[regenschutz]

Unfortunate. So many essays that I wrote in school cited The World Facebook as a source.

I'm worried that the death of these easily accessible sources will push more and more pupils into relying on Wikipedia or even worse: AI. Being critical of what you see online and finding facts yourself is crucial to digital literacy.

[detourdog]

The CIA World Factbook was one of the major sites to access for information using Gopher. I discovered it using Gopher and it was proof to me of the usefulness of Internet. I would cite it as a reason that someone might want to access the internet.

[xphos]

Can you add context on what Gopher is for the unknowning? I searched for it but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol) is the only seemingly relavent thing I found not sure if thats exactly what your refering too?

[runjake]

Gopher was a text-mode, menu-based, hypertext-based precursor to the World Wide Web. It's what we used before the Web and web browsers came along.

Here's a good image of your typical Gopher page: https://img.sysnettechsolutions.com/What-is-Gopher-Nedir-EN....

[cfmcdonald]

This video [0] shows someone using Gopher (and other common pre-web Internet tools) in the early 90s.

I used Gopher when I did a high school summer science camp at Indiana University in 1994. It was a really interesting time of transition when the graphical Web was just coming on-line with Mosaic, but most tools were still textual/command line (FTP, pine/elm email/Usenet clients, MUDs, etc.)

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDV4zrex18o

[detourdog]

It predated the World Wide Web as a client for browsing. It was developed at the University of Minnesota and named for the School's mascot.

The client was not graphical. I felt like it was like swinging from vine to vine with each vine being a gopher site. Once one was on a site one could drill down a directory structure of published data. One would access an initial site by typing in it's IP address or domain name. One could then follow the gopher links until exhaustion or all the links on that site were visited.

There was a period of time before the WWW was graphical and I found gopher far superior for browsing. One had to download files and then view them locally using local tools.

One could even follow a gopher link to the WWW. The splash page had the slogan "Welcome to the World Wide Web there is no top or bottom". This could not be said of Gopher sites where each site had to be connected to directly and all the links on the site could be visited.

Once IP addressees became available to the public WWW browser became graphical. This made the Gopher less useful since it was stuck as terminal browser. The IP address made the machine one was browsing from addressable to every host on the internet. This made inline graphics more practical because they could be rendered in line while browsing.

[xphos]

Gosh that actually sounds a amazing I am always annoyed that I have to leave terminal so much to explore I can understand the common person being daunted by that but a terminal accessible browser client sounds lovely for a lot of use cases

[ecliptik]

Lynx supports gopher [0] and check out Bombadillo [1], it's a stripped down "small web" (gopher, gemini, finger) only terminal browser.

Gopher is sort of like Latin, it's a dead protocol, but is still useful.

0. https://lynx.invisible-island.net/lynx_help/lynx_url_support...

1. https://bombadillo.colorfield.space/

[SyneRyder]

For Gopher, I used to use a little terminal browser called Phetch:

https://github.com/xvxx/phetch

It's written in Golang and was last updated in 2022. There's a GIF on the Github page to give a feel of what Phetch & browsing Gopher in the terminal is like. I mostly use the Lagrange GUI client though, which is fantastic.

Gopher still exists. If you're starting out, you can get your own "gopherhole" and Unix shell account at https://sdf.org/ It's a long time since I updated mine, but I'm at gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/syneryder/

[edsu]

This makes me wonder if someone is putting the latest version of the Factbook on Gopher now. It might be a fun little project?

PS. Lagrange is a beautiful piece of software.

[detourdog]

I kinda of remember when Mosaic supported all the protocols. One would just replace http with whatever protocol wanted to connect to the host with.

gopher:// or ftp://

[pseudalopex]

TUI web browsers exist. But many sites are not usable.

Gemini is a newer protocol influenced by Gopher.[1]

[1] https://geminiprotocol.net/

[detourdog]

I'm pretty nostalgic for Gopher. If the graphical web hadn't been so mind blowing I would have realized how great it was at the time. Before the web had graphical browser I thought it was pretty useless compared to gopher.

[mzi]

> Once IP addressees became available to the public WWW browser became graphical.

What does that even mean?

[detourdog]

There was a time when only institutions were on the internet. Eventually one could get dial-up connection to a commercial entity. NYC's had an early commercial service provided by PANIX (Public Access Unix) and the San Francisco bay area had the Well.

This was just a terminal connection where one could connect to other hosts on the internet through a dial-up connection. The modem would connect to a computer that had a route to an internet gateway. PANIX provided a Unix user account one could dial into. One didn't need an IP address to get on the internet. The difference was that an internet host couldn't find/connect to the terminal one was browsing on. There was no "addressability". If one downloaded a file from the internet it didn't end up on the machine one was using. The file ended up in a directory on the computer one was dialed into. The second step of retrieving the file involved downloading the file from your home directory on the Unix machine one was dialed into. In my case I think I needed a modem that supported the Zmodem protocol.

Eventual the dial-up providers were able to provide IP addresses using the SLIP (serial link IP). Once one had an IP the machine was on equal footing of all the other internet hosts. The computers could exchange information directly. This provided an easy way for a web browser to directly connect from the machine one was using and the host one was connected to. This is when graphical browser became available to everyone with an IP address. The graphics became inline and could be rendered directly on the client.

I believe there were ways prior to this to inline render graphics I never experienced them. AOL used to be a closed network with graphics and no internet gateway. CompuServe may have been similar. I never used either of those systems.

Outside of my college's library connection I only accessed the internet through PANIX until the internet boom. I learned about PANIX through an ad in the back of Computer Shopper.

[mzi]

Mosaic, the first graphical browser was developed by National Center for Supercomputing Applications. They were of course not bound by dial-up or similar and probably didn't care for commercial offerings of connectivity in their priorities in development.

And before it, slip had been available and standardized for some time.

I would say what drove the adoption of commercial services was the graphical web, not the other way around.

[jimt1234]

I feel really old now. :(

[homebrewer]

Don't; I'm pretty old myself, and I've only a vague idea of what gopher is because it was never used in this part of the world, and internet access also came pretty late. Maybe GP is in a similar position.

[hk__2]

At least Wikipedia is supposed to cite its sources, while AIs don’t.

[pardon_me]

AIs that were trained on data obtained through naughty channels actively avoid citing sources and full passages of reference text, otherwise they'd give the game away. This seems to increase the chance of them entirely hallucinating sources too.

[GorbachevyChase]

Have you used one recently? The big providers all cite sources if give a research prompt.

[i80and]

Unfortunately, the citations are generally quite low quality and have in my experience a high rate of not actually supporting the text they're attached to.

[GorbachevyChase]

This is on par with humans, honestly. I’ve dug into cited studies by consulting firms that were 100% false.

[hk__2]

In my experience they just add random links at the bottom that are often unrelated to the response they give; there’s absolutely no guarantee that they did read them or that their response is based on them.

[sofixa]

Sometimes they hallucinate them, or if they exist, sources include blatant nonsense (like state owned propaganda, such as RT) / don't support the claims made by the output.

[maximilianthe1]

what's worse is when they cite clearly LLM generated articles from web

[keeganpoppen]

wtf are you conversing with LLMs that you regularly are running into "state owned propaganda" in the references? my "blatant nonsense" detector is going off...

[olyjohn]

My favorite is when it cites 5 sources, and 1 of them is a real source, and then the other 4 are short form junk that point to the first one as the source. So basically its just picked one article and summarized it for you and not picked any info from any other places. Oh and bonus points when I type the exact same prompt into a search engine, and that 1 source is the top search result anyways.

[sofixa]

https://www.euronews.com/next/2025/11/04/ai-chatbots-are-spe...

Original study: https://www.isdglobal.org/digital-dispatch/investigation-tal...

[vonneumannstan]

Do you people even use the models or do you just lie about them?

https://chatgpt.com/share/6984c899-6cc4-8013-a8f6-ec204ee631...

[regenschutz]

You're using the Research model that isn't available to Free users. As a pupil myself, I can vouch for the fact that nobody is using the Research models here.

Even if a pupil does pay, they will either be too lazy to wait the nearly 10 minutes it takes for the AI to do its research, or they actually care about getting good grades and therefore won't outsource their research to AI.

[vonneumannstan]

You can replicate on the free tier. You should try it. I'm just pointing out that the loudest anti-ai voices often either haven't used the models at all or are basing their bad opinions on outdated versions. Any opinion made about ChatGPT with GPT 3.5 is basically irrelevant at this point.

[pickleRick243]

I have bad news for you regarding pupils who "care about getting good grades"...

[hackingonempty]

No worries, we can rely on our Dear Leader and his team of experts to keep us informed.

[sofixa]

> Wikipedia

There is nothing wrong with Wikipedia, at least in the main languages. It's crowdsourced and has citations (and where there aren't "citation needed" help identify that).

It gives you superficial, in depth and factual information, with links to sources for more details if needed.

[PLenz]

There's nothing at all wrong with Wikipedia but it needs sources to cite since it doesn't allow original research and the World Factbook is an important one.

[hexagonsuns]

>There's nothing at all wrong with Wikipedia

Well, except for the very obvious political bias

https://manhattan.institute/article/new-study-finds-politica...

[tyre]

Looking at the underlying study, this isn’t evidence of bias. It’s evidence of correlation between Republicans and negative sentiment.

If you look at the sentiment for public figures given, the bottom one is, for example, Brett Kavanaugh. Well, he was credibly accused of sexual assault during his confirmation hearings, which was a huge deal at the time. Someone with that on their record will probably be read as negative, but, I mean, not the editors’ fault!

[philwelch]

The accusations weren’t particularly credible and similar slander campaigns against people like Joe Biden aren’t nearly as prominent.

Even notorious dictators like Mao Zedong get treated with kid gloves as long as they’re on the left: https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/how-wikipedia-whitewashe...

[sofixa]

Kid gloves? The cites text literally says:

> His policies resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people in China during his reign, mainly due to starvation, but also through persecution, prison labour in laogai, and mass executions

What's "kid gloves" about that?

Let's contrast with the the farthest thing from a leftwing dictator we can find, the quintessential rightwing one, Adolf Hitler. Here's the intro to his Wikipedia page:

> Adolf Hitler[a] (20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was the dictator of Germany during the Nazi era, which lasted from 1933 until his suicide in 1945. He rose to power as the leader of the Nazi Party,[b] becoming the chancellor of Germany in 1933 and then taking the title of Führer und Reichskanzler in 1934.[c] Germany's invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 under his leadership marked the outbreak of the Second World War. Throughout the ensuing conflict, Hitler was closely involved in the direction of German military operations as well as the perpetration of the Holocaust, the genocide of about six million Jews and millions of other victims.

Note how the atrocities are last, same as Mao.

[O1111OOO]

When it comes to politics and studies... We all should know by now to research those sources too, right?

"The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit[5] conservative think tank."

It is a report generated by this conservative organization (that presumably gets donations from many other conservatives). Is there a chance that the report itself is suspect?

[cataphract]

"Bias" here is just sentiment analysis. The report (from a conservative think-tank) is not about factual errors. Plus, the effect they find shows only for US politics, where there is really not much of a "left".

[sofixa]

> Findings show that Wikipedia entries are more likely to attach negative sentiment to terms representative of right-leaning political orientation than to their left-leaning counterparts

Is that a bias or just reality?

Right leaning politicians in the US include people paying underage girls for sex, people screaming about "Jewish Space lasers", people obviously stealing money in plain sight with crypto pumps and dumps, people running away from responsibility, people getting caught engaging in sexual acts in public, and on and on and on. Their left-wing equivalents are... extremely mild by comparison. What, some run of the mill corruption and sexual comments that resulted in resignations?

If go past "right wing is associated with more negative things", and look into what those negative things are, you'd realise it's just reality. Just because there are two parties and two categories of political leanings doesn't mean they are somehow equal.

[elzbardico]

Yes, the left engages only in "mostly peaceful protests"

[throwawayqqq11]

Citation needed for mostly violent protest.

[hexagonsuns]

"Bias isn't bias if I agree with the side it's taking!"

[sofixa]

It's not bias if it's factual reality. You not liking it doesn't make it bias.

[icf80]

"Facebook" :)

[mikemarsh]

Surely there's a lot of CIA involvement there too ;-)

[regenschutz]

Oh wow, didn't at all notice that while typing lol. I guess my swipe-to-type skills aren't as good as I thought they were

[mrbluecoat]

I initially read it as Facebook as well and almost celebrated :D

[KellyCriterion]

Isnt it already in AI as the prior version were publicly and should be in training corpus?

[pseudalopex]

The World Factbook was updated weekly. This was because facts changed.

[ToucanLoucan]

Every time an article like this gets posted some commenter INEVITABLY brings up "isn't this solved because AI" and god it is so depressing. Apparently a whole lot of people out there existing in the world genuinely think fucking LLMs are going to be reliable stewards of knowledge.

We are fucking cooked.

[therealdrag0]

Ai training can be thought of like human training (school), much of what you learn shapes you but you forget the details. We need to continue to have real sources of info.

[cududa]

Sure but that doesn't mean it'll perfectly retrieve information it's trained on. There's a lot of conflicting sources, hallucinations, etc.

[belter]

See the positive. At least you would not get a fail on your school essay about Greenland...

[ekianjo]

> Unfortunate. So many essays that I wrote in school cited The World Facebook as a source.

A source of propaganda? There's nothing the CIA does without political motivation.

[kergonath]

> There's nothing the CIA does without political motivation.

Even then, political motivation in itself does not make it inaccurate. It’s easy to see why a liberal democracy supposed to defend liberty across the globe would be interested in making facts accessible. Facts and education are the best way to fight obscurantism and totalitarianism. It’s also easy to see why a regime sliding back towards autocracy would have no interest in doing it. If they were competent, they could have continued pretending they cared and actually use it as a propaganda tool. Same with Radio Liberty and the others.

[schnable]

there used to be a higher alignment in the US between political motivations and morality.

[mangodrunk]

>It’s easy to see why a liberal democracy supposed to defend liberty across the globe would be interested in making facts accessible.

Who is supposed to defend liberty across the globe? Do you think the US has been doing that and should be doing that?

The point of OP was that the facts from the CIA can’t be trusted. That they can lie about the facts.

[Sharlin]

The Factbook has always been widely regarded as a reliable source of information.

[ekianjo]

By the Western world aligned with the US?

[lyu07282]

I would hope that most people do understand that the CIA is a heavily biased source to use on information on other countries.. like wtf?

[ceejayoz]

Heavily biased sources can still provide useful facts, if you're careful.

For example, the IDF now accepts Hamas's death toll estimates after decrying them as inflated for years. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2026-01-29/ty-article/.p...