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ChatGPT Mostly Source Wikipedia; Google AI Overviews Mostly Source Reddit
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this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2025
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Throughout most of my years of higher education as well as k-12, I was told that sourcing Wikipedia was forbidden. In fact, many professors/teachers would automatically fail an assignment if they felt you were using wikipedia. The claim was that the information was often inaccurate, or changing too frequently to be reliable. This reasoning, while irritating at times, always made sense to me.
Fast forward to my professional life today. I've been told on a number of occasions that I should trust LLMs to give me an accurate answer. I'm told that I will "be left behind" if I don't use ChatGPT to accomplish things faster. I'm told that my concerns of accuracy and ethics surrounding generative AI is simply "negativity."
These tools are (abstractly) referencing random users on the internet as well as Wikipedia and treating them both as legitimate sources of information. That seems crazy to me. How can we trust a technology that just references flawed sources from our past? I know there's ways to improve accuracy with things like RAG, but most people are hitting the LLM directly.
The culture around Generative AI should be scientific and cautious, but instead it feels like a cult with a good marketing team.
The common reasons given why Wikipedia shouldn't be cited is often missing the main reason. You shouldn't cite Wikipedia because it is not a source of information, it is a summary of other sources which are referenced.
You shouldn't cite Wikipedia for the same reason you shouldn't cite a library's book report, you should read and cite the book itself. Libraries are a great resource and their reading lists and summaries of books can be a great starting point for research, just like Wikipedia. But citing the library instead of the book is just intellectual laziness and shows to any researcher you are not serious.
Wikipedia itself also says the same thing: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_Wikipedia
Right, and if an LLM is citing Wikipedia 47.9% of the time, that means that it's summarizing Wikipedia's summary.
Exactly my point.