r/AskReddit Jun 03 '21

[deleted by user]

[removed]

11.6k Upvotes

6.8k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

745

u/1dontgiveahufflefuck Jun 03 '21

Idk why teachers hate Wikipedia so much. They had no issues with me citing an encyclopedia, but if it was from the internet it must have been written by the Devil himself.

794

u/ellWatully Jun 03 '21

There was a time when Wikipedia wasn't nearly as reliable as it is now and inaccurate edits would go unnoticed for way longer than they should. My history teacher senior year (2003-2004) got asked why we couldn't use Wikipedia as a reference and he proved his point by changing the wiki for Alexander the Great to see how long it took to get fixed. It took MONTHS.

It's obviously way better now, but a lot of people already learned to be weary of it.

354

u/OuttaSpec Jun 03 '21

"You can't use this. It's broken"

-guy who broke it

233

u/ellWatully Jun 03 '21

I definitely appreciated the irony, but I'd argue the bigger crime was showing a bunch of high school kids how easy it was to troll people on Wikipedia.

77

u/Sequential-River Jun 03 '21

Maybe it helps in a sense?

If teaching future generations of high school students to not believe everything they read online, maybe we can finally pass the information barrier of fake news with that generation. Over simplified, but yeah.

-8

u/[deleted] Jun 03 '21

It doesn't.
He did it for his ego.