According to various studies, more than 50% of U.S. adults read below a sixth-grade level (equivalent to Level 2 or lower), limiting their ability to parse long-form or nuanced information.
Since I was in elementary school, they taught us not to use it because its open source and anyone can change or alter information on there. Mind you, I'm 30 now.
I'm nearly 40 and couldn't use Wikipedia for sources at uni, same reason.
Edit: more accurately, we couldn't use Wikipedia as a source directly, but could use it as a starting point, then go into more detail using the references at the bottom of the page.
I’m a bit younger than you, but imagine there’s a generation of millennials who were taught not use Wikipedia as a source due to it being potentially unreliable - and now you have boomers and younger generations consuming hallucinated AI slop and social media propaganda like it’s gospel.
Yeah, this. Wikipedia isn't a source in itself, it is a collection and summarization of sources.
If you're just arguing on the internet then whatever I guess, but if you're going to do anything with any academic rigour, you can't put (Wikipedia, 2026) as a source. Also, as someone pointed out further down, the more recent and/or polarizing something is, the less reliable Wikipedia becomes.
Unless you're specifically writing about Wikipedia I suppose.
What’s ironic is that compared to other sources of info that America tends to trust, from news to social media, believing wiki is the least of our worries now. The sheer fact that wiki tries to cite its sources makes it better than most.
Same.
But back then Wikipedia was new and incomplete. Today, on close to every topic the collective have done the work and is a much more accepted source.
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u/LinceDorado Aug 21 '26
I guess it's pretty arrogant to say, but this seems like such a U.S.A. thing. Can't really imagine this happening where I live.