Teacher Says Wikipedia Has Too Many Lies, So the Kid Switched to YouTube

What's going on

In many Japanese schools, teachers routinely caution students against citing Wikipedia in assignments — a rule familiar to students in many countries. The reasoning is fair: Wikipedia can be edited by anyone, and errors do slip through. But when one parent's young child took this lesson to heart and announced they would now do all their research by watching videos instead, it quietly broke the internet.

The thread grew into something more than a parenting comedy. It became a surprisingly thoughtful conversation about information literacy: in a world where every source has its flaws, what are we actually telling kids when we dismiss Wikipedia without explaining why — and what are we pointing them toward instead?

As more than a few commenters pointed out, there's a certain irony baked into the situation: a lot of those YouTube explainer videos are built from Wikipedia to begin with.

Comments

My kid in lower elementary school has started saying “My teacher said Wikipedia has too many lies, so I’m going to look things up by watching videos instead.” I have absolutely no idea what to do.

小学生低学年が、「Wikipediaは嘘が多いって先生が言ってたから、動画で調べる」と言い始めて頭を抱えている。

View on X

Those videos are also made from Wikipedia, by the way.

その動画もwikiから作られてる

This is a genuinely serious problem for parents all across the country, and I mean that. I once spent a whole class period with middle schoolers discussing how to avoid being fooled by fake news — and the conclusion we reached was “…yeah, it’s hard.”

こういうのはわりと大真面目に全国の保護者の困りごとだと思う。以前、フェイクニュースに騙されないためにどうしたらよいか中学生たちと授業中に話したことがあったが、結論は「むずかしいね…」だった。

Saying video is nothing but lies is going too far… but the amount of neutral content out there really is way too low. Everything is so sensationalized.

動画は嘘しかない・・は言い過ぎだけど、ニュートラルな内容すくなすぎる。煽りすぎ

Videos always have the creator’s own views mixed in to some degree, so it’s kind of scary when you end up landing on a bad one.

動画は動画で投稿主の思想が多かれ少なかれ入っているので、ハズレを引いた時恐いな～って思います

At least Wikipedia is text, so you can actually verify it. But with video, misinformation gets in through your eyes and ears — which makes it way easier to swallow without noticing. That’s the truly cruel part.

Wikiの方がまだテキストなので検証できますが、動画の嘘は視覚と聴覚をハックされるのでより鵜呑みにしやすいという残酷さもありますよね…。

Honestly, for lower elementary kids, I kind of just want to say: go look it up in a paper dictionary or encyclopedia lol

正直小学生低学年なら、紙の辞書や百科事典で調べろって言いたいですがｗ

The teacher probably just hasn’t updated their opinion since back when Wikipedia had basically no citations and “source: Wikipedia lol” was a running joke. That was like 10+ years ago.

10数年前の今みたいに出典が全然なく「ソースはWikipedia笑」みたいな時代から先生がアップデートできてないんだろうな

Not to mention, sometimes the person who wrote the original paper went ahead and edited their own Wikipedia article about it.

なんならその論文書いた人が自分でWikipedia編集してる場合もあるからな

People say Wikipedia can’t be trusted — but then what internet sources ARE more trustworthy than Wikipedia? If I’m being honest, it’s basically academic papers, university websites, and research lab pages. That’s about it.

Wikipediaは信用出来ないとか言われるけど、じゃあWikipediaより信用できるインターネット上の文献は？といわれると論文、大学、研究室のホームページくらいよな

Wikipedia can be edited to correct misunderstandings and you can actually see the sources. YouTube videos basically can’t be edited after upload, and often have no sources at all — that’s way more harmful. Lies exist all across the internet. Wikipedia is honestly one of the lighter offenders.

Wikipediaは編集されて誤解解けるしそもそもソースが見れる。 Youtubeは基本的に後から編集できない上にソースもない場合があるの害悪すぎ。嘘が多いのはインターネットそのものであって、Wikipediaはまだ軽い方

Wikipedia is definitely better than looking things up by video. Only the uploader can edit a video, but Wikipedia can be corrected by anyone — so if something is wrong, someone can actually go and fix it. Sure, there are trolls too, but still.

動画で調べるよりはWikipediaの方がマシ動画はあげた本人しか編集できないが、Wikipediaは他人が編集できるので、記事に突っ込み入れたくなったら編集して正しい方向性に持っていける勿論悪意を持った荒らしもあるけど

Wikipedia still has more credibility, let’s be real. Like… what exactly are you supposed to watch on video, and whose channel would you even trust?

まだWikipediaの方が信ぴょう性がありますよね動画とはいったい誰の何を見に行くのか……

The way I see it, Wikipedia’s actual content is the cited sources — the article text is just the secondary layer built on top of them. The “verifiability” system is what guarantees that, and I’m surprised how few people know about it. In a well-written article, you can trace every single sentence back to its original source. You simply cannot do that with a video.

ウィキペディアは、外部情報源の出典情報が主たる内容で、記事本編の文章は従たる付属品だと思っている。「検証可能性」の仕組みが、それを担保していること、意外に知られていないのかな。きちんと書かれた記事であれば、文単位で情報の出所を調べることができるのにな。動画ではそれはできないのよ。

If you’ve already gotten to Wikipedia, why not just follow the citations and go to the original sources? Run those through fact-checking, and you’ll know whether something is a conspiracy theory, whether peer review was done right, whether there are replication studies. Wikipedia’s actual procedural issue isn’t bias — it’s that it’s a secondary source, not a primary one.

いや、ウィキペディアまでたどり着いたならアスタリスクから元文献にあたれば済む話じゃね？元文献をまずファクトチェックにかける。そうすると陰謀論かどうか、査読が適切かと再認実験や関連論文の有無がわかる。ウィキペディアは筆者偏向の有無以前に又引になるのが手続き上問題になるという話

Internet video is so tied to impression-based revenue that creators have basically no incentive to reflect on bias in their own content. Wikipedia, for all its “anyone can edit it” reputation, actually requires citing where information comes from — and that builds in a framework for evaluating source quality.

ネット動画はインプレッションに基づく収益化が成されやすい面から基となる情報の偏りを内省するインセンティブが働きにくい… wkiは誰でも書けると言っても、どんな情報源由来か出典を明記する事が求められ、記述根拠の品質についてその信頼性を判断するに必要な環境の整備を意識させる仕組みがある

Wikipedia is probably fine for someone like a university professor — someone deep enough in the field to catch mistakes when they see them. For someone who can’t tell good from bad, it’s a different story. It’s kind of like that fantasy trope of the master who wields a cursed weapon so skillfully it becomes their loyal partner. Pretty cool, if you can pull it off.

Wikipediaについては、大学教授みたいな「その道に精〇している(=間違いが書いてても見破れる)人」が活用する分にはいいかもですが、良し悪しが分からない人が使おうとすると大怪我する感じ、　ファンタジーにおける「呪いの武具を、上手いこと使いこなして相棒としてしまう達人」みたいでカッコいい

To add to what I said: it’s not just Wikipedia — every source, books included, can contain errors. But actually judging which sources are reliable is genuinely hard for students. So the ones that work as a reasonable starting point (not error-free, just relatively trustworthy as a baseline) are the ones I mentioned above.

補足すると、Wikipediaに限らず全ての文献（本等も含め）は間違いを含みうるものだと思うのですが、その中で信頼性の有無を判断するというのは学生には難しいと思います。そこである程度無条件に信用出来るもの（間違いを含まないと言う意味では無い）は上記の通りなのかなと考えてます

Government and UN official websites do tend to carry their own perspective, but the factual content is usually pretty accurate.

政府や国連の公式サイトなんかも色が付きがちとはいえ正確な事が多いですね

That’s where the National Diet Library Digital Collection comes in!! (Japan’s National Diet Library is the country’s national archive and largest public research library, roughly equivalent to the U.S. Library of Congress.) Not that being a published book makes something automatically reliable — but the document quality is high.

そこで国会図書館デジタルコレクションですよ！！(実際出版された本だからって信用できるわけではないけど文献としての質は高い)

And academic papers aren’t error-free either — there are plenty of garbage papers out there that never get cited by anyone.

しかも論文も間違いが全くないというわけではなく、中には引用もされないようなゴミ論文も多い

And even papers and university/research lab sites need scrutiny. “Always approach research with a critical eye” is honestly one of the most useful things I took away from university.

そして論文、大学・研究室のホームページでも精査が必要だったり。何事も常に批判的視点を持って調べることが大事というのは、大学で学んだ知識のひとつでもある。

So if you compare all the lies across Wikipedia, YouTube, and Twitter, the truth emerges from the overlap~ lol

嘘が多いWikipediaとYouTubeとTwitterとを比較することで、真実が見えてくるんですね〜w

Wikipedia: writes lies by accident. Twitter: writes lies for attention. YouTube: writes lies for money. — personal opinion only, and I’m not claiming any of this is the truth either.

Wikipedia……筆が滑って嘘を書く Twitter……目立ちたくて嘘を書く YouTube……金が欲しくて嘘を書く ※個人の感想です。これもまた、真実だなんて主張しません。

Wikipedia, YouTube, TV, newspapers — they all have plenty of lies. So look at whatever you want, but you need to check as many sources as possible, compare them, and look for contradictions and errors before drawing any conclusions. There’s no single right answer of “never use this” or “just stick to this one.”

WikipediaもYouTubeもテレビも新聞も嘘が多い。だから何を見て調べてもいいけど、なるべく多くを見て突き合わせて矛盾や誤謬がないか見極めて判断するひつようがある。これを見てはダメとか、これを見ればよい、という正解はない

It’s not like online information is uniquely untrustworthy. Even magazines and encyclopedias can have errors. What really matters is information literacy education — teaching kids to gather from multiple sources and build the judgment to assess things comprehensively.

ネットの情報だけが信用ならないということはありません。雑誌や百科事典の記述に誤りがある場合もあるので、新聞や専門誌などから複数の情報を得て、総合的に判断する力をつける情報教育が大切です。

My take

Kids today have to swim through a flood of information that simply didn't exist for previous generations. Respect to the children doing the swimming — and to the teachers trying to teach them how.

#Relatable #Culture #Society

Source & translation note

Comments loosely translated for tone. Reactions collected from Togetter and X threads.

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