this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. A showerthought should offer a unique perspective on an ordinary part of life.

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[–] creed10@lemmy.world 22 points 1 year ago (6 children)

my understanding from an English professor is less about its reliability of information, but more its reliability regarding citing sources. you can't cite something that consistently changes

[–] Duamerthrax@lemmy.world 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The schools should have used wikipedia as an opportunity to teach media literacy. You don't use wiki as your source, you go to the cited sources and investigate those. Use the cited sources a in your school reports.

[–] xx3rawr@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 year ago

Yet I see some teachers themselves using "Source: Google images" lmao

[–] rchive@lemm.ee 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That might be one reason why some warned against using it, but I definitely had teachers in middle school and high school that explicitly said not to use it because it could be changed by anyone including people who could be wrong or lying.

[–] creed10@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

definitely not incorrect, for sure

[–] A2PKXG@feddit.de 5 points 1 year ago

Technically you could cite a version in the version history. But Wikipedia isn't about being right. It's about trying to get It better

[–] PutangInaMo@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

And the ability for folks to change it and provide inaccurate sources. It's peer reviewed for the most part and academia wants officially peer reviewed sources.

[–] TheRTV@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago

Hmm, interesting. When I was in HS, I would paraphrase Wiki and use their citations in my bibliography 😆

[–] zephyreks@lemmy.ca -3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's also just often completely inaccurate. The standards it uses to cite works make them pretty much useless: any good information on Wikipedia is on there by accident.

[–] DauntingFlamingo@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That is wildly inaccurate and you know it. There are like 6.5 million articles on Wikipedia and the majority (since people are pedantic, we'll say 50.1%) are well cited and accurate

[–] zephyreks@lemmy.ca 0 points 1 year ago

Have you looked at what's considered a valid "source" on Wikipedia?

The fact that there's an odd good article does not make the site a reliable source of anything.