Growing up we heard, ad nauseam, that "wikipedia is not a reliable source". People just need to state the same thing about LLMs- they aren't reliable, but can potentially point you to primary sources that -are- reliable. Once the shininess of the new toy wears off, people will adjust.
Wikipedia is as good as anything else.
As an example, I frequently use Wikipedia to read about history, computer science topics (e.g. how to implement an algorithm), or scientific topics.
The exception is current events, but even then, I suspect that Wikipedia is not any more biased than the news.
I'm open to having my mind changed, though.
Encyclopedias – including Wikipedia – are not acceptable sources for college-level work certainly. They are tertiary literature, which can provide an overview to someone trying to get a toehold into a subject, and which can hopefully point them toward primary and secondary sources. But tertiary sources are not typically allowable citations for college research.
But, this thread has discussed the reliability of Wikipedia.
I will say that wikipedia, as things stand, is way more accurate than chatgpt. So much so that comparing them doesn't even make sense to me.
But don’t get me wrong, I also view ChatGPT conversations as being on par with pub chats as far as “confident facts” go.
I think our difference may be in how we view Wikipedia.
Last I read about this, the error rate in Wikipedia was actually lower than in the Encyclopedia Britannica, by a measurable amount.
This was a while back, and admittedly it only counted articles where there was an equivalent article in both (which probably gives a better picture of Wikipedia, as those kinds of “boring” articles have less vandalism…) but it’s not immediately a given that Wikipedia is just objectively bad at being accurate.