A study from Profound of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity shows that while ChatGPT mostly sources its information from Wikipedia, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity mostly source their information from Reddit.

  • antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    21 days ago

    I think the academic advice about Wikipedia was sadly mistaken.

    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).

    • Mniot@programming.dev
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      21 days ago

      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.