A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
Germany once had a minister of defence with a ridiculous number of first names. I think 12 names or so. Then one guy kept editing in another into Wikipedia. During the edit war where people were deleting the extra name and he was putting it back in some journalist used Wikipedia as a source for the names and they copied the fake one down. So now the guy had a source he could point to to win the edit war.
I think it took several months until this was resolved.
I once searched for Barack Obama on wiki years ago right when a rogue editor turned it into a page about Blackops Apache Assault Helicopters and Seals copypastas. I still dont know why. I occassionally wondered if I was sleepwalking.
Theoretically this should still be available somewhere in the edit history.
Gather around children. u/bjoern_tantau is going to tell us of one of the mighty Wikipedia Edit Wars.
Some journalists just scour Reddit or buzzfeed for content.
I don't call them journalists. They're bloggers.
Haha, you’re right. My mistake. 😂
On the other hand, Wikipedia doesn't allow original research and discourages primary sources while that's very much part of what a journalist is expected to do; they write the secondary sources Wikipedia runs on. It's a much harder job to discover and vet primary sources.
And that's why conservatives hate wikipedia.
Yet another not-a-showerthought.
What makes it not a shower thought
I mean the comparison used to be Wikipedia vs finding the right literature in a library. Now it's mostly Wikipedia vs AI that sometimes makes things up including sources. The real degradation happens over time though. People using AI to write papers which then get fed into AI as a source. It already is but will become increasingly hard to verify how reliable the information is that you find.
This all happens in the background of short video clips dominating the engagement of young people. We have students at our school who aren't even capable of using AI to cheat and they don't care either. They saw some tiktoks telling them once they're 18 they can get rich with betting or real estate (despite having no capital) so why do homework? I'd rather they trust wikipedia blindly than what they currently do.