When I was in college in like 2005, we had to go through a citations course. It seemed outdated to me at the time, what with the way literally everything is searchable now(then.)

I was swiftly berated for suggesting that there was anything wrong with the way we do citations. Because APA has it alllll figured out. If it's a website they even added a website citation tool!

When I asked if we could cite Wikipedia then, I was berated again. Obviously you would never do anything so idiotic as cite Wikipedia! Why, anybody can say anything on Wikipedia.

So what's the difference between Wikipedia and any other website? She couldn't say.

I just copied wikipedias citations the entire time I was in college. My citations were never questioned.

[–] frongt@lemmy.zip 0 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Wikipedia is not a primary source. They have an explicit rule against original research: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research

So it's in the same class as your own papers. Citing it directly is regurgitation. The more this happens, the worse the quality gets. Same as saving and resaving a jpeg, or when AI gets trained on AI slop.

[–] Zexks@lemmy.world -1 points 4 days ago

Sp you are unaware that wikipedia ALSO has sources