• salty_chief@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    Wikipedia is not accepted by colleges as a reliable source to cite. When you are writing a paper/essay. That should tell you that it isn’t a reliable source for information.

    • SpacetimeMachine@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      That’s ridiculous. It’s not allowed because it’s not a primary source of information. It’s a great jumping off point for knowledge and if you need to cite something you can just look through its sources at the bottom of each page.

    • tabular@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      I’m not writing a paper or essay… so my standards are different.

      Conversely I’ve tried following a paper to implement an algorithm and suddenly found it used math terms that I couldn’t find an explanation for (and unlike the rest of the paper it didn’t elaborate shit).

      • Sckharshantallas@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        I’m not writing a paper or essay… so my standards are different.

        It actually shouldn’t matter in this case. Wikipedia isn’t a “source” of anything, it simply states facts and backs them with sources (though not always, many articles will have a “missing source” for many paragraphs). It’s also public, so anyone can add things without it being peer reviewed.

        So if you actually care about whether some information is correct, you should check what is the source. And if something is wrong you can do your part and change the text to be more neutral or better phrased. Edits that improve pages are almost always gonna stick.

        In the end it’s all ant’s work to update/fix the huge number of badly written stuff in there.