Your teachers weren’t gaslighting you, stop using that word when you mean lying.
Wikipedia may have sited sources but those sources can, and have been, incorrect many times. Misleading information is still prevalent on the site. So even if you steal the sources Wikipedia uses in their articles you better dig deeper because that shit is nefarious. Wikipedia is not immune to western propaganda. They pick and choose what info to put out there from the sources knowing most, like OP, won’t read deeper into anything they site. You’ll just take their word for it.
“Stalin was a very bad man who ate children.” [1][2][3][4]
1: Stalin: Court of the Red Tsar, Montefiore
2:The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn
3: Why I Fucking Hate Stalin So Much, reddit thread by StalinHater69
4: my literal ass
5: I saw it in a vision
6: Trust me bro
7: Animal Farm by George Orwell
8: “Stalin is a card-carrying monster.” By totally not a wes-turd centric news outlet
9: It was revealed to me in a dream.
- r/historymemes post
- Radio free Europe
A whole bunch of legit sources (even primary sources) are on some form of banned list as the facts they present don’t match the capitalist line.
deleted by creator
Literally. At least look for peer reviewed at minimum. The term “source” doesn’t mean correct information, it just has information that could be anything.
Some people just don’t want to do proper research and I get it; school makes learning awful. It should be engaging but our school systems make it a chore. So of course kids are going to look for the easy answers because the curriculum doesn’t encourage exploration. Some teachers are great with that but when the whole school system is regulated by capitalists to create the perfect workers? Yeah you’re gonna get people like OP.
Stage 1: wikipedia is bs bc muh internet
Stage 2: no in fact wikipedia is reliable because muh sources and muh impartiality
Stage 3: wikipedia is bs bc western propaganda 😎
I remember learning that in primary school when I did a project on the algerian war and it called us “gangsters” or smth like that
“How dare you not like to be colonized?? 😠 😠”
Teacher gaslighting you
Europeans unable to light the gas
Truly, we live in evil times
Well, the teachers were right all along.
Sources, by themselves, don’t mean anything. A whole lot of terrible scholarship has tons of sources. It depends on how reliable they are, and how you use them.
Can’t believe you have to go to a communist website to say something so obvious and elementary (and, you would think, uncontroversial).
I don’t want to risk getting doxed by frogs and NAFO shibas yet.
Wikipedia is good for everything except politics
And geography sometimes
And as most things ARE politics…
there’s a political element to everything, but some things are less explicitly political. wikipedia’s article on, say, meerkats is probably on average much better than its article on stalin for example.
Your teachers were trying to get you to actually do the work and not just trust what some randos said on wikipedia.
During my education I didn’t come across a teacher who “taught” an alternative to Wikipedia. I would have loved to learn how to find good information much earlier. The intention is good but I don’t know if students get the appropriate tools.
I had a teacher that accepted a blog as a source and never told me it wasn’t reliable because, just like many people reading Wikipedia articles, they weren’t checking the sources, just the names. The irony is that they were just checking them to make sure they weren’t wikipedia articles.
Yeah with teachers it’s hit or miss. Research is hard especially doing it for the first time, just googling stuff doesn’t bring up much. Some teachers are great in steering students in the right direction but others just say “no wiki” and leave you on your own.
I learned research skills in first year English classes at uni. There are classes in uni specifically to teach students how to do proper research. It’s a subject on its own.
It sucks that the good stuff is hidden from most people. Some sites are blocked unless you’re in academia.
Also, your teachers often can’t explicitly demonstrate the disinformation on wikipedia they’re trying to warn you about without getting censored/fired themselves.
Woah, I can’t believe their teachers lied to them with the express intention of making them doubt their entire perception of reality. Pretty fucked up.
Very early in my transition from a SocDem with communist aesthetics to an ML I decided to check the wiki page of the 50-cent army. I had heard it somewhere in some context and remembered the name for no reason.
I don’t know what prompted me to look into the sources but I did. One of the sources, maybe the fourth one, is a study on online arguments regarding topics that one would expect paid agents of the seeseepee to join in if they exist. Their result was that there were no indications such an organised effort existed. They mentioned this wasn’t proof such an organisation didn’t exist, bless them.
Now, after hearing this one might reasonably believe this citation is there to say some argue this organisation doesn’t exist, or at least that it’s not certain. Nope. The citation is used to say that another name for these supposedly existing agents is wumao. That’s it. As I recall at no point does the article suggest that the organisation may not exist or mention a study where they couldn’t find the traces they would be leaving. If I had to guess I’d say someone did write these things, and use this study to cite that and the name, then had their contributions removed by some removed like mikehawk10(currently Red-tailed hawk) who seems to be a literal CIA agent. Fancy that. Nobody should trust Wikipedia, says man who invented Wikipedia
You can know the trustworthiness of this page by visiting the Catholicism entry, which is super decorated and being taked care of. Surely, all that thing about the obvious crimes against humanity is just some “black legend”, sources, the Vatican.
To say nothing about the famous source [citation needed] and their clear anti communist bias. /s
More seriously, XKCD did a simple but good comics about some issues with certain Wikipedia sources: https://xkcd.com/978/
It’s of course not unique to wikipedia, Adrian Zenz for example once wrote a big report to the German government with in theory lots of “sources” mentionned at the bottom of every page.
the issue of course was that if you actually checked the source, half the time it was various publications that themselves used studies or reports by Adrian Zenz himself as their source, so the guy was actually using himself as a source, but with just a few intermediaries from western media it gave the illusion of a large number of different sources with the same opinion.
And the other half were themselves sourcing from well knonw totally not biased sources like Radio Free Asia, the National Endowment for Democracy, or ASPI.
