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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.
I think the academic advice about Wikipedia was sadly mistaken. It's true that Wikipedia contains errors, but so do other sources. The problem was that it was a new thing and the idea that someone could vandalize a page startled people. It turns out, though, that Wikipedia has pretty good controls for this over a reasonable time-window. And there's a history of edits. And most pages are accurate and free from vandalism.
Just as you should not uncritically read any of your other sources, you shouldn't uncritically read Wikipedia as a source. But if you are going to uncritically read, Wikipedia's far from the worst thing to blindly trust.
It wasn't mistaken 10 or especially 15 years ago, however. Check how some articles looked back then, you'll see vastly fewer sources and overall a less professional-looking text. These days I think most professors will agree that it's fine as a starting point (depending on the subject, at least; I still come across unsourced nonsensical crap here and there, slowly correcting it myself).
I think it was. When I think of Wikipedia, I'm thinking about how it was in ~2005 (20 years ago) and it was a pretty solid encyclopedia then.
There were (and still are) some articles that are very thin. And some that have errors. Both of these things are true of non-wiki encyclopedias. When I've seen a poorly-written article, it's usually on a subject that a standard encyclopedia wouldn't even cover. So I feel like that was still a giant win for Wikipedia.
In 2005 the article on William Shakespeare contained references to a total of 7 different sources, including a page describing how his name is pronounced, Plutarch, and "Catholic Encyclopedia on CD-ROM". It contained more text discussing Shakespeare's supposed Catholicism than his actual plays, which were described only in the most generic terms possible. I'm not noticing any grave mistakes while skimming the text, but it really couldn't pass for a reliable source or a traditionally solid encyclopedia. And that's the page on the best known English writer, slightly less popular topics were obviously much shoddier.
It had its significant upsides already back then, sure, no doubt about that. But the teachers' skepticism wasn't all that unwarranted.