It'll probably be a little bit like life before the web. You'd hear something and have no immediate way to verify the veracity of the claim. It's one of the reasons teachers pushed students to go to the library and use encyclopedias for citations when writing research papers.
Our species has obviously managed to make it pretty far without facts for the longest time. But we've comfortably lived with easily verified facts for 20-30 years and are now faced with a return to uncertainty.
If I had to guess, we'll see stricter controls on institutions such as Wikipedia that rely on credentialism and frequent auditing as a means to counter the new at-volume information creation capacity. But I don't really have the faintest idea of how this will turn out yet. It's wild to think about how much things are changing.
My teachers were always clear that encyclopedias were not to be used as a primary source either. They're not even a secondary source. Encyclopedias are tertiary sources.
They're better than Wikipedia... but only barely.
In the end you use Wikipedia and an encyclopedia the same way: to get a broad understanding of a topic as a mental framework, then look at the article's citations as a starting point to find actual, citable primary sources. (Plus the rest of the library's catalog/databases.)
exactly. information literacy starts with evaluating the sources. I have had numerous chats over the last few years where it's evident that people do not do due dillagence in their information gathering. it seems that either people aren't being taught this anymore or that they have given in to sloppy thinking.
Our species has obviously managed to make it pretty far without facts for the longest time. But we've comfortably lived with easily verified facts for 20-30 years and are now faced with a return to uncertainty.
If I had to guess, we'll see stricter controls on institutions such as Wikipedia that rely on credentialism and frequent auditing as a means to counter the new at-volume information creation capacity. But I don't really have the faintest idea of how this will turn out yet. It's wild to think about how much things are changing.