Relatable CultureSociety

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

A parent's sleepless moment sparks a surprisingly deep national debate on how we actually teach kids to evaluate information.

· 7 min · Togetter

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.
Those videos are also made from Wikipedia, by the way.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
Honestly, for lower elementary kids, I kind of just want to say: go look it up in a paper dictionary or encyclopedia lol
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.
Not to mention, sometimes the person who wrote the original paper went ahead and edited their own Wikipedia article about it.
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 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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Government and UN official websites do tend to carry their own perspective, but the factual content is usually pretty accurate.
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.
And academic papers aren’t error-free either — there are plenty of garbage papers out there that never get cited by anyone.
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.
So if you compare all the lies across Wikipedia, YouTube, and Twitter, the truth emerges from the overlap~ lol
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, 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.”
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.

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.

Comments loosely translated for tone.

Source https://togetter.com/li/2679161