Blog/2026-06-08/Citation Needed
A long time ago, Wikipedia was formed and because Wikipedia is an aggregator of information and not a scholarly work, it created "Citation Needed", a tag to describe text within it that was not suitably referenced. Wikipedia itself and this particular tag were both memetically strong, and the Internet itself (to its great credit and detriment) has the property that it collapses expertise, trust, and authority to 0 and social networks end up with an all-to-all conversation. This meant that much of what was posted on the Internet was by cranks, and people adapted to that by asking people to substantiate the claims they made.
But things changed over time. Search became better[1], originating the "let me google that for you" response to people who would ask for easily substantiated results. Some communities retained their tradition of expecting others to prove things to them, however. And when LLMs and the chat interface to them came onto the scene a few years ago, these people stopped being of much value to talk to. For an informed person, it starts to feel more and more like tutoring[2] an incompetent[3]. For a while now, I've used Overmod to insulate myself from this sort of thing and it's quite effective but I'm reminded of it because I always read comments by my close friends and today I found that one of them had encountered this problem.
What's the point of arguing with any of this.
It's like someone arguing that cheese isn't real. Yes I can go to the grocery store and take a picture of cheese and show it, but what's the point? They can live in their own world. It doesn't change any of our lives. The world is what it is.
As my wife and I are prone to saying to each other: "sou desu ne". Indeed, there are people who disbelieve things. And if you were to tell them about it, many of them would ask you to prove it. But if they wish to believe those things, it is nothing to you. "Someone is wrong on the Internet", and once it was pretty common for people to care about that. But as Eternal September has come to more and more social networks, and as LLMs with the ability to perform advanced search and summarization have come to be, the ignorant only remain so out of their own choice, either wilfully so or out of incompetence, and are no longer worthwhile to communicate with.
The ancient epistemological technique of demanding evidence before being convinced still stands true. The burden of proof is on the claimant. But the claimant is the truth-seeker themselves. If I read something on the Internet that might be true, I am now in the position of evaluating whether that should be my belief. The guy who made the claim won't care, irrespective of the truth of the claim. My friends might care. My family might care. But a stranger on the Internet who has given me a claim has already given me something valuable - an idea thread that I might pull on if I desire to identify its truth - and he is not likely to give me more especially considering the ease of self-verification. To believe it uncritically would be an error on my part. To disbelieve it also so.
Notes
[edit | edit source]- ↑ Google actually preceded Wikipedia, but around the time of Wikipedia there was a massive explosion of websites as higher-speed connectivity spread across the globe and more traditional knowledge sources started moving to the Internet so search got a lot better.
- ↑ It's not just God who helps those who help themselves.
- ↑ Though, realistically, many of these are bots or tarpits or sealions.
- ↑ bpodgursky on Permalink: HN • news.ycombinator.com • 48447249
