How did they know it was not LLM generated?

At some point you're forced to either believe that people have never heard of the concept of a force multiplier, or to return to Upton Sinclair's observation about getting people to believe in things that hurt their bottom line.

> but if you dig into the source you realize it's coming from a crank.

It is a dark sunday afternoon, Bob Park is sitting on his sofa as usual, drunk as usual, suddenly the TV reveals to him there to be something called the Paranormal (Twilight Zone music) ..instantly Bob knows there are no such things and adds a note to the incomprehensible mess of notes that one day will become his book. He downs one more Budweiser. In the distance lightning strikes a tree, Bob shouts You don't scare me! and shakes his fist. After a few more beers a miracle of inspiration descends and as if channeling, in the time span of 10 minutes he writes notes about Cold Fusion, Alternative Medicine, Faith Healing, Telepathy, Homeopathy, Parapsychology, Zener cards, the tooth fairy and father xmas. With much confidence he writes that non of them are real. It's been a really productive afternoon. It reminds him of times long gone back when he actually published many serious papers. He counts the remaining beers in his cooler and says to himself, in the next book I will need to take on god himself. The world needs to know, god is not real. I too will be the authority on that subject.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:WhatLinks...

It's not that I personally find it hard.

It's more like, a lot of stuff in Wikipedia articles is somewhat "general" knowledge in a given field, where it's not always exactly obvious how to cite it, because it's not something any specific person gets credit for "inventing". Like, if there's a particular theorem then sure you cite who came up with it, or the main graduate-level textbook it's taught in. But often it's just a particular technique or fact that just kind of "exists" in tons of places but there's no obvious single place to cite it from.

So it actually takes some work to find a good reference. Like you say, review articles can be a good source, survey articles or books. But it can take a surprising amount of effort to track down a place that actually says the exact thing. I literally just last week was helping a professor (leader in their field!) try to find a citation during peer review for their paper for an "obvious fact" in the field, that was in their introduction section. It was actually really challenging, like trying to produce a citation for "the sky is blue".

I remember, years ago, creating a Wikipedia article for a particular type of food in a particular country. You can buy it at literally every supermarket there. How the heck do you cite the food and facts about it? It just... is. Like... websites for manufacturers of the food aren't really citations. But nobody's describing the food in academic survey articles either. You're not going to link to Allrecipes. What do you do? It's not always obvious.

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