Apparently, the "logic" stems from that tired old phrase, "anybody can edit Wikipedia, so you can’t trust it."

Okay, fine, telling the kids to be skeptical of any information source is probably a good idea…​ But that’s not what’s happening here.

Instead, they’re bad-mouthing Wikipedia specifically, and then having them do a fucking Google search and using whatever pops up as an authoritative source!

Are you kidding me?

I’m not making this up.

In case you’ve sequestered yourself to the IndieWeb for a while and haven’t been doing the "normie" thing for a while, type in any common subject in Google right now and look at the utter trash that comes up:

• Merchants selling something related to that thing

• Keyword farms with stolen blog content

• Original low-effort articles that appear to be almost machine-generated (maybe they are?)

• Fucking copies of Wikipedia articles (if you’re lucky)

• Mirrors of stackexchange sites (if you’re lucky)

Raise your hand if you think this shit should be used as primary sources for research. Nobody?

Wikipedia may have its internal problems. Maybe it’s too easy to make edits. Maybe it’s too hard to make edits. Maybe they don’t use all of the donation money the way you might want them to. Maybe all of that’s true. Cool, let’s fix that. Keep pressure on Wikipedia. Money can do nasty things to organizations. Don’t let them get all weird like Mozilla where I don’t even know if I support them anymore (though I’m a staunch Firefox supporter and MDN supporter).

But if you ask me to pick the most valuable thing on the Web, my answer for many years has been, without a moment’s hestitation, Wikipedia.

As far as I’m aware, it’s the greatest trove of human knowledge ever assembled outside of the great libraries of the world, and it’s accessible to anyone, anywhere, any time. No advertising. No agenda (or damn near no agenda, I mean, come on - show me a more neutral source for this information).

So what I tell my kids: okay, if they won’t let you cite Wikipedia as your resource, then at least start there and use the Sources section at the bottom of every fucking page to find high-quality primary sources.

(I don’t actually swear at them.)

If I thought it would be even remotely worth doing, I would fight this shit at the school. Sadly, I do not.

(And holy hell, don’t get me started on how they teach math or English, or this new "Code Red" shit. I’ll loose my fucking mind and I’ll start typing pure Zalgo text (zalgo.org) here and then you’ll lose your mind and we’ll all get swallowed up by the ancient ones as they emerge from the ethernet to feast on the delicious madness.)

But what I can do is tell my kids to go to Wikipedia first and their school is wrong.

And I donate to Wikipedia every year. Jimmy Wales (wikipedia.org) himself can spend that on pizza and beer as far as I’m concerned. As long as they keep the servers humming.