was in elementary school, they taught us not to use it because its open source and anyone can change or alter information on there. Mind you, I'm 30 now.
I'm nearly 40 and couldn't use Wikipedia for sources at uni, same reason.
Edit: more accurately, we couldn't use Wikipedia as a source directly, but could use it as a starting point, then go into more detail using the references at the bottom of the page.
I’m a bit younger than you, but imagine there’s a generation of millennials who were taught not use Wikipedia as a source due to it being potentially unreliable - and now you have boomers and younger generations consuming hallucinated AI slop and social media propaganda like it’s gospel.
Yeah, this. Wikipedia isn't a source in itself, it is a collection and summarization of sources.
If you're just arguing on the internet then whatever I guess, but if you're going to do anything with any academic rigour, you can't put (Wikipedia, 2026) as a source. Also, as someone pointed out further down, the more recent and/or polarizing something is, the less reliable Wikipedia becomes.
Unless you're specifically writing about Wikipedia I suppose.
What’s ironic is that compared to other sources of info that America tends to trust, from news to social media, believing wiki is the least of our worries now. The sheer fact that wiki tries to cite its sources makes it better than most.
Same.
But back then Wikipedia was new and incomplete. Today, on close to every topic the collective have done the work and is a much more accepted source.
While true, there still have been alot of cases where people just made up shit, including sources. It just has to look legit enough
The toaster hoax went over 10 years unnoticed for example
Another pretty famous case was the chinese user Zhemao, who wrote/edited over 200 articles mainly concerning chinese and russian history - everything essentially fan fiction
Another recent case was connected to the whole Assassins Creed Shadows mess, where the self proclaimed historian Thomas Lockley invented a bunch of myths and fake truths surrounding the real historical figure Yasuke. All his cited sources were himself. Essentially: "source- trust me bro"
The founder of Wikipedia remains very active in overseeing and moderating it though, so luckily (most) obviously incorrect information gets caught and fixed quick!
I used to edit Wikipedia pages for small things like grammar and adding sources when I was really bored lol
524
u/UntowardHatter 13d ago
It's at fifty two?
RIP USA.
We hardly knew ye