Comment on ChatGPT Mostly Source Wikipedia; Google AI Overviews Mostly Source Reddit
Mniot@programming.dev 2 weeks agoI 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.
antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
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.