Correct and not at the same time. I’ll use Wikipedia as a source to hopefully show you that I’m in a position to understand some of the nuances.

1. Never, ever, ever cite Wikipedia in formal writing unless it’s to cite some meta aspect of the project itself (such as “this article was 5879 words long as of 4 May 2025”). If you really do need to formally cite Wikipedia, always make sure to grab a permanent URL for the current revision.
2. If you already know a fact but just need it cited, look at the inline citation in the article, evaluate the source, and use it if it’s to your liking.
3. You don’t necessarily have to look at Wikipedia’s sources at all if you don’t want to. You can look at something stated on there then go out and try to find more in-depth information about it if we just cover it in a sentence or two with a shallow citation doing the bare minimum to support only what we say.
4. There are some subtle qualities to articles you only pick up on as an experienced editor, but here are some less vibes-based things: does the article have a little grey or blue padlock at the top right on desktop? Those are protection templates, and they prevent IPs and very new editors from changing the article. Is there a green circle or a bronze star at the top right on desktop? Those represent a good article and a featured article, respectively. A good article has been peer-reviewed by an experienced editor, and a featured article has been peer-reviewed by at least several highly experienced editors. These articles are routinely scrutinized to make sure they keep up their overall quality, and this status can be removed if they deteriorate.
5. Wikipedia legitimately has high standards for the information presented – way higher than when teachers were (absolutely correctly) panicking about students sourcing it in their writing. In 2012 – 13 years ago, when I would consider Wikipedia to have had much lower standards than it does today – it was found that its information about psychological disorders was of higher quality than Britannica and a psychiatry textbook. 2012 Wikipedia was still climbing its way out of the hole that Wikipedia stopped digging around 2006 when it implemented quality standards, and it’s vastly better in 2025 than in 2012.
6. There’s honestly nothing that wrong with using Wikipedia as a source in casual disputes over popular topics. For how many Mughal casualities there were in some obscure 1608 battle? Yeah, probably continue on to the source the article cites instead. For the date of JFK’s assassination? Just take it at face value, to be honest. For something where you just want to give someone a casual overview of the topic? Really just link them to Wikipedia; it’ll likely do a better job than you unless the subject is very underdeveloped there or unless you’re a subject matter expert.
7. As for using Wikipedia as a source in your own private life when you just need to check something? In that case, just try to keep in mind your own level of familiarity with the subject, how obscure the subject is, how contentious the subject is, if the article overall looks well-cited or if it looks/sounds like someone just injected their own original research, if the inline source looks credible (this last one doesn’t guarantee anything; if you want a guarantee, check the source yourself to ensure it says what Wikipedia says it does), if it’s plausible that Wikipedia isn’t showing the full context here, and if the consequences of an inaccurate understanding are worth risking.
8. If you see something on Wikipedia that’s uncited or poorly cited, please either remove it or attempt to find a robust citation for it. It helps a lot.

Based The Conversation appreciator? On my Lemmy? It’s more common than you’d think.

Why pay for anything ever if it’s going to potentially get taken away?

Because it’s called “lifetime”? As in the entire point of the product is that it will not ever be taken away with the exception that you close your account? “Why pay for anything if there’s nothing enforcing the core premise of the product?” The gardener advertised a “whole-yard mow” for $100, but I’ve already gotten the area around the driveway, and honestly would it really be that bad if they just stopped right now?

You can talk about odds all you want (although I think around $100 million in VC funding puts those odds squarely in favor of “lifetime” users getting the floor sawed out from under them Looney Tunes-style), but the fact it’s even possible is what’s deeply disturbing, because it’s deliberate. Lifetime’s meaning should be unambiguously stipulated in a contract, not inferred. Know why? Because companies out there advertising “lifetime” subscriptions right now have little disclaimers like “approximately five years or so but honestly we don’t really know or care lol this license disappears whenever we want it to”).

People are assuming it’s for the lifetime of your Plex account, but my response is: based on fucking what? Plex on their website doesn’t seem to specify this anywhere, even in their terms of service. People asking on their official forums receive responses saying things like “probably for the lifetime of your Plex account” with no sources to anything. I’m not trying to sealion here; I literally can’t find a single instance of Plex stating officially in writing or verbally what “lifetime” actually means to the end user. If Plex isn’t going to rugpull, why can’t they add a couple sentences to their TOS saying something like: “The purchase of a lifetime pass grants the user a non-transferable license for [blah blah] starting from the date of purchase. This license will not be revoked unless 1) the associated account is terminated by the account holder or 2) the aasociated account is terminated by Plex for one or more of the reasons outlined in section [blah]”?

They could, they should, they don’t, and you have no good explanation, otherwise you would’ve offered one by now. They have enough money to afford a legal team that wouldn’t overlook that. The answer is that they want to reserve the right to destroy the “lifetime” pass whenever they want. If you can find official documentation from Plex Inc. saying that if I buy a lifetime pass today for $250, the license will only end with the termination of the account, then I’ll have no idea why they make this too hard to find, but I’ll take back everything else I said in this comment and stop using “lifetime” in scare quotes. I genuinely want to know if they say anything about this anywhere.

Another reason donating to FOSS is better than paying for proprietary software. Proprietary software devs get to run around stealing whatever code they like from the open-source community and never suffer any consequence because they don’t make their source available. I can think of a select few proprietary projects that have the balls to be source-available.

If you want to intentionally create a system that lets you evade accountability for stealing code, “fine”, but I have zero respect for you or your product, and I’m certainly not paying you a dime. I’ll put my money toward the developers who work to better the world instead of the rat fucks who steal from them to make money and pollute the software ecosystem with proprietary trash.

Some points as someone who does not use Tailscale:

• Tailscale the software is under a BSD license. Plex is proprietary.
• The discussion in this thread about Jellyfin is less corporate versus non-corporate (where in the context of proprietary software this would be payware versus freeware) and more FOSS versus proprietary software.
• To be clear, Tailscale is proudly doing the same Series C venture capital bullshit as Plex. They’re seemingly just as corporate as Plex, but at minimum, the software as it exists right now isn’t tied down to Tailscale.
• Additionally, this isn’t Tailscale versus Plex; it’s Jellyfin + Tailscale versus Plex.
• Jellyfin + Tailscale means that you’re using Jellyfin, which is FOSS. Using FOSS doesn’t just benefit you but also everyone else using it because it benefits greatly from the network effect. Any money that goes to Jellyfin that would’ve otherwise gone to Plex is given back to the community and hard-working developers rather than lining some soulless venture capitalist’s pocket.
• With Jellyfin + Tailscale, everything you’re using locally is FOSS. With Plex, none of it is. And even taking corporate into account, with Jellyfin + Tailscale, most of what you’re using locally is non-corporate. With Plex, all of it is corporate.
• Tailscale is giving you a real service through use of their VPN. Because Plex is run on the end user’s infrastructure and barely touches Plex’s server for remote streaming, they’re basically just making you pay them a “fuck you, that’s why” subscription fee.

TL;DR: This isn’t a binary “corporate versus non-corporate”.

same can be said of FOSS. back channel deals, betrayals, hostile takeovers. all of these things can(and have) happen to FOSS projects. all under a false pretense of “openness”. it’s stupid easy to change licenses and lock out contributors. it’s happened several times. although you can technically argue anything before the license change could be forked, the event usually puts a bad taste in the public mouth and contributions dry up anyway. nobody wants to support a project with uncertainty.

“you could technically argue”??? That’s literally, unambiguously the law. That’s how the licensing works. This isn’t a technicality; it’s a fundamental, widely understood feature of the license. That’s how the license was designed to work. On top of that, licenses like the GPL have extremely stringent requirements for changing the license. (Here, Jellyfin uses GPLv2, so we’ll go with that.)

Everyone with work in the current codebase has copyright over that work under the GPLv2. Nobody relinquishes that to some centralized entity. Thus, you have two options for every single individual person whose contributions are still extant in your project (no matter how large): 1) get their consent not just to relicense but to the specific license you want, or 2) remove their work from the project either because you can no longer contact them or because they’ve said no.

The fact that you called this process “stupid easy” for anything but the smallest, most insular project is the dumbest fucking thing I’ve heard today, and I’m not even wasting my time reading the rest of your comment given how shockingly willing you are to not just speak about things you have zero understanding of but to somehow arrive at the most false statement possible about them.

Here’s Jellyfin’s ‘How to Contribute’ page.

Absolutely true for FOSS. For freeware? My opinion is that it’s money wasted because, unlike FOSS:

• I have no way of auditing what I’m putting money toward.
• There’s no way for the community to keep it going if it stops or goes to shit.
• Money given toward proprietary software is money that would be better donated to FOSS whose developers actually give a shit about and make progress toward bettering the world.
• Proprietary software isn’t worthy of your respect or support. At best, use it if there are no FOSS alternatives, but don’t give money to something that could rapidly enshittify at any moment with no recourse and no way or recouperating your money.

Here’s Jellyfin’s ‘How to Contribute’ page, incidentally, for no particular reason. Let Plex eat up their $90+ million in venture capital instead of taking money from the little guy and then fall off a cliff into an abyss of enshittification.

Exhibit #46,853 for why freeware will inevitably fall out from under your feet and why you should exclusively use FOSS wherever possible.

EDIT: Here’s Jellyfin’s ‘How to Contribute’ page.

To be fair, though, this experiment was stupid as all fuck. It was run on /r/changemyview to see if users would recognize that the comments were created by bots. The study’s authors conclude that the users didn’t recognize this. [EDIT: To clarify, the study was seeing if it could persuade the OP, but they did this in a subreddit where you aren’t allowed to call out AI. If an LLM bot gets called out as such, its persuasiveness inherently falls off a cliff.]

Except, you know, Rule 3 of commenting in that subreddit is: “Refrain from accusing OP or anyone else of being unwilling to change their view, of using ChatGPT or other AI to generate text, [emphasis not even mine] or of arguing in bad faith.”

It’s like creating a poll to find out if women in Afghanistan are okay with having their rights taken away but making sure participants have to fill it out under the supervision of Hibatullah Akhundzada. “Obviously these are all brainwashed sheep who love the regime”, happily concludes the dumbest pollster in history.

Psychology has an embarrassing history.

It really doesn’t?

Half their studies aren’t reproducible.

Replicable*, and also see here.

Their most famous study is basically a fraud.

Do you mean the Stanford prison experiment, which is famous because of how terrible it was? The one that’s taught in Psych 101 classes as a lesson on ethics and how not to design an experiment? Because while I would argue it’s not the most famous study, the entire reason it’s famous is because it was so shittily designed that psychologists going forward took lessons from it. No one’s holding that up to say “Wow, look at this great study we, the field of psychology, collectively did.”

They’re behind lobotomies

That was psychiatry and neurology, but I don’t expect you to know the difference.

They’re behind the Satanic panic

That a random quack psychiatrist came out and publicized this doesn’t mean that “the field of psychology” is behind the Satanic panic. Dr. Oz is a fraud who used his platform to sell bullshit supplements; does that make the field of medicine “behind” homeopathy?

They’re behind eugenics

This literally isn’t true, or at least it’s a ridiculous half-truth to put psychology at the forefront of eugenics. Eugenics is – surprise, surprise – rooted in biology after inheritance became more widely understood (read: we knew just enough to be dangerous). Eugenics had its hand in basically every natural science, and so you’ll find occasional psychologists like Henry H. Goddard showing up, but you’ll see biologists, statisticians, politicians, and so forth. Eventually eugenics spread into fields like psychiatry (note: different from psychology), but “they’re behind eugenics” is absolute fucking horseshit that you fail to back up with literally anything.

I’m not anti-intelectual [sic] or a Scientologist or anything

Uh-huh…

I guess what I’m trying to say is that psychologists like Jordan Peterson might want to clean up their own room before trying to lecture the rest of us.

Why are you bringing up Jordan Peterson? Peterson is widely despised among psychologists, he no longer works at the University of Toronto, and instead of contributing research to the field or engaging in clinical practice, he puts out self-help sludge. “I’m not an anti-intelectual, but I’m going to take an entire century-old field of science and compress it into Philip Zimbardo(?) and Jordan Peterson so I can say that science bad actually.”

You understand that the “hard sciences” are also affected by this crisis, correct? “Soft science” is a borderline meaningless term that stigmatizes entire fields of science to the sole benefit of anti-intellectuals.

Even when we take into consideration that the problem is currently worse in sciences like psychology, economics, sociology, etc.: “these results support the scientific status of the social sciences against claims that they are completely subjective, by showing that, when they adopt a scientific approach to discovery, they differ from the natural sciences only by a matter of degree.” Social sciences are science.

You don’t belong to “the hard sciences crowd”; you belong to a Sheldon Cooper-esque stereotype who devalues work you don’t understand.

The replication crisis is real, but I’m going to give some pushback on the “ssssh” like it’s some kind of conspiracy “they” don’t want you to know about™. We live in an era of unprecedented and extremely dangerous anti-intellectualism, and pushing this as some kind of conspiracy is honestly really gross.

• The entire reason the crisis became known is because scientists have and are having the integrity to try to replicate results from existing studies. They want the science in their field to be sound, and they’ve been extremely vocal about this problem from the minute they found it. This wasn’t some “whistleblower” situation.
• Arguably a major reason why it took so long for this to come to the fore is because government agencies which administer grants focus much less on replicating previous experiments and more on “new” stuff. This would ironically be much less of a problem if more funds were allocated for scientific research (i.e. so they weren’t so competitive that researchers feel the need to publish “new” research lest their request be denied). This “ssssh” rhetoric makes the voting public want the exact opposite of that because it tells them that their tax dollars are being funneled into some conspiratorial financial black hole.
• This happens in large part because concrete, replicable research on humans is extremely hard, not because the researchers lack integrity and just want to publish slop. In CS, I can control for basically everything on my computer and give you a mathematical proof that what I wrote works for everything every time. In physics, I can give exact parameters for my simulation or literal schematics for my device. A psychological or sociological experiment is vastly more difficult to remove confounding variables from or to properly document the confounding variables in.
• This doesn’t invalidate soft sciences like anti-intellectuals would want you to believe. While some specific studies may not be replicable, this is why meta-analyses and systematic reviews are so important in medicine, psychology, sociology, etc.: they give the “average” of the existing literature on a specific subject, so outliers get discovered, and there’s far more likelihood that their results are correct or close to correct.
• This is actively being worked on, and researchers are more aware of it than ever – making them more cognizant of the way they design their experiments and discuss their methodologies.
• One of the major reasons for problems with replication isn’t actually that the original studies were bunk within the population they were sampling. Rather, it’s that once replication was attempted on people from diverse cultures rather than the narrow range of cultures often sampled in many (especially older) papers (“Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic”), the significance observed disappeared. As noted in the linked article, 50% given that fact is actually not half-bad. With much more extensive globalization in the modern day and a larger awareness of this problem, it should become less and less severe.

EDIT: I just noticed that they also got their facts wrong in a subtle but meaningful way: the statistic is that 50% of the published papers aren’t replicable, not reproducible. Reproducibility is taking an existing dataset and using it to reach the same conclusions. For example, if I have a dataset of 500 pictures of tires and publish “Tires: Are they mostly round and black?” in Tireology, claiming based on the dataset that tires are usually round and black, then I would hope that Scientist B. couldn’t take that same dataset of 500 tire pictures and come to the conclusion that they’re usually square and blue. However, replication would be if Scientist B. got their own new dataset of say 800 tire pictures and attempted to reach my same findings. If they found from this dataset that tires are usually square and blue but found from my dataset that they’re usually round and black, then my results would be reproducible but not replicable. If Scientist B. got the same results as me from the new dataset, then my results would be replicable, but it wouldn’t say anything about reproducibility. Here, a lack of replication might come from taking too narrow a sample of tires (I found the tires by camping out in a McDonald’s parking lot in Norfolk, Nebraska over the course of a weekend), that I published my findings in 1985 but that 40 years later tires really have changed, that there was some issue with how I took the pictures, etc.