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❤️
I remember when it supplanted Encarta and encyclopedia Britannica. My teachers wouldn’t let me use it as a source originally
just follow the citations.
Jesus fuck, the AI debate is really older than AI itself. You’re not meant to use a singular source for facts, and you are meant to corroborate them. AI/Wikipedia could say any old shit at any given time, but if you take time to find more than one source to verify things, using those sources as a place that research has been collated to start is completely fine.
Even in school my teachers would tell us that we couldn’t use wikipedia as a source, but followed up by showing us how to use it to find sources through its citations.
You’ve been whacked with a wet trout.
In a way it feels like it should be more. Only 25! Which can surely be said of no other website.
I can understand the feeling that it seems so young. But If we take into account that the World Wide Web, a public network, (or in other words, a non-military/government/higher education based network,) started in 1989 and opened up to the public in 1993. As for U.S. American’s (and probably other countries as well), the internet infrastructure wasn’t wasn’t well established and ready to take on 10’s of millions of WWW users daily. It wasn’t until 1996 in the U.S., where we would have around 3,750,000 internet service users. (Using the population info from here for the rough estimate.) And according to the graph below, it wasn’t until about midway through 2001 when the U.S. crossed over the 50% population with internet access.
So what I’m highlighting here is that, Wikipedia.org going live in 2001 is actually impressive for it’s time. And it’s old in comparison to a lot of main-stay websites. Also, remember Wikipedia wasn’t asking for users to pay a monthly subscription or have to deal with seeing ads on the platform. So server costs even then, were being funded in other ways. All of that to me is seriously impressive.
