this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2026
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It's funny how things have shifted from people complaining about citing Wikipedia to people citing AI. Now Wikipedia may as well be the gutenberg
I think part of that has been actual elevated standards on Wikipedia with a more robust culture for things like citations, but probably more importantly, it's readers already being expected to understand that Wikipedia isn't an inherently credible source and needs checking if you actually care.
Of course part of it now too, as you imply, is generative AI making it look more rigorous by comparison and lowering people's standards.
But now you also have to check if the citations are AI slop too... still better than an AI overview, but it could become more of an issue as AI slop research papers and AI slop news articles get published more often... 🫠
I'm lazy and have started treating wikipedia as a primary source. But if I'm quoting it to somebody else, I tend to look at the cited references to make sure I trust those.
🤓 Point of clarification: primary, secondary, and tertiary sources refer to the proximity to the original information, not to their reliability.
Secondary and tertiary sources often comprise both the most reliable and unreliable sources. 🤓
(Ik what you meant by "primary" lol)
I meant it exactly as your definitions. Academically. My fuck up was saying "as" instead of "equal to" or "like." Hence me admitting how utterly lazy that is. I should also add irresponsible.
Wikipedia is by design not citable, unless you include the revision number, but it contains all the sources to cite.
are people actually citing AI? i wonder how that would look like, it certainly sounds like: "my mom said..."
tl;dr: i never saw a problem in using Wikipedia (even at it's beginning), but it's an awesome to to get started with a topic, same counts for AI I guess.
No encyclopedia is citable. They're not primary or secondary sources.
You can’t use tertiary sources in academic research because they’re just aggregation of references. You need primary sources whenever possible, and secondary sources when primary sources are unavailable.
Which is where going down to the references and grabbing the primary sources there comes in handy, because you can cite those.
Thank you for being the one to say this; it’s usually me. I typically also address the idea, espoused by far too many teachers, that ‘you can’t cite Wikipedia because it’s an unreliable source’. Where that statement is obviously wrong as Wikipedia nor any encyclopedia is a source, rather it’s a resource, but also, Wikipedia is the most accurate encyclopedia to date due to its ability to be updated on a whim. Which serves to offset the ‘half-life of facts’ that understandably effects the accuracy of written encyclopedias.
Yeah that's a big failing on the teachers, not explaining why you can't cite Wikipedia. It's not hard to explain "you can't cite wikipedia directly because it isn't a source. It's just a collection of references, and you need to go cite the primary source, and here is where wikipedia lists their sources for each claim and how you can cite them".
This is online discussions, people use links. Similarly copy and paste from AI output. Online isn't as formal or regulated as published works.
with "online" you are referring to social media discussions?
Generally yes, FB, reddit, Lemmy and so on since these are now the locations where most social discourse happens.
According to APA guidelines, citing an AI is valid but the citation is just
“I used X Model for Y purpose.” And doesn’t require anything more lol
i mean using a model to obtain certain data is fine, we did that already twenty years ago. it would just not be called citing
I had a customer at the store I work at use GPT for info on what we sell. I'd rather he was referencing twitch chat when he told me chat told him we sold something.