[Dalewyn]

It is weird to anyone who didn't grow up being told to not cite Wikipedia as a source of information in any authoritative capacity, being told to instead dig for and cite the original source instead which a tool like Internet Archive is useful for.

Culture shock stemming from a generation gap, I guess.

(Obviously this distinction is not important for most comments here on Hacker News which are just written in passing, but if this was an academical setting you would, presumably and hopefully, get laughed out of the room.)

[ezst]

I disagree with the sentiment, the IA is a very useful source, but, as shown here, it provided the wrong answer. In general, you can't trust it to tell "how old is something", only to show that it is "older than".

[jchw]

"Since at least 2005" is not a wrong answer. It's imprecise, but perfectly accurate. And since there is no oracle of absolute truth to consult, it's not like it's wrong to seek out empirical answers like this, it's just one fairly general approach to find a new upper bound. Of course, in this case there is a better answer, but still, there's nothing weird or wrong about the approach.

[smabie]

I mean.. it took more work and produced a sub-optimal answer?

[jchw]

More effort has been made to argue that it's a bad approach than the actual effort it takes to go to archive.org, enter a URL, and see the first capture date. That all to say, it's not any appreciable amount of effort. It's really at worst a similar amount of effort to searching Wikipedia for an answer.

[az09mugen]

I think the "5 * 9 is at least 40" from Rick and Morty is relevant here : https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IxqcYJEXr6I

[Dalewyn]

I am not commenting on the accuracy or value of the information provided by Internet Archive, I am speaking concerning the phenomenon that not citing Wikipedia is "weird".

[amusingimpala75]

Wikipedia may not be a citable source itself, but it can still be a good place to find links to other sources more reputable.

[sfn42]

Major life hack. You may not be allowed to cite Wikipedia, but there's nothing stopping you from using wikipedias citations.

Also the whole "don't use Wikipedia" thing is idiotic. There's a bunch of tech illiterate teachers who think Wikipedia is full of misinformation, and impress that view on students. So lots of people think Wikipedia is useless, while in reality it's a fantastic source of information and you can easily find the sources of that information.