[HN Gopher] School vs. Wikipedia
___________________________________________________________________
School vs. Wikipedia
Author : ingve
Score : 317 points
Date : 2022-10-07 15:33 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ratfactor.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (ratfactor.com)
| jmchuster wrote:
| When i was in school, the rule was also "you can't use the
| encyclopedia as a source". So it feels more like trying to get
| students to learn to find and use primary sources. Wikipedia
| actually makes this incredibly simple now, since everything has a
| citation link.
| mcguire wrote:
| When I was in school, long before Wikipedia, encyclopedias _weren
| 't_ accepted as references. That's why you had to go to the
| library. I don't have a problem with that part.
|
| On the other hand, if I were a teacher, citations of random
| internet stuff would result in a bit of a lecture and points off
| the second time.
| rtanks wrote:
| I've always used Wikipedia as a starting point to lead me to
| other sources.
| karaterobot wrote:
| Seems like the purpose of these research papers in school got
| lost somewhere. They are an opportunity to develop skills and
| judgment, not to do important scholarly work. By saying "don't
| use Wikipedia" they are missing an opportunity to teach kids how
| to find and vet resources. Wikipedia does have a ton of issues:
| as do, evidently, some of the top peer-reviewed journals in the
| world. So, the provenance of a citation is not enough, and
| focusing on it is beside the point. The skill schools should be
| teaching is how to sift the wheat from the chaff, since that will
| be more valuable later on.
| the_third_wave wrote:
| Smart teachers, be glad that they're still around. It is not the
| fact that "anyone can edit Wikipedia" which is the problem - as
| noted elsewhere vandalism is usually quickly dealt with - but
| more that in many subject areas "only certain edits are allowed
| to stand". Any topic which is even slightly politically
| contentious is soon taken over by a bunch of self-proclaimed
| _keepers of The Truth(tm)_ who make sure that only their
| narrative is allowed to be followed. Given this phenomenon those
| parts of Wikipedia have more in common with political propaganda
| than encyclopedic articles. Even just using the references is
| fraught with error since those references are often just as
| biased as the articles in which they are referred. The only parts
| of Wikipedia which can still give some semblance of what is
| really going on are the edit history and talk pages, the latter
| in combination with its own edit history. It is there you can see
| how the narrative is being controlled, especially on the edit
| history pages.
| [deleted]
| floppydisc wrote:
| Just out of curiosity; has anyone here contributed to Wikipedia?
| Cyberdog wrote:
| Yes, back before I lost faith in the project. I actually
| initiated some somewhat-notable articles such as those on Tank
| Man (the Tiananmen Square protester) and traditional ("hand-
| drawn") animation.
|
| Most of my more recent contributions have been fixing
| typos/grammar or removing obvious spam, but I've given up on
| doing even that little as of late.
| robotnikman wrote:
| Somewhat related:
|
| (Most of what you read on the internet is written by insane
| people) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32897812
| lxe wrote:
| Interesting how this mentality haven't changed in many decades
| now. We weren't "allowed" to cite/use wikipedia as any type of
| source in high school back in 2006. The easy solution is simply
| to cite the primary sources directly from the wikipedia's
| citation.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I was in primary school before the web, and we were either
| discouraged or forbidden from citing encyclopedias. Tertiary
| sources, in general, have been discouraged for papers for a long
| time.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Google books should be free to peruse for school students. That
| would be a good use of government money.
|
| If people are against Google books, then the governments should
| scan and share all of human knowledge.
| CivBase wrote:
| When I was in high school a little over a decade ago, my school
| told us to use an academic search engine that they payed for
| access to. It was actually pretty neat. I'm surprised that hasn't
| become more ubiquitous.
| janmarsal wrote:
| A teacher who calls wikipedia a bad source is usually a bad
| teacher. They think their job is to weed out the bad students
| from the good, and they hate how wikipedia makes this job harder
| for them, so they forbid the use of wikipedia. Only a bad and
| lazy teacher would do something like that.
| mountainb wrote:
| This parent is wrong, and the teacher is also wrong. There is no
| reason for children to use a source like Wikipedia for anything.
|
| Children also should not be permitted to use services like
| Google, which is bad for similar reasons, amply recited by the
| link author.
|
| Schools usually have access to excellent library databases. It's
| never too early to teach children useful research skills.
| Wikipedia is anti-useful. Searching Wikipedia is an anti-skill
| that actively misinforms users, training both children and adults
| into believing that they can do "research" by punching strings
| into a text box to retrieve often highly inaccurate articles
| which are also un-citeable for any serious purpose.
|
| When the web was young and fresh, Wikipedia was better than many
| alternatives. In the current era, with so many digitized books
| and journal articles, there is no reason whatsoever to use
| Wikipedia for anything but the most casual browsing.
|
| >Instead, they're bad-mouthing Wikipedia specifically, and then
| having them do a fucking Google search and using whatever pops up
| as an authoritative source! >Are you kidding me?
|
| Google is worse, so it's not like the teacher is offering a
| better alternative. The teacher instead should be directing the
| children to print or digitized encyclopedias and towards
| appropriate databases. The teacher would also be better off
| directing the children to sources like Archive.org to seek out
| higher quality primary and secondary sources responsive to
| whatever questions are being posed.
| mikkergp wrote:
| > The teacher instead should be directing the children to print
| or digitized encyclopedias
|
| Any data source you encounter needs to be validated. Wikipedia
| is a fine source for lots of types of data, traditional
| encyclopedias aren't known to be any more accurate. The reality
| is you have to think about the importance of the information
| you're looking up, but most people shouldn't be referring to
| primary sources as they are much harder to validate than
| secondary sources.
|
| "Wikipedia has a similar number of errors to professional and
| peer-reviewed sources"
|
| -- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6889752/
|
| Another source: https://www.nature.com/articles/438900a
| mountainb wrote:
| You just linked to what is effectively a press release
| written by someone affiliated with the Wikimedia Foundation
| Board of Trustees, but you presented it as if it were some
| sort of highfalutin study merely because it links to a
| handful of articles. It does not even go into any detail on
| what it is citing.
|
| Each cherry picked citation except for the fifth in that
| press release covers a relatively narrow area of knowledge,
| but the core question of Wikipedia's suitability for general
| education is how reliable it is as a general resource. The
| fifth citation itself cites to another cluster of studies of
| questionable relevance.
|
| Citing encyclopedias is already forbidden by most research
| manuals. The real question is whether it should be used as a
| research starter at all. My answer is "no," because minute-
| for-minute of time spent researching, almost anyone will be
| better off with other resources, even just browsing by topic
| for book titles in the Library of Congress.
|
| When the internet was shit, Wikipedia was impressive. Now,
| you can get virtually any digitized book title instantly with
| academic access. You can retrieve any academic article
| instantly with academic access. There is no reason apart from
| lack of academic database access or laziness to use Wikipedia
| for anything at all.
| mikkergp wrote:
| I may just be seeing the problem in a different way because
| our positions seem irreconcilable. fair enough to your
| position though.
| Avicebron wrote:
| What? I'd be interested to see which digitized book
| provided a curated list of js exploits in a .txt ready to
| be fed into a parser...
|
| Google certainly can help solve problems.
| [deleted]
| dvdkon wrote:
| The kind of "research" school kids are usually doing, Wikipedia
| is perfectly suited for. Their work is likely going to be read
| by the teacher or their peers and that's it. It's basically
| just used as proof that they're capable of finding information
| on a practical non-academic level, and Wikipedia _is_ good at
| that, no matter how citeable it is.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| I think this is completely wrong.
|
| When I was in school (what the US would call K-12 school), our
| school library had Encyclopedia Brittanica and a few other
| large encyclopedias. We frequently used them as launching off
| points, because they almost always had a lot more information
| in them than "children's books" about a topic. In later years
| at school, it would start to make more sense to use the still-
| non-primary-source-books-but-still-much-more-detailed books in
| the library. In college university, we used a mixture of
| textbooks (still not primary sources!) and actual papers.
|
| There is a complex web of information sources. Brittanica was
| fine back in my day as a "someone who knows something about
| this wrote up a really fine summary that will give you some
| directions". There's no reason for Wikipedia not to play this
| role today (it is both at least as accurate and more expansive
| than EB). There are many years of education before "seek[ing]
| out higher quality primary and secondary sources" makes much
| sense, and even then, the introduction you can get from
| Wikipedia will frequently stand you in good stead before doing
| that.
|
| Yes, it is true that using Wikipedia the way you describe it is
| a bad habit, but that's precisely why children (and adults!)
| should be taught how best to use it. I remember being actually
| taught that EB was pretty much the entire summary of all human
| knowledge - laughable now. We can do better than that by
| embracing, not by rejecting, wikipedia.
| standardUser wrote:
| Whatever the topic, there is a significant benefit from first
| browsing some high level Wikipedia articles to get the lay of
| the land. I don't think you are thinking much about the
| learning process and how our brains work. You're jumping to
| step 5 because you seem to have an ax to grind. Steps 1-4 are
| "what the fuck is going on and why should I care" and Wikipedia
| is great for setting us up to learn more (and to want to learn
| more, and to know what there is to learn!).
| tablespoon wrote:
| > This parent is wrong, and the teacher is also wrong. There is
| no reason for children to use a source like Wikipedia for
| anything.
|
| Exactly. To oversimplify, the correct advice has two parts: 1)
| don't use Wikipedia, 2) use these better sources instead. The
| teacher is wrong because they're apparently forgetting the
| second part, but the parent is also wrong because missing that
| doesn't make Wikipedia a good source.
|
| IMHO, a pretty good lesson for schoolchildren is: quality
| information usually takes some effort to access, and
| information that's easily accessible is probably bad. That's
| because quality is usually expensive, so free very often takes
| shortcuts on quality or injects an agenda.
| mountainb wrote:
| Correct. If the children are going to get any value from the
| many, many hours spent in a school, why not use the library
| resources that the school pays vast fees to maintain access
| to (public, private, AND parochial all pay for these things),
| which require actual skills to be developed to use
| effectively? Why should the teacher earn a salary for telling
| children to type into a text box? A computer could do the job
| of telling kids to "search Wikipedia" for less money, but a
| teacher can be more helpful to train students in the core
| academic skillset that is formal research.
|
| Why do we look at the state of affairs in which
| undergraduates even at "elite" schools arrive to universities
| completely unprepared to use any academic-caliber library
| research tools and consider that acceptable?
| dfxm12 wrote:
| I wonder what the actual message is compared to what gets back to
| the parent. Are teachers really saying "Don't use wikipedia" full
| stop, then turning around and accepting any other webpage as a
| scholarly source? That seems really unlikely.
|
| At worst, wikipedia is a tertiary source. I'm surprised I had to
| deal with this in college, but the teacher in one of my classes,
| after we submitted our first papers, felt the need to break this
| down and explain how to use wikipedia and properly cite sources
| in this context. I'm sure some kids turned off their ears after
| the beginning of that lecture...
| roywiggins wrote:
| It seems entirely apiece with how a rule begins ("Don't cite
| tertiary sources like encyclopedias, Wikipedia is an
| encyclopedia, so don't cite Wikipedia") and then gets
| simplified to the point of uselessness ("Don't cite Wikipedia",
| then finally "Don't use Wikipedia") and then generates its own
| inverse rule ("If it's not Wikipedia, you can use it").
|
| At each stage the _why_ gets shaved off and then people come up
| with their own reverse-engineered explanations ( "Don't use
| Wikipedia because it's edited all the time by randos, so it's
| less reliable than the other stuff you'll find online").
|
| You can see this with, eg, p-values- people learn the rule "A
| p-value measures the probability of obtaining the observed
| results, assuming that the null hypothesis is true." which
| becomes "a low p-value means we should reject the null
| hypothesis" becomes "a p-value is the probability the null
| hypothesis is true" (the inverse).
| d4rti wrote:
| What's code red mean in this context?
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Likely, an active shooter drill
| yellsatclouds wrote:
| ah, so training to trigger people's fears from a young age...
| you know, for safety.
| tbt wrote:
| School rarely helps with learning and almost always harms
| learning. If you're still sending your kids to school, be mindful
| that you're doing that for reasons other than to help them learn.
| JediWing wrote:
| That is a bold claim. In my experience school gave me exposure
| to subjects I would not have thought or been interested to
| explore on my own, and put structure around dedicated learning
| time.
|
| I have kids. I send them to school. They are learning!
|
| You might have a leg to stand on if your argument weren't so
| incredibly absolutist. I could certainly concede that American
| schools may be a less than optimal way to learn with some
| outmoded practices. There are certainly variances in
| educational quality.
|
| But school _rarely_ helps with learning? School _almost always_
| harms learning? I reject those claims as false on their face.
| tbt wrote:
| It rarely helps with learning vs. natural counterfactuals. It
| harms by socializing kids to not believe that their own
| curiosity is hopeworthy.
|
| See John Taylor Gatto's work.
|
| Instead of inefficient spending for large, programmed
| classes, you should have daycare/day supervision with lots of
| resources (books, internet, age-appropriate tinker equipment
| like electronics and tools and so on, microscopes,
| telescopes, a few adults on hand who are experts in whatever
| topic to help kids get traction / navigate), more free-
| rangness, less authoritarianness, more mastery learning, more
| apprenticeship.
| rvba wrote:
| I dont understand thr current trend on Wikipedia to add long
| quotes by various people to the articles. This makes fhr articles
| less concise. It also feels like reading material for 5th grade.
|
| I tried deleting those few times but often this led to edit wars.
| It feels as if in some cases some D tier people want to be quoted
| on wikipedia for stuff, so they add own quotes and "guard" them
| from taking them down.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| The flaw in the policy isn't don't use Wikipedia. It's don't use
| Wikipedia but then _do_ use Google and trust whatever comes up as
| top search result. That 's bad policy.
|
| Policy when I was in high school was don't _quote_ Wikipedia, but
| feel free to chase sources cited by it, read those, and analyze
| and quote those. This still has the potential for bias, of course
| (the editors on Wikipedia will have pruned the set of sources
| cited by the article), but the meta-goal was to teach students
| how to search primary sources (read: "Actually get up and go to
| a library and open a book,") so it achieved that goal even if the
| books were biased.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| I teach college and I still get college students straight out of
| high school who think that a web site is credible if it is a
| .org.
| js8 wrote:
| To me this misses what age group of kids are we talking about.
|
| If you're 12 and writing an essay on something as an exercise, go
| use Wikipedia. You will likely not be able to understand the
| primary sources, and secondary sources might be mixed bag.
|
| If you're in college, that's a different story. You should prefer
| primary sources, but Wikipedia is still a great starting point.
|
| I would say the primary problem is that libraries as a public
| good suck nowadays, but that is caused by copyright, a neoliberal
| version of enclosures.
|
| If you really have to tell kids not to use Wikipedia, point them
| to a real alternative - SciHub and LibGen. ;-P
| anon400232 wrote:
| As valued as SciHub and LibGen may be, they are repositories of
| mostly disjoint materials. They are not seamlessly
| interconnected.
|
| As a very basic bar to strive for, I don't think either offer
| full text search over their contents.
|
| Any recommendedation for third party tools that might help?
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| Many!
|
| In biology and medicine, pubmed is the most common (
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ ) .
|
| For general purpose you can use google scholar (
| https://scholar.google.com/ ).
|
| When you find an interesting article, both these tools will
| allow you to both seach backwards for articles that it cites,
| and search forwards for articles that cite it in turn.
| Repeated application can quickly help you expand the pool of
| potentially relevant articles (especially once you surface
| review articles in the citation chain, which can help tie
| things together and/or let you jump across to associated
| topics) .
|
| Finally, both of these tools yield you a DOI which you can
| plug into scihub. You can also install the extension "Sci-Hub
| X Now!" to do this last bit for you. (
| https://github.com/gchenfc/sci-hub-now )
| jacobolus wrote:
| Start with https://scholar.google.com or similar citation
| indices. When the full paper is not freely available, you can
| often paste a DOI into sci-hub.
| Avicebron wrote:
| What do you mean by full text search over their contents? I
| just found a full published article? Do you mean that there's
| a competing article on libgen? If so, that's fairly normal
| with science, it changes year to year or month to month,
| those articles can both be valid in some sense because they
| are time dependent.
| jrm4 wrote:
| That's funny, I literally have this discussion at the beginning
| of every semester of my college "Technology for Information
| Professionals" class.
|
| It's such a good icebreaker. Always starts with a timid "Oh, I
| can see reasons for both" and ends with "What were my teachers
| thinking? Anyway we would just cite the articles that Wikipedia
| cited to lol"
| mellosouls wrote:
| Wikipedia is a terrific resource for an overview - and sometimes
| in-depth - coverage of a subject.
|
| Where it might fail is - like a calculator (and obviously Google)
| - make research too easy; I can see that being an argument to at
| least change the focus of study methods in some cases.
|
| Another way it might fail as a resource is where the "expertise"
| of the editors contributing is biased (and therefore so is the
| content) towards the demographics of Wikipedia editors, eg
| leftist/white/male/middle class, which carries it's own
| significant risks of misinformation in some areas of knowledge
| where those biases are potentially harmful.
|
| Complacency towards this last point, which is breezily dismissed
| by the author with
|
| _" No agenda (or damn near no agenda, I mean, come on - show me
| a more neutral source for this information)"_
|
| severely undermines his argument.
| BashiBazouk wrote:
| I would think just taking everything at face value on the main
| wikipedia article might not be a good idea but if after reading
| the article, doing some verification by following the citation
| links or using the article and citation links as a jumping off
| point for further research would work as well as anything from
| the card catalog library days of my education.
| flerchin wrote:
| Is this guy me? He could be me. Literally had this same
| conversation with my kids this week.
| sagondis wrote:
| I had a fight with my 9th grade daughter on the exact same topic.
| She was arguing anything other than wikipedia is more accurate !
| MrTortoise wrote:
| I would expect wikipedias to be more accurate than teachers.
|
| I am a software engineer who spends his life showing people the
| origional sources of information to help them unpick collective
| repeated misunderstandings. That takes me, with more experience
| that my team combined to do that.
|
| teachers have experience of teaching - not possessing knowledge
| or the practises of sifting, applying and validating their
| hypothesis aroudn the veracity of information.
|
| Most curriculums are out of date in ways that don't matter all
| that much. But i still rekon wikipedia is still more up to date
| than them.
| nailer wrote:
| This is Wikipedia's fault.
|
| - Wikipedia know people mistakenly cite Wikipedia itself
|
| - Wikipedia agree that people should not do this
|
| - Wikipedia had the opportunity to educate Wikipedia's audience
| not to do this.
|
| - Wikipedia has not educated Wikipedia's audience not to cite
| Wikipedia itself.
|
| What they should have done:
|
| > We hope you find Wikipedia useful. Remember to never cite
| Wikipedia itself! Instead cite the websites and research papers
| Wikipedia cites. If information isn't cited by Wikipedia, don't
| use it! It can be added by anyone and can even be removed from
| Wikipedia at any time!
|
| That's all they needed to do.
| akolbe wrote:
| To be fair, they did and do. Every page contains a link at the
| bottom to a "Disclaimer", the first two paragraphs of which
| read as follows:
|
| "Wikipedia is an online open-content collaborative
| encyclopedia; that is, a voluntary association of individuals
| and groups working to develop a common resource of human
| knowledge. The structure of the project allows anyone with an
| Internet connection to alter its content. Please be advised
| that nothing found here has necessarily been reviewed by people
| with the expertise required to provide you with complete,
| accurate or reliable information.
|
| "That is not to say that you will not find valuable and
| accurate information in Wikipedia; much of the time you will.
| However, Wikipedia cannot guarantee the validity of the
| information found here. The content of any given article may
| recently have been changed, vandalized, or altered by someone
| whose opinion does not correspond with the state of knowledge
| in the relevant fields. Note that most other encyclopedias and
| reference works also have disclaimers."
|
| Moreover, see:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_not_a_r...
|
| It's just that people don't take any notice.
| graypegg wrote:
| One of the most useful parts of a wikipedia article are the table
| of references on every article, glad the author mentioned that.
| Maybe they've dealt with some uninterested teachers, but I only
| remember mine telling me to not CITE wikipedia, not that it was
| untouchable. For any topic, you have a starter kit of references
| to go and check out, with a light synopsis of why it's relevant
| so you can filter out the junk ones, that's a pretty valuable
| tool on it's own!
| kube-system wrote:
| This is probably a relic of what these teachers learned 20+ years
| ago when the internet had an higher ratio of academically
| spirited content, and wasn't yet entirely full of people trying
| to make a buck with pages that merely look like content to
| googlebot.
|
| Do schools still have subscriptions to things like LexisNexis? I
| feel like it would be eye opening to many students to see just
| how different an academic search engine is compared to public
| search engines.
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| Most (all?) of my schools did have a subscription (early
| 2000's), but it was only accessible at school on the school
| computers, so I basically never used it, because I did my
| homework/research at home.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Most schools have off campus proxies you can use now
| strangattractor wrote:
| Wow - these comments are wackier than anything I have ever read
| in Wikipedia. 1. Using XKCD as a source for academic malfeasance.
| 2. Thinking that encyclopedias should be/are written by a single
| individual. 3. Wikipedia's editorial policies result in the
| amplification and ossification of (political, academic, medical,
| etc.) establishment narratives and standards, which are often
| corrupt for a wide variety of reasons. 4. Wikipedia is anti-
| useful.
|
| I'll add my own.
|
| Wikipedia causes halitosis and ED.
|
| Before Wikipedia people did not have to evaluate their sources.
|
| Wikipedia is causing the culture wars in the US.
|
| Kids should be looking things up in the card catalog because it
| teaches patience and persistence.
|
| Wikipedia articles don't cover the topics in depth......
| davidjfelix wrote:
| This is the kind of FACT based analysis I look for when
| complaining about computers on a computer forum. Could you
| possibly assign a "truth score" to this for me so that I can
| ask a scholarly journal (which has never been accused of
| publishing falsified data) to publish it!?
|
| Sorry for the sarcasm. I've been rolling my eyes at the
| comments too. Where do these lunatics come from?
| [deleted]
| SevenNation wrote:
| > If I thought it would be even remotely worth doing, I would
| fight this shit at the school. Sadly, I do not.
|
| This statement (and the general sense of the author's emotional
| state) makes me wonder whether the author has actually spoken
| with teachers or is getting his information from his kids. Kids
| are just as capable of spinning facts for effect as adults. Or
| ignoring nuance. Or straight up misinterpretation.
|
| Before "fighting" the school, the first step should be to
| understand the school's position. Then the teacher's position.
| Only after the actual facts are on the table should a decision
| about action be taken.
|
| The author appears to be doing the same thing he rails against
| the school for doing: treating a single source as the beginning
| and end of the story.
| aimor wrote:
| Every now and then I like to read through Wikipedia pages for
| things I know more than the average person on. It keeps me
| skeptical of the things I read on there. For people unfamiliar
| with a subject (students) I think Wikipedia pages are misleading,
| poorly organized, and sometimes wrong. That doesn't make
| Wikipedia useless, but the author's best advice is to use
| Wikipedia as a map to other sources of information.
|
| I don't think Wikipedia has a path forwards for fixing the
| quality of its articles. In my opinion it requires every page
| being rewritten by an expert with a single voice, as a
| traditional encyclopedia would have, which is the exact opposite
| of Wikipedia's core. Though I did check, and they have more than
| enough cash to write a traditional encyclopedia.
| onetimeusename wrote:
| I agree about pages being poorly organized. It's what happens
| when dozens if not hundreds of people edit a page. Some pages
| probably have orders of magnitude more edits/editors making
| changes. It destroys the flow between sentences when people
| fixate on small edits. That's generally not the case though, I
| have seen many high quality pages which tend to have a few,
| knowledgeable editors who watch it.
| encylopinion wrote:
| I stopped using Wikipedia a while ago.
|
| Its math and science content is too nonsensical to be useful.
|
| I occasionally read a history article, maybe once every 6
| months. But history from things happening hundreds to thousands
| of years ago, predating modern media... sorry historians, it
| might as well be fiction.
|
| I'm sure someone has thought long and hard about why the
| content is losing quality.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "Its math and science content is too nonsensical to be
| useful."
|
| Can you name a example?
|
| I found them to be generally of higher quality than
| controversial topics. So maybe not always with the best
| didactic approach, but usually a good start. And then I
| follow the links, if I want to dive in deep.
|
| Wikipedia is useful for me, for quickly checking something.
| Not scientifically dive into a deep topic.
| bhk wrote:
| A problem in mathematics is that mathematicians do not
| always agree on the definitions of things -- even very
| fundamental concepts [1] [2] -- and so Wikipedia in the
| interest of neutrality presents all definitions in use. In
| a given textbook, an author will choose one set of
| definitions and stick with them, which makes things
| manageable for the reader. In Wikipedia, the number of
| alternative interpretations of a sentence grows
| geometrically with the number of ambiguous terms.
|
| [1] What is a "natural number" (do they start at 0 or 1?)
|
| [2] What is a "function"? Does it carry along a "co-
| domain"?
| thebooktocome wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_differential_equati
| o...
|
| Repetitive content, written at several levels
| simultaneously, weird fixations on tangential topics.
| scythe wrote:
| >written at several levels simultaneously,
|
| I don't understand why this bothers people. If something
| on Wikipedia is above or below my level, I just skip it.
| It takes all of three seconds to recognize. I've
| consistently found it to be a great starting point for
| self-study in all sorts of math.
| thebooktocome wrote:
| A novice isn't always going to know the difference
| between something they could understand with effort and
| something they don't have the context to understand.
|
| It's an incredibly common cause of anxiety in math
| education, and even if you're not personally affected by
| it others may be.
| scythe wrote:
| >It's an incredibly common cause of anxiety in math
| education
|
| I question whether this can be a root cause of anxiety.
| Simply not understanding stuff does not normally cause
| anxiety. Most people don't get anxious looking at, for
| example, Chinese characters.
|
| On the other hand, imputing that something should be
| frightening can actually cause a fear response:
|
| https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1993-20380-001
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030105
| 110...
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/nn1968
|
| Teaching students that incomprehensible math should
| frighten them doesn't seem like a good approach. There
| are no grades or critical teachers when you're passively
| reading a Wikipedia article.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| For sure, but Wikipedia aims to be a Encyclopedia and not
| a math course.
|
| Now it surely would be nice, if it could work more like
| it.
|
| That wikipedia knows my skill set and automatically hides
| or show additional paragraphs in certain topics etc. or
| even the paragraph in a simpler language etc.
|
| But this a bit more ambitious - and not really achievable
| with the current approach. So if I want a math course, I
| search for a math course.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| Would you be so kind as to mention the issues in the talk
| page of said article?
| thebooktocome wrote:
| Nope. Been burned by Wikipedia editors being territorial
| and deletionist way too many times.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| Not only that, 4 paragraphs until the first citation, 16
| paragraphs until the next one. All that information might
| be correct, but there's no easy way to confirm it.
|
| PDEs are a significant enough thing that the article is
| probably correct. But once you get into more niche math
| articles, a lot of the writing is incorrect.
| random314 wrote:
| Once again, any articles with incorrect content that you
| can cite?
| xg15 wrote:
| My personal annoyance with Wikipedia articles on advanced
| math is that often it's "monoid in the category of
| endofunctors" on steroids.
|
| A lot of those articles seem to follow a pattern of: "An A
| is a B that also does C".
|
| If you click on the link to understand what a B is, you get
| "B is a D in the space of Es with properties F and G".
|
| and so on...
|
| I can understand that this appears logically consistent and
| very satisfying for people who have already understood the
| concepts, but it doesn't help at all if you're trying to
| gain an understanding.
|
| A good textbook has a sense of order in which dependent
| concepts are introduced. With Wikipedia, the task of
| discovering that order is outsourced to the reader. Maybe
| you could develop some kind of path finding algorithm to
| figure out the optimal reading order for understanding a
| given concept, but to my knowledge, that doesn't exist yet.
|
| The other problem is that no shortcuts are offered. Even if
| you figure out the order yourself, Wikipedia gives you no
| hints _how much_ of B, C, D, E and F you have to understand
| to get the idea of A. The expectation seems to be to read
| the entire articles on the dependent concepts, which can be
| long, rambling and full of obscure special cases.
| Nimitz14 wrote:
| Wikipedia is by definition a reference. If you want to
| learn something use different material. Trying to make
| wikipedia articles tutorials is out of scope (not that it
| isn't nice to get practical examples for concepts, which
| ime there often are!)
| GTP wrote:
| But I think that this is a core difference between an
| encyclopaedia and a textbook. If you need the topics
| presented in an order that takes you from a certain level
| of understanding to the next, you need a textbook.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Well that's the problem. An encyclopedia should neither
| provide nor need such an ordering. But Wikipedia often
| does need it, while also not providing it, the worst of
| both worlds.
| threatofrain wrote:
| Wikipedia math has competition and they are generally
| much harsher than Wikipedia, which indicates the
| direction which communities of volunteers wish to go when
| they disagree with Wikipedia's execution.
|
| https://ncatlab.org/
|
| https://kerodon.net/
|
| https://stacks.math.columbia.edu/
|
| The people who are looking up references to advanced math
| concepts are likely students who are already on a
| mainstream pedagogical pathway and are looking to fill in
| holes to a concept map they're already building.
|
| The use case of someone who (1) does not wish to consult
| the vast and well-discussed pedagogy of math and (2) is
| not an advanced math student and thus wishes to have
| stand-alone math definitions is a Very special case.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > Wikipedia math has competition and they are generally
| much harsher than Wikipedia, which indicates the
| direction which communities of volunteers wish to go when
| they disagree with Wikipedia's execution.
|
| Okay, but I don't think those communities are relevant to
| this conversation.
|
| > The use case of someone who (1) does not wish to
| consult the vast and well-discussed pedagogy of math and
| (2) is not an advanced math student and thus wishes to
| have stand-alone math definitions is a Very special case.
|
| Number 1 is a weird assumption! Unless by "consult" you
| mean spend weeks studying a textbook, the problem is that
| consulting is too difficult! And if I understand
| "harsher" correctly you just said the other sites are
| harder to use, didn't you?
|
| So then it's just "not an advanced math student", which
| may or may not be a majority of people on these pages but
| it's a very significant amount and it's the more
| important target for a general encyclopedia.
| random314 wrote:
| Have you tried Simple wikipedia? Also, wikipedia is a
| reference, not a textbook.
| threatofrain wrote:
| There are alternative wikis for math and they're way
| harsher.12 Wikipedia is the middle ground between math
| wikis written by current students and professionals vs
| pedagogues.3 But I'd argue that if you want pedagogy or
| step by step proofs, then why not simply buy a well
| vetted textbook, of which math has many?
|
| Also, Wikipedia tried a wiki textbook project and no
| doubt people were very unsatisfied because they couldn't
| compete with textbooks, which often have a singular
| pedagogical vision behind it. It's hard to compete with
| famous well discussed texts.
|
| I'm happy with Wikipedia as a _reference_ which
| supplements those students who are already studying the
| material; in other words, those students looking up
| topics in Linear Algebra are taking or have taken the
| course already.
|
| [1]: https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/linear+algebra
|
| [2]: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/algebra/#Lin
|
| [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_algebra
| xg15 wrote:
| That's certainly true, buy I think it also makes it quite
| unsuited as a reference (except for people who are
| already familiar with the concepts and just need a quick
| reminder).
|
| Wikipedia math articles are not useful to get a shallow
| understanding of a topic. On the contrary, it pulls you
| into a rabbit hole of dependent concepts just for you
| just to be able to understand the words in the article's
| summary.
|
| From an actual reference, I'd expect that it gives a
| brief, self-contained description of the basic idea of a
| concept, without going too deep into specifics, possibly
| with a "see also". That's not what Wikipedia does.
| jacobolus wrote:
| The problem with math and science content is that there are
| many possible audiences with many possible backgrounds, and
| such content tends to require substantial prerequisite
| knowledge. So when you have a source edited by anyone, you
| end up with a hodgepodge of different material aimed at
| different audiences with different expectations of
| background. It takes a lot of effort and expertise to rewrite
| this mishmash into a clear and coherent narrative.
|
| This is a much harder problem for an encyclopedia than for a
| textbook chapter or a journal paper, because each article is
| supposed to (somewhat) stand alone and be both broadly
| accessible and somewhat comprehensive. For a textbook chapter
| you can systematically build up prerequisite knowledge from
| earlier chapters and you can assume that students will spend
| significant time and effort working problems and will have
| some expert guidance and support if they get stuck. For a
| journal article you can assume readers have deep subject-
| matter expertise, e.g. have a PhD in the field. In both of
| those cases you can leave out most information about the
| topic as clearly out of scope.
|
| Traditional encyclopedias typically punt by just not
| including much technical detail at all. (Some Wikipedia
| articles also do this.)
|
| * * *
|
| As a basic example, let's think about what might be included
| in an article about "circle". You can look at this from a
| kindergartener's point of view, or a high school geometry
| student's, or an ancient astronomer's, or a physicist's, or a
| signal processing engineer's, or a 19th century projective
| geometer's, or a complex analyst's, or a group theorist's, or
| an algebraic geometer's, or a topologist's, or a number
| theorist's, or an ergodic theorist's, etc. Some of these
| audiences are easy enough to satisfy, but to provide deep
| comprehensive coverage of the way a fundamental concept like
| the circle is related to every mathematical field is going to
| take careers worth of background. Which parts to attempt,
| which parts to skip, and how to organize them is a very
| challenging set of editorial choices.
| Uyuxo wrote:
| "But history from things happening hundreds to thousands of
| years ago, predating modern media... sorry historians, it
| might as well be fiction."
|
| What? I'm confused on what you're saying here. Are you
| stating there are no primary sources on history from more
| than a few hundred years ago? All history is made up? I'm
| sure there are poor quality historical articles, but I
| wouldn't go so far to call all history "fiction".
| brnaftr361 wrote:
| History is very much an interpretive science. You can infer
| a lot of things from a site that predates written history.
| One of the salient examples were some severely deformed
| bodies found ritually positioned with assumed valuables.
| And that's all the context you get, and now you have to
| frame it with anthropologically modern references polluted
| with ideologies like Hobbes/Rousseau while conjointly
| projecting Holmberg's mistake into the past when the
| concept of "marginal" people didn't exist. There's a lot of
| errors that can arise and a lot of features that can
| metamorphose into only a distant conception of what once
| was.
|
| And even then, records are questioned. Sometimes period
| historians really had to stick their necks out to speak the
| truth (and in the most literal sense) so direct impressions
| we have of certain elements of history may be reasonably
| called into question. And there are numerous historians
| that are known to have fabricated elements.
| reaperducer wrote:
| Some people actually think this way.
|
| I once worked with someone in an important position in a
| major media organization who believed nothing was recorded
| before the printing press, and was quite vocal about it. He
| quite strongly believed that everything else was made up.
|
| I always wanted to ask him what he thought about Egyptian
| hieroglyphs, but he was too far above my pay grade to
| approach or challenge.
| pseudostem wrote:
| As someone who reads a lot of history, please head over to
| r/AskHistorians
|
| It has very strong moderation, and low quality answers are
| deleted. Their papers cite methods and hypothesis which
| removes a lot of "fiction" from the equation.
|
| Also, they get quoted in mainstream media too. The content
| quality is out of this world.
| winphone1974 wrote:
| So you stopped using it, but now use it less, and you read
| history articles that are fiction because they're so old, but
| the quality had declined recently? Pick a lane.
| random314 wrote:
| Also maths and science is "too nonsensical".
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Books are still where the good stuff's at. Even some
| periodicals.
|
| Not sure what went wrong with the Internet but it's not
| living up to the early hype, and doesn't really even seem to
| be heading the right direction.
| dublin wrote:
| But real books on real topics have been getting purged from
| libraries (especially school libraries) for well over a
| decade now. In many school districts, older books
| containing actual truths, are _destroyed_ rather than
| marked as removed from circulation and re-sold. Some
| libraries I know of locally purged almost all of their
| books on "old, white" history, and replaced them with
| "more modern" bullshit works by "CRT" writers.
|
| To the point of this article, much of this is driven by the
| teachers, who say they will not accept sources that might
| have "social biases" (as if it were possible for any book
| to not have those!) The library then purges those books
| because "no one has checked them out in a couple of years".
|
| The sad thing is that almost 100% of books being added to
| the libraries fall into just a few categories: Books
| promoting or "celebrating" perverted sex of any and all
| kinds (including pretty much all "youth fiction"), Manga,
| or "Graphic Novels" (let's face it, some have good artwork,
| but are really just nicely bound and printed comic books,
| usually with little to no redeeming educational value.)
|
| Sadly, I don't know a single person under 30 who has a clue
| how to actually _use_ a library to find real sources - they
| all just default to Googling. The web is amazing, but what
| 's NOT on it is staggering, and of amazing quality and
| scholarship (which is itself a lost art...)
|
| More worryingly, I've seen a LOT of valuable content vanish
| from the search engines, which just shoves that content
| right down the memory hole, using the same flawed logic as
| those high school librarians - no one's asked for it
| _recently_.
|
| We lose access to and context for valuable information when
| our search engines (it's all about the money from hits and
| eyeballs) only keep what is "popular". Alas, we've replaced
| Carnegie Libraries with Kardashian libraries, to our great
| loss...
| winphone1974 wrote:
| I'm confused by what you think the internet is, and this
| hype you feel it's failing?
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Are you not familiar with the hype that it'd become the
| end-all-be-all repository of human knowledge? It's been
| talked about that way since at least the 90s. It's not
| uncommon to see people on this site post sentiments that
| it _has_ achieved that--in some fields, kinda, in many
| others you can barely scratch the surface before you
| _have to_ hit a library (probably a university library,
| and you may need ILL) to keep going, or if you 're _very_
| lucky the book you need exists in digital form and you
| can buy or pirate a copy, but the "open Web" simply does
| not have the info you want, and even if it does have it,
| it's a crap-shoot whether it's presented and organized at
| least as well as some print version you could get
| instead.
| paganel wrote:
| Ignoring the very controversial topics, like Israel and
| Palestine or the current war in Ukraine, Wikipedia can be a
| very good starting point when it comes to history.
|
| The entries are not exhaustive nor are all of them very
| scientific-sounding, but at least the basic facts which we
| sort of know of are there.
| nkingsy wrote:
| We are all watching user-generated content destroy the very
| concept of truth, and Wikipedia is example A1.
|
| There is no solution. Perhaps truth was always an illusion, but
| the illusion has been destroyed and it is unravelling society.
|
| A consensus of reputation used to govern these things, but now
| reputation means almost nothing and there are no mechanisms for
| consensus on the web. Attempts at consensus are all based in
| censorship and what remains of reputation is a perverted proxy
| for "ability to get attention".
| kube-system wrote:
| "Consensus of experts" and "consensus of internet users" can
| also be two entirely different things.
| wpietri wrote:
| I don't see any particular reason to think that Wikipedia is
| worse than what existed prior. What exemplar from, say, 1980,
| do you think was better in terms of information quality?
|
| I'm thinking back to going in to a library, where a given
| topic would generally have 0-3 books. Books often put
| together by a single person, a person often chosen because of
| personal relationships with a publisher, plus that
| publisher's intent to turn a profit. Or opening up a daily
| newspaper, where I might get a few paragraphs on a topic,
| written by one person and edited by a couple more, all paid
| for by an ad-supported company run by people who often had
| local political connections.
|
| There may be no mechanism for consensus on the web, but
| Wikipedia certainly has one, one that has worked reasonably
| well for 20 years at this point.
| nkingsy wrote:
| It worked for a time and now it is dying at the hands of
| bad-faith actors who have worked within their mechanism.
| wpietri wrote:
| That's an interesting claim. Where's your evidence?
|
| I'll also note you must have missed my question, as I
| don't think you have answered it.
| nkingsy wrote:
| disclaimer: Yes the grayzone hires RT reporters and has a
| strongly anti-us take on pretty much everything. Please
| don't spout "russian propagandist" takes. They've been
| heard plenty. This is the lack of truth I'm talking
| about. These are investigative journalists--a dying breed
| that western propagandists are attempting to make
| extinct.
|
| https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/10/wikipedia-formally-
| censor...
| wpietri wrote:
| That's not evidence, that's a series of disconnected
| vague complaints from a publisher who is salty that
| they're not considered a reliable source. They complain
| about conflicts of interest, but I didn't see them even
| acknowledging their own. I also couldn't find any
| financial transparency, so it's not clear to me who is
| funding this or their other writing.
|
| And I'll point out for the last time that you still
| haven't answered my initial question. If you're just
| going to keep dodging, I think I'm done here.
| nkingsy wrote:
| I thought the article answered your question pretty well
| and they clearly state on their about page that they are
| not backed by any government and rely on donations.
|
| The entire internet points to wikipedia and its consensus
| mechanism is inherently vulnerable to editors for hire,
| as clearly demonstrated with scores of links.
|
| So my answer is "pick any publication from 1980 and it is
| better because its bias can be audited and it is not
| polluting every search query I make"
| wpietri wrote:
| They _claim_ they are not backed by any governments, but
| decline to say who is backing them. Just as an example I
| came across yesterday, the San Francisco Standard is
| "not backed by any government and rely on donations", but
| their funding comes from a billionaire venture
| capitalist. The same claim could be truthfully made by a
| site backed by a Russian oligarch just as well. And
| regardless, there's no evidence.
|
| I agree that Wikipedia's mechanism has its challenges;
| anybody who knows the site does. But it's vastly better
| than "any publication from 1980" because every edit is
| tracked, the citations should be available for all to
| see, and people can object to and/or edit bad content.
|
| Just as an example of how a book from the olden tymes
| could go wrong, consider Trump's "The Art of the Deal".
| It sold more than a million copies, but its ghostwriter
| took 20 years to admit that it was a lot of horseshit:
| https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-
| trumps-...
|
| Wikipedia is way more auditable than that book or most
| books from that era. And way more auditable than The Gray
| Zone that you've chosen to cite.
| throw10920 wrote:
| > There is no solution.
|
| How an an explicit web of trust not a solution?
|
| Imagine a system where you can keep a local database of
| people/sites/pages you know and how much you trust them,
| selectively expose parts of that database to your immediate
| friends and/or the web as a whole, and lookup/query the
| databases exposed by contacts.
|
| "My friend F1 assigns a trust score of 0.9 to website W1, and
| I assign a trust score of 0.9 to F1, so I trust this site
| 0.81 and I'm willing to make financial transactions on it
| without further research (but not give it my SSN)."
|
| "My friend F2 trusts random R1 0.7, who trusts random R2 0.5,
| who trusts random R3 0.4, who is pushing this new
| cryptocurrency - maybe I should talk with F2 about R1 and R2
| before doing _anything_ with this... "
|
| "My friend F3 distrusts site W2 with a score of -0.7, I'm not
| going to shop there."
|
| "My friend F4 is a history expert and distrusts this
| Wikipedia page on history with a score of -0.5, so it's
| probably not reliable."
|
| What would be wrong with this system?
| kube-system wrote:
| You're described a system that tells you what your friends
| think, not a system that necessarily comes to any objective
| truth. The internet is already full of echo chambers of
| misplaced trust -- that's much of the problem.
|
| Linking echo chambers to mutually trusted echo chambers
| isn't going to lead people to objective truth. It's going
| to introduce flat-earthers to ghost hunters.
| [deleted]
| ohwellhere wrote:
| You're solving for trust rather than "truth". Of course,
| there may be no truth, hence GP's:
|
| > > Perhaps truth was always an illusion
|
| But my interpretation of what they meant by "very concept
| of truth" is something like "consensus reality;" where the
| vast majority of people trust something is true. A network
| of trust is fragmented bubbles of distinct truths.
|
| > What would be wrong with this system?
|
| For starters, I don't know that it's a priori better than
| the current fragmented bubbles of distinct truths we have.
| Are more fragmented bubbles better? For some populations or
| people, maybe; for society? It's less clear.
|
| But I think the real thing wrong with web of trust systems
| is that the value is tied up in network effects and you
| have to solve for adoption.
|
| ---
|
| I say that as someone who generally thinks this is a useful
| way of approaching the problem of trust. I've brainstormed
| building this too many times to count. :)
| nkingsy wrote:
| I won't argue the trust system presented here other than to
| say it sounds exhausting.
|
| I want everyone to get as close a proximity to the truth as
| is possible and for us as a society to achieve consensus
| around what are the facts and what should be done about
| them.
|
| What you describe, at scale, is a social credit system. It
| does feel like an inevitability and one that will produce
| unprecedented collateral damage, but may save civilization.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| My ability to evaluate people's ability to evaluate
| people's ability to evaluate people's ability to evaluate
| article truth is very low.
|
| In other words, a web of trust trying to replace Wikipedia
| is useless to me after a couple hops, so next to zero
| material will be covered by it.
| akolbe wrote:
| "The apparent accuracy of a Wikipedia article is inversely
| proportional to the depth of the reader's knowledge of the
| topic." - Kozierok's First Law
| EGreg wrote:
| I have found the opposite... there is hardly a consistsntly
| more organized and accurate source that is accessible to the
| public, but I would be glad to hear what it is if you have one
| in mind.
|
| Wikipedia is far more trustworthy than local news channels even
| about recent events, and everything is sources (casualty count:
| who said it etc.)
| sk55 wrote:
| I think Wikipedia is a great start to finding content at a
| general level.
|
| Though, vertical specific niches often have better sources of
| information. For e.g. Examine.com currently seems better for
| nutrition and supplement information. Or even an old school
| reference book like The Art of Computer Programming by Donald
| Knuth is better for algorithms.
| bawolff wrote:
| > Or even an old school reference book like The Art of
| Computer Programming by Donald Knuth is better for
| algorithms.
|
| It is rediculous to compare an encyclopedia like wikipedia
| to an advanced text like Knuth. They aren't trying to do
| the same thing.
| EGreg wrote:
| I disagree that the old school books are better. It is like
| saying MacOS 7 is better than today's Linux that has many
| people fixing bugs and expanding its features over the
| years
| concordDance wrote:
| > Wikipedia is far more trustworthy than local news channels
| even about recent events, and everything is sources (casualty
| count: who said it etc.)
|
| That's more due to the very low quality of news.
| EGreg wrote:
| What is CONSISTENTLY higher quality that wikipedia?
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| Wikipedia is often okay for science articles.
|
| I find many of the mathematics articles to be difficult to
| read. I'll look at a mathematics concept that I think I
| understand (or even use often), and it will be written in
| jargon that is completely incomprehensible to me.
|
| However, where Wikipedia really has a problem is in
| contemporary politics. Anything that is even remotely political
| is probably controlled by one or another clique of editors.
| There are opposing cliques that battle over every Israel-
| Palestine article, or over whether to use the Serbian or
| Croatian name for village X that existed 200 years ago, or
| about whether hummus is Lebanese or Syrian or Israeli or
| Levantine. There are also subjects in which one clique has
| gained complete dominance and is able to completely control a
| whole topic area. If you start looking at the edit histories
| and talk pages of articles on one topic, you'll come to realize
| how influential relatively small numbers of motivated (and
| sometimes coordinated, though this is against Wikipedia's
| rules) editors can be.
|
| That's why I'd take anything that's even remotely politically
| contentious on Wikipedia with an enormous grain of salt.
| verisimilitudes wrote:
| > Wikipedia is often okay for science articles.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman (4th paragraph)
| witherk wrote:
| I have definitely seen some bad science promoted for trans
| rights. But I don't really think "science" tells us what a
| women is, that's a social issue.
| concordDance wrote:
| One of wikipedias biggest issues is its inability to cope
| with words that have different but overlapping meanings.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| It's clearly a scientific issue, but also a social issue.
| There is a scientific definition of what a woman is, and
| there is a social definition (which is very close to the
| scientific definition, but which does depend a bit on
| culture and which can change over time). A lot of the
| debate comes from people talking past one another,
| without acknowledging that they're using the same word to
| discuss different topics.
| [deleted]
| ccn0p wrote:
| this 100%. and so many things have been politicized which
| then causes revisionist/selective history that it's hard to
| trust a lot of the content... sadly. I used to have so much
| faith and hope in wikipedia.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| If you want to see the mother of all Wikipedia cabals, take
| a look at the Eastern European mailing list, which was
| exposed more than 10 years ago.
|
| It was a group of editors who conspired to game Wikipedia's
| rules (for example, "thou shalt not revert more than three
| times per day" can be circumvented by calling in a friend
| to revert for you). What makes the story really crazy is
| that they were exposed by Wikileaks, which published a
| giant stack of email threads between the conspirators.
|
| This is a run-down of some of the things the most powerful
| member of the group, an administrator, said: https://wikile
| aks.org/wiki/Wikipediametric_mailinglist/Piotr....
| jarenmf wrote:
| I have an opposite experience. I'm a scientist and my research
| topic is accurately depicted in Wikipedia I would say better
| than any textbook. Of course Wikipedia has to be reductionist,
| it is not required to provide a full literature review for any
| topic. If you are doing a PhD-level research, then Wikipedia
| will fall short of providing the latest and finest details.
| Other than that, it's more than enough. I also believe it is
| the duty of experts to contribute to improving Wikipedia (I
| know many who do).
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| It depends on the topics. I have some knowledge in hard science
| topics and IT and like you I sometimes read the relevant pages.
|
| They are usually great and very accurate. They are also usually
| in "layers" with more basic information first and then more
| details.
|
| I guess this is because you can hardly argue with an integral,
| as opposed to who the greatest baseball player was.
| jancsika wrote:
| > Every now and then I like to read through Wikipedia pages for
| things I know more than the average person on. It keeps me
| skeptical of the things I read on there.
|
| I wrote a dissertation on Conlon Nancarrow's Player Piano Study
| No. 36.
|
| Skimming the facts in the article on Conlon Nancarrow,
| everything looks to be both true and relevant to Nancarrow's
| life and musical output. I could make a few small improvements.
| E.g., the proportions of tempos among the twelve voices in
| Study No. 37 are taken from a peculiar tuning system that
| apparently only appears in Cowell's _New Musical Resources_.
| Making that connection would tie in nicely to the previous
| section that mentions the influence of Cowell 's book on
| Nancarrow. (I believe that connection is made in Kyle Gann's
| book in case anyone wants to go ahead and make that edit.)
|
| > That doesn't make Wikipedia useless, but the author's best
| advice is to use Wikipedia as a map to other sources of
| information.
|
| As an expert on Conlon Nancarrow's music, I approve of using
| the Wikipedia article about him as a useful and accurate
| starting point for learning about his life and music.
|
| Until I read a citation on a current Wikipedia article in your
| area of expertise that has factually inaccurate information in
| it, I can only reserve judgment on your opinion about
| Wikipedia's veracity.
| IncRnd wrote:
| Wikipedia, in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.org,
| specifically mentions this exact issue. [1]
| The content of any given article may recently have been
| changed, vandalized, or altered by someone whose opinion
| does not correspond with the state of knowledge in the
| relevant fields.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:General_disclaimer
| prerok wrote:
| Yes and any reader citing it would be best advised to check
| the page history and comments section. Teaching that to
| children would also be a good way of showing and exposing
| these vandalisms. They might learn to use it better then.
|
| Outright discarding one of the best sources of information
| humanity has ever created is IMHO just plain wrong. I would
| understand it if this were people writing doctorates but
| anything below university level should definitely use it.
| BeetleB wrote:
| It's always good to tech people to check the history and
| comments. However, when you cite a Wikipedia article,
| you're supposed to cite a _particular revision_. That 's
| what the "Cite" link does.
| [deleted]
| bergenty wrote:
| What a bunch of bull, use specific examples if you're trying to
| make claims like that. I also read articles I'm an expert in
| and I'm always amazed how complete the articles are.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| Wikipedia is all about the citations. 90% of my Wikipedia edits
| are either adding citations or [Citation Needed] if I couldn't
| find a source for an uncited claim.
|
| There are some math and physics articles that can go 10
| paragraphs without a single citation. They'd be great blog
| posts or chapters in a book. But they're poor quality Wikipedia
| articles.
| MajimasEyepatch wrote:
| I've definitely read some Wikipedia pages on niche technical
| topics in my field that were clearly written by someone with
| _some_ degree of expertise (maybe a grad student) but with no
| understanding of the purpose, standards, and style of
| Wikipedia. The voice is often all over the place.
| ilyanep wrote:
| A large number of my larger edits are fixing up voice /
| tone to make an article read more like an encyclopedia and
| less like an excited blog post.
| OJFord wrote:
| What stops me editing more (usually it's a
| grammatical/formatting error I want to fix, or where I
| think a link to another page is warranted) is IP blocks.
| I'm logged in! Why do you care what my IP is! I have a
| (small) track record but most importantly it's all going
| against my name and if I'm doing bad things you can just
| block _me_!
|
| I understand anon IP blocks, of course. But not logged-in
| ones. Especially when (afaict) all of Mullvad's (London at
| least) IPs are blocked.
| nerdponx wrote:
| I've seen this too. Sometimes they seem like they are
| copied and pasted from whatever the person already happened
| to be writing when they came across the Wikipedia page.
| prova_modena wrote:
| Yeah absolutely. I've seen non-wiki-savvy experts do these
| kind of edits, get reverted, and stop editing wikipedia
| forever because the whole experience left a sour taste in
| their mouth. I recently found the essay below targeted to
| exactly that audience, it's super useful to helping experts
| who want to contribute.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Expert_editors
| tomp wrote:
| Why would a math article need citations? A proof is a proof.
| simiones wrote:
| Only for experts capable of following the proof. For
| everyone else, it's a magical formula.
|
| Not to mention, I very very much doubt that those articles
| prove every property they present (since I've never seen a
| math text of any kind do that, essentially).
| Someone wrote:
| You'll always need some axioms to build on.
|
| If you allow that, proofs made using proof assistants
| prove every property they present.
|
| And of course, Principia Mathematica
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principia_Mathematica) is
| a non-computer example.
|
| Both get tedious fast if you try to understand a proof
| from the axioms up. That's why you'll rarely find a
| publication starting from almost zero.
| [deleted]
| palunon wrote:
| Aside from the fact that proofs are often difficult to
| verify, one cannot prove what a monoid or a vector space
| is. They are definitions, and to make sure the ones in the
| article match what is used in the mathematical community,
| you need citations.
|
| And yes, sometimes there are conflicts. In France, we have
| two competing definition of a limit (relating to wether you
| include the point in its neighbourhood), one being the
| traditional one, taught in schools, and one being the one
| that's become the world standard and used from university
| onwards.
|
| How do you arbiter that on wikipedia without sources ?
| chobytes wrote:
| I always chuckle when I see some like basic logical steps
| slapped with "citation needed".
| nerdponx wrote:
| Because that's essentially original research. If it's a
| known proof, it should exist in written form somewhere
| else, which you can cite. if it's novel, it belongs
| somewhere other than Wikipedia.
| bawolff wrote:
| Because wikipedia is not trying to report the capital-T
| Truth. Its goal is to summarize human knowledge found by
| others.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| You could cite all of the notations that you introduce
| because that tends to be a mess.
| chobytes wrote:
| Unfortunately I think 10 page expositions/derivations are the
| highest quality math and physics pages. I think the wikipedia
| style is fundamentally incompatible with communicating this
| kind of information unfortunately.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Wikipedia's math articles are so bad that I can't even follow
| the ones about things I already know.
| gpm wrote:
| Wikipedia's math articles can be dense and assume you're an
| expert, but I've never known them to be wrong.
| kbelder wrote:
| There's other types of bad than wrongness.
| ghaff wrote:
| Math is one of the main categories--although there are
| other especially adjacent ones--where I often think that
| 1.) You either already know this stuff or you're going to
| emerge no more enlightened and probably click elsewhere
| after the first few sentences, and 2.) Some people really
| love to play with their equation editors.
| krastanov wrote:
| Could you give examples of these topics?
|
| Most math and physics pages I have seen on wikipedia are about
| as good as an average textbook. The French wikipedia is way
| better for math, but the English one is not bad.
| GCA10 wrote:
| Well said. It's especially frustrating to come across what I'll
| call "Mudslide Pages" for prominent entities. These consist of
| a decade or more of minor news items, piled atop one another.
| No effort to distill key elements of these entities' impact --
| let alone the how and why of what they do. It's just endless
| what and when.
|
| So on top-tier companies, the pages are cluttered with details
| of brief moves in and out of old headquarters buildings -- plus
| long-ago product rollouts and cancellations -- plus stock-
| market zigzags in 2013, 2015, etc. For authors/artists, each
| work is treated in isolation, without an effort to define their
| style and how it evolved.
|
| There's no natural entry path for a subject expert to step in
| and make it all coherent. Instead, the mudslides just keep
| coming.
| NavinF wrote:
| I've noticed a similar phenomenon on pages about machine
| learning. There are entire sections about now-obsolete ideas
| that people only talked about for a few months before moving
| on.
| random314 wrote:
| Are those pages inaccurate? Any examples?
| nerdponx wrote:
| This is different, because I think often those pages are
| written by the individuals themselves, or representatives for
| the companies.
| ghaff wrote:
| I think it's more that's it's super-easy to add some
| factoid whether or not it really adds to the article in
| question. See what happens whenever a "notable" section
| gets started in some article in a community of any size.
| jrm4 wrote:
| This is literally the worst idea I've ever heard here on HN.
| Completely guts the core of what makes Wikipedia great. It's
| not a classic "encyclopedia" and that's GOOD.
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| What is an example of an article you think is misleading or
| wrong?
| Glyptodon wrote:
| Eh, I don't think Wikipedia is perfect - and the smaller and
| less frequented the article the more weird it might be. But
| most of the time it's mostly going to be right about stuff like
| who was president in 1887, and have citations to elsewhere,
| which is a lot more than can be said for the average random
| Google result.
|
| A couple days ago I was kind of annoyed that the article on
| Greensleeves didn't include lyrics.
| winphone1974 wrote:
| But the entire point of Wikipedia is that there is no possible
| way a traditional gatekeeping expert encyclopedia could be as
| current or encompassing as a crowd sourced version. Maybe that
| would be the ideal best solution, but let's not have it stand
| in the way of progress to a better reality
| pitchups wrote:
| Not sure what your particular area of expertise is but every
| time I have browsed Wikipedia for articles related to technical
| topics including math, programming, AI/ML as well as science, I
| have found their articles accurate and informative. I also
| recall a few studies comparing the accuracy of articles on
| Wikipedia with Encyclopedia Brittanica and journals, which
| conclude that Wikipedia compares favorably with both (easily
| found via a google search).
| bnralt wrote:
| > For people unfamiliar with a subject (students) I think
| Wikipedia pages are misleading, poorly organized, and sometimes
| wrong.
|
| This is true even if you're reading works from experts in a
| field. For instance, Robert Hoyland, Fred Donner, and Patricia
| Crone (until her death a few years ago) are some of the leading
| academics in the studies of early historical Islam. However,
| Donner's review of Hoyland's textbook thought it was
| misleading[1], Crone's review of Donner's textbook considered
| it misleading, and Crone's Hagarism is generally not accepted
| by any current scholar as far as I can tell.
|
| That is to say, one needs to be skeptical no matter the source,
| as well as humble enough to realize that know more than others
| doesn't necessarily make your understanding more correct. It's
| also useful to try to understand the disagreements in the field
| and how they've developed.
|
| [1] http://www.middleeastmedievalists.com/wp-
| content/uploads/201... [2]
| https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articl...
| koonsolo wrote:
| There was one student in my classroom who was always correcting
| the teacher. Except for the fact that the teacher was always
| right and the student wrong.
|
| Call me skeptical, but can you provide us with examples where
| Wikipedia is misleading or wrong?
| random314 wrote:
| Can you give examples of misleading articles? Are they
| political or nonpolitical?
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Every now and then I like to read through Wikipedia pages for
| things I know more than the average person on. It keeps me
| skeptical of the things I read on there._
|
| It's always frustrating for me to see things in Wikipedia I
| know are wrong because I was in the room when a particular
| decision was made, or because I personally made the decision.
|
| I gave up making corrections because they would always get
| reverted by someone in another country who wasn't even born
| when the event happened. Simply because there wasn't a random
| blogger live streaming it, and nobody's written a book about
| it, my knowledge remains my own.
|
| Wikipedia is the ultimate example of deleting the world's
| history because it can't be linked to.
| jl6 wrote:
| Time to write it down yourself somewhere?
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| Write a blog post or website with your knowledge, then you
| can reference that from Wikipedia.
|
| Wikipedia is explicitly not meant to be a primary source
| (indeed, no encyclopedia is).
| flaviut wrote:
| How do we know you're not just making stuff up?
|
| If you've got a good answer to that question I'm sure they'd
| love to hear it and to update their policy.
|
| For what it's worth, you can write the information you know
| in a blog that can be linked back to you personally, and
| that's an acceptable source to cite.
| akolbe wrote:
| Well, blogs generally aren't acceptable sources to cite in
| Wikipedia. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:Blog
|
| Press sources do often have minor or major inaccuracies
| which can then get perpetuated in Wikipedia.
|
| "What people outside do not appreciate is that a newspaper
| is like a souffle, prepared in a hurry for immediate
| consumption. This of course is why whenever you read a
| newspaper account of some event of which you have personal
| knowledge it is nearly always inadequate or inaccurate.
| Journalists are as aware as anyone of this defect; it is
| simply that if the information is to reach as many readers
| as possible, something less than perfection has often to be
| accepted." --David E. H. Jones, in New Scientist, Vol. 26
|
| Wikipedians, for that matter, are aware of this defect too
| (or ought to be), because a great many press articles about
| Wikipedia contain absolute clangers.
| flaviut wrote:
| Interesting--looks like I came across an older policy
| document. But in this case, it sounds like the author is
| an established and published expert on this topic, so
| their blog would be acceptable: https://en.wikipedia.org/
| wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_and_usin...
|
| > The author is an established expert on the topic of the
| article whose work in the relevant field has previously
| been published by reliable third-party publications,
| except for exceptional claims.[4] Take care when using
| such sources: if the information in question is really
| worth reporting, someone else will probably have done
| so.[5]
| akolbe wrote:
| Well, on the same page (which is an essay, not a policy)
| you have:
|
| " _Never_ use self-published sources as third-party
| sources about any living people, except for claims by the
| author about themself. This holds even if the author of
| the source is an expert, well-known professional
| researcher, or writer. "
|
| That limits things quite severely. The relevant policy is
| here:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_li
| vin...
|
| (Just to explain: in Wikipedia, "policies" are "widely
| accepted standards that all editors should normally
| follow"; a "guideline" is "a generally accepted set of
| best practices that editors should follow, though it is
| best treated with common sense, and occasional exceptions
| may apply", and an "essay" can be just one editor's
| opinion; it is "not one of Wikipedia's policies or
| guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the
| community.")
| flaviut wrote:
| I see, thank you for pointing out the classifications of
| policy-like writings.
|
| I still disagree in the narrow bounds of this
| conversation, which is articles about technical topics.
| The prohibition there seems to be on accepting someone's
| claims about themselves, which is different from an
| expert on a subject making specific fact-based claims in
| their field.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| If there is no decent reference available, IMHO the knowledge
| is useless anyways and might as well be deleted. Can anybody
| prove me wrong?
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| When was the last time you read through a copy of Encyclopedia
| Britannica? Have you done an apples to apples comparison? No
| encyclopedia is perfect, but as far as I can tell the
| "standard" encyclopedias are a lot worse.
|
| My grandparents had bought a copy of Britannica decades ago and
| they had something like 50 years of its yearbooks. I would cite
| it sometimes and no one at school batted an eye. I remember
| reading through it and cross-referencing articles against
| Wikipedia and Wikipedia's accuracy was far superior.
|
| The thing to keep in mind is that not only are all
| encyclopedias fraught with errors, primary sources are often
| wrong too! The goal isn't perfection, it's transparency -- and
| Wikipedia in this department is enormously better than any
| private encyclopedia you'll ever find.
| BashiBazouk wrote:
| Heh...Reminds me when I was in school doing a report using
| the leather bound Encyclopedia Britannica from 1911 that we
| still had in the book shelves. I still wonder how accurate it
| was. It was a history report so maybe more so than later
| editions as it was closer to the event? Who knows...
| [deleted]
| verisimilitudes wrote:
| Give a single example of how the Encyclopedia Britannica be
| worse than random idiots, foreign agents, and shills on
| Wikipedia.
| TrinaryWorksToo wrote:
| They're about the same accuracy according to this data:
| https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/study-wikipedia-
| as-a...
| akolbe wrote:
| Well, for a particular set of fairly obscure science
| articles. It's quite different in the social sciences,
| for example. What people don't appreciate is that
| Wikipedia has very different strengths and weaknesses to
| Britannica.
|
| Britannica doesn't contain outright hoaxes and nonsense.
| Examples:
|
| https://www.theregister.com/2017/01/16/wikipedia_16_birth
| day... https://wikipediocracy.com/2022/08/11/wikipedias-
| credibility...
|
| But Britannica can never be as up to date as Wikipedia:
|
| https://www.inputmag.com/culture/queen-elizabeth-ii-
| death-wi...
|
| Nor can it cover as many topics as Wikipedia.
|
| Wikipedia's quality also depends on the topic area. Hard
| science and computing tend to be covered more adeptly
| than philosophy for example.
|
| And article quality simply varies much more in Wikipedia.
| It ranges from some of the finest writing anywhere,
| rivalling anything in Britannica and surpassing it in up-
| to-dateness, to complete rubbish and intentionally
| falsified content.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| I think you are drastically underestimating how
| absolutely bonkers the 1970 Britannica edition was in
| terms of (using your example) Social Sciences.
|
| I did this analysis long ago and i don't have the set in
| front of me, but there absolutely were hoaxes and
| nonsense which were believed to be true (or which fit the
| prevailing narrative) in 1970.
|
| Not being up to date isn't just about incorporating new
| information. Fields like social sciences have huge
| revisions and reversals because conclusions in those
| fields are so often rooted in opinion and inference
| rather than empirical observation.
|
| Yet, no teacher would complain about using an old copy of
| Britannica.
| IncRnd wrote:
| I'm glad you posted that information, because it really
| shows that random online information can often be wrong
| or conflict with other online authorities. Here are two
| quotes from an article that was posted 10 years after
| your link. [1] "There has been lots of
| research on the accuracy of Wikipedia, and the results
| are mixed--some studies show it is just as good as the
| experts, others show [that] Wikipedia is not
| accurate at all."
|
| and later in that article They found that
| in general, Wikipedia articles were more biased--with 73
| percent of them containing code words, compared to just
| 34 percent in Britannica.
|
| [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/hbsworkingknowledge/2015
| /01/20/...
| TrinaryWorksToo wrote:
| Bias is not the same thing as being correct or incorrect.
| [deleted]
| xapata wrote:
| > code words
|
| I'm not sure that's a great measure of bias. It's easy to
| write in an unbiased tone, yet still be biased.
| [deleted]
| 0x0000000 wrote:
| I remember hearing this a long time ago, and the article
| you linked is from 2005. I wonder if Wikipedia having >=
| accuracy to traditional encyclopedias remains true today,
| given how different the web and web users are today.
| thrwyoilarticle wrote:
| Foreign to who?
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| fwipsy wrote:
| I'm not convinced either of you have read enough of either
| encyclopedia to have anything like a representative sample.
| Tangurena2 wrote:
| Last time our family had an encyclopedia set was back in the
| 70s. And yes, nerd that I was (am, and will forever be) I
| read it. When we moved overseas, we had to put a lot of stuff
| in storage, and this was one of the things stolen from
| storage.
| hindsightbias wrote:
| Wiki is transparent in a self-referential sense only. History
| started in 1992. If there's no hyperlink, it's lost. Pick any
| wiki page and see all the dead, rotting citations.
|
| I'd bet any mining of actually working citations would
| average closer to 2015. It used to be people citing something
| from the 70's or 80's would get strange looks from people who
| lived then, now I see Millenials looking at Gen-Z kids that
| way.
|
| History is written not by the victor, but by the last wiki
| editor.
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| Maybe, but with the extensive number of books, journals,
| magazines and newspapers scanned and available to view on
| the Internet Archive, it's never been easier to add or
| verify a printed source citation.
|
| Also various other newspaper archives have mind-numbing
| amounts of scanned material dating back well over 100
| years, and the Wikipedia Library provides free access to
| these resources for editors.
| jholman wrote:
| Pedantry alert, but it drives me crazy:
|
| "Wiki" is a type of software, like "editor" or "web
| browser". It is not the name of wikipedia.
|
| Yes yes, language evolves, but this is like someone
| deleting the Internet Explorer link from their Windows
| desktop and saying "I deleted the internet from this
| computer, I don't have the internet any more".
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| > If there's no hyperlink, it's lost
|
| This just isn't true. Most wikipedia references have a
| hyperlink _and_ a proper citation which can be looked up
| using traditional means. For example, a cite might look
| like this:
|
| "Intel Pentium Processor G6950 (3M Cache, 2.80 GHz) with
| SPEC Code(s) SLBMS". Ark.intel.com. 2010-07-13. Archived
| from the original on 2011-03-09. Retrieved 2010-07-29.
|
| The link to intel.com has rotted, but:
|
| 1) There's an archive of the page so the information hasn't
| been lost
|
| 2) There's also a full citation, with which you can write a
| letter to Intel asking them for the document in question
| ("Intel Pentium Processor G6950 (3M Cache, 2.80 GHz) with
| SPEC Code(s) SLBMS"). This is a lot more detail than you'd
| have in a traditional encyclopedia. If you're a researcher,
| the encyclopedia has given what you need to seek more
| detail from the primary source - and that's the whole
| point!
|
| archive.org and wikipedia.org working together is really
| powerful.
| m463 wrote:
| Maybe traditional encyclopedia might give wikipedia a run for
| the money on subjects, say toilet paper:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_paper
|
| But wikipedia is far ahead on more practical articles like
| which way the toilet paper goes:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_paper_orientation
| Slow_Hand wrote:
| I'm team "over" as far as toilet paper goes :), but the
| best argument I ever heard for TP rolled "under" was that
| in this configuration your cat couldn't unspool the entire
| roll onto the floor.
| codetrotter wrote:
| Something I recently became aware of is that in some cases
| toilet paper orientation preference may be due to left
| handedness vs right handedness.
|
| I am right handed and prefer to have the paper oriented
| over itself.
|
| A member of my family is left handed and prefers to have
| the paper under itself. She once said that for her, with
| left handedness, having the paper under itself makes it
| easier to grab.
| OJFord wrote:
| That doesn't make sense to me, surely it's always easier
| (by whatever little amount) if it's away from the wall
| ('over itself' as you say I think), whichever side it is,
| and whichever hand you use dominantly?
| idontpost wrote:
| mhb wrote:
| Wouldn't this completely depend on which side the toilet
| paper holder is mounted?
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Here is a simple idea that AFAIK has not been tried.
|
| Limit "External Links" to only websites found in Google
| Scholar. More specifically, limit them to only academic
| sources. (Maybe limiting to .edu or country-specific
| educational TLDs, e.g., ac.uk, etc. is better. I realise
| Scholar is hardly a reliable filter for non-commercial sources,
| given Google's incentives. Remember "Knol".)
|
| This could be an option. Maybe an HTTP header sent to
| Wikipedia: Academic-Only: on
|
| The way to "fix the quality of article" is to fix the quality
| of sources. As it stands, Wikipedia can use any source it finds
| on the web. (Not to say they do in practice.) That can be an
| extremely low bar.
|
| One can use Wikipedia solely as a path to "External Links"
| and/or "References". To the extent that articles just take
| their sentences from References or External Links, any
| verification needs to be done on the source, not the article. I
| use Wikipedia as the default search engine in Fennec. On
| desktop, I search Wikipedia from the command line with a custom
| script. The forward proxy scrubs the "X-Client-IP" header.
| Before reading an article, in the event I read the article
| instead of only using External LInks and references, I always
| skim the Talk: page. https://en.wikipedia.org
| /wiki/Talk:Criticism_of_Google/Archive_1
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Knol/Archive_1
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Knol/Archive_2
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Knol/Archive_3
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Knol/Archive_4
| gpm wrote:
| Unfortunately, I don't think that works at all. Not all
| universities use education specific TLDs, and not all
| departments/labs in universities with a domain name under an
| education specific TLD actually keep there website under that
| TLD.
|
| Completely random example of such a lab (and if you check
| publications you'll see they host papers under this domain
| name) https://www.honeylab.org/
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Is this domain excluded in Google Scholar searches.
| gpm wrote:
| That one in particular? No clue. I'm not sure what google
| scholar's criteria are.
|
| I know things on utoronto.ca turn up sometimes for a
| example that does (UofTs non-edu domain name, which is
| used for most things. Though toronto.edu is also owned by
| the university and used for some things).
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| TLD alone would certainly not be enough of a filter.
| Scholar has to account for scientific publishers that use
| TLDs like .com and .org and other non-school websites
| that use ccTLDs.
|
| But Scholar proves it is possible to usefully filter for
| peer-reviewed papers.
|
| Filtering is never "perfect". The question is whether it
| is good enough to be useful.
| bombcar wrote:
| The biggest problem is students don't care. It's why
| encyclopedias had to be "banned" from reports when I was a
| student; the teacher wanted us to actually do _some modicum_ of
| research beyond rewriting an encyclopedia article.
|
| Both were still a decent place to start, but they're both often
| only "right" from a certain point of view.
| nathias wrote:
| one simple mechanism would be to freeze the article editing for
| a bit when it becomes a hot topic in US media
| PopePompus wrote:
| That is frequently done. A recent example is the article on
| "recession", which was frozen around the time that the US had
| two consecutive quarters of negative growth (often used as a
| definition for a recession).
|
| https://www.npr.org/2022/07/29/1114599942/wikipedia-
| recessio...
|
| There are differing levels of "frozen", which require
| differing levels of editor seniority to be allowed to edit.
| nathias wrote:
| nice, I had no idea, I just remember seeing the edit wars
| on some hot topics a while ago
| warner25 wrote:
| I'd love to hear the perspective on this from some people
| (there must be dozens reading Hacker News) who actually have a
| Wikipedia page about themselves.
| bawolff wrote:
| Most people are biased about themselves. In particular famous
| people often want to hide controversy.
| warner25 wrote:
| Yeah, but things I wonder: Do people learn surprising
| things about themselves from their own Wikipedia page, like
| a connection to some event or other person that they
| previously weren't aware of? Do they find their pages
| laughably incomplete or inaccurate?
|
| If there were a Wikipedia page about me, I can imagine that
| it would probably highlight some insignificant thing (from
| my perspective) that got my name into a small town
| newspaper or school / employer public relations piece while
| omitting several of the facts from my personal top-5 list
| (in importance) about my own life.
| aimor wrote:
| I suppose if I ever get my own Wikipedia page the first
| thing I should do is publish an autobiography.
| chobytes wrote:
| Agreed. My background is in math... and I find math wikipedia
| to be appealingly low quality. Both for reference and for a
| general audience.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| I learned 10x the world history from Wikipedia than I ever did
| from history classes writing up non-wiki citations in the proper
| format.
| jshandling wrote:
| Here here!
| verisimilitudes wrote:
| They could learn about SNES emulator Near (RIP) or, say, the
| Scots language.
| teeray wrote:
| I had teachers like this, some of them smugly defacing Wikipedia
| to try to prove their point. What they never realized is how
| quickly their vandalism was detected and removed. They never
| checked to see how persistent their edits were.
| kube-system wrote:
| Vandalism is easy to spot though. Wrong but plausible
| information is difficult to identify.
| akolbe wrote:
| Exactly. That's why the world thinks an "Alan MacMasters"
| invented the electric toaster. That particular hoax lasted
| ten years and spread far and wide:
|
| https://wikipediocracy.com/2022/08/11/wikipedias-
| credibility...
|
| Example from the BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articl
| es/1D0xzxYf9ykH9gcYp9...
|
| Several books have the false info too. Wikipedia is useful,
| but it is never a good idea to rely on Wikipedia blindly.
| thrwyoilarticle wrote:
| >Several books have the false info too
|
| Sounds like we shouldn't trust books blindly, either.
|
| Is there a source we can trust blindly?
| datadata wrote:
| I think pedagogical goal is exactly to prevent the act of
| blindly trusting any source, regardless of source
| quality. Trust fails without verification, so the idea of
| a blindly trusted source is self defeating.
| thrwyoilarticle wrote:
| That's more optimistic than my impression. I view it as a
| mix of a few things:
|
| - What often happens when a person is surprised to learn
| something: they assume most other people don't know it
| and become eager to repeat it without further nuance or
| investigation. Like moon landing conspiracy theorists who
| learn that there are no stars in the photos.
|
| - The hazing, elitist attitude surrounding knowledge. _I
| suffered, therefore you should suffer_. From this
| perspective, it doesn 't make sense for there to be a
| gargantuan, selfless compilation of knowledge more
| accessible than any library in history. It must be wrong.
|
| - People are lazy and will paraphrase the Wiki page that
| appears at the top of a web search for the topic.
|
| It's much easier to say Wikipedia can't be trusted than
| to instil upon pupils an understanding of epistemology, a
| distrust of what authority figures tell them, an
| appreciation of academic honesty, and the knowledge of
| how to construct a good bibliography.
| akolbe wrote:
| Well, to be fair, the books in question aren't exactly
| high-brow material.
|
| But I've even seen University Press books get tripped up
| by Wikipedia. See the "Coati" example on this page:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenes
| is_...
|
| The thing is, this would have been avoidable. If
| Wikipedia tells you someone called J. Bloggs invented
| some kind of gadget 100 years ago, you can do a Google
| Books search to see if there are any 20th-century sources
| saying so.
|
| If there aren't, then Wikipedia is having you on. Alan
| MacMasters is not the only example: exactly the same
| thing happened with the inventor of the hair-
| straightener. See Example 16 here:
|
| https://www.theregister.com/2017/01/16/wikipedia_16_birth
| day...
| davidjfelix wrote:
| Realistically, no. Credibility is often a crapshoot which
| I think is why you see so many otherwise-intelligent
| individuals believing nonsense.
| IceHegel wrote:
| Wikipedia is the closest thing the west has to Regime media. It's
| usually correct about factual matters, but has high levels of
| embedded bias towards establishment ideas.
| Minor49er wrote:
| I hope a student finds this blog post on Google and shows it to
| the teacher
| chatterhead wrote:
| You should be fighting this at the school. Wikipedia should not
| be used as a source for academic purposes; the sources being
| referenced on Wikipedia very well could be though and as such
| Wikipedia is an incredibly useful tool for surface level research
| and schools should absolutely be taking this approach to using
| it.
|
| They should not, under any circumstance, have children "Googling"
| the answer to questions. Most of these kids parents already use
| that phrase as a keystone of their parental pedagogy and they
| don't need that in school, too.
|
| Wikipedia is wonderful. They have more money then they will ever
| need so don't donate; but, they are great. Everyone should have a
| copy of Wikipedia locally updated yearly.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| That's what I told my kids. They weren't allowed to use
| Wikipedia either, so I told them to use it for the sources
| referenced there.
|
| Google Search content farm results should not be allowed, but
| good searching might turn up some decent material so I think it
| should be taught but with those caveats. Is it too much to ask
| that the teachers at least give a cursory review of the source
| links students submit, and give feedback to the students who
| are not choosing good ones?
|
| Back in my day we were allowed to use popular magazine articles
| as sources (Time, Newsweek, etc) and honestly those probably
| weren't that great either (see Gell-Mann amnesia effect).
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| Searching for and finding relevant information is a skill all
| unto itself.
|
| Telling people outright to not use the two most common
| starting tools (Google and Wikipedia) is probably a bad idea.
|
| Telling people that they can definitely do better than JUST
| using the starter tools definitely seems like the right path.
| jacobolus wrote:
| If scholars find some claim on Wikipedia and repeat it in their
| published work, they should unquestionably cite Wikipedia. When
| scholars fail to cite Wikipedia, a few years later other
| Wikipedia editors come back and cite that work as evidence for
| the original claim, sometimes for claims that turn out to be
| nonsense, and people trying to figure out what happened won't
| notice that the citation chain is a circle. Cf.
| https://xkcd.com/978/
|
| Teaching students not to cite the sources they use is a
| horrible teaching practice which does harm to academia. Better
| is to teach students to critically examine every source they
| use and consider its limitations (in Wikipedia's case, being a
| volunteer project by a wide range of pseudonymous strangers),
| follow up on claims made there, check other sources for
| contrary claims and analyses, etc.
|
| Every source has biases and limitations. You can find plenty of
| fabrications and distortions snuck into e.g. New York Times
| stories, undergraduate history textbooks, or Supreme Court
| decisions. These sources should also be examined critically.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| If scholars find some claim in Wikipedia, they should cite
| the source of the claim. If the source actually is Wikipedia,
| it should not be included in an academic paper.
|
| It's clear to me now that there is a divide between people
| who used physical encyclopedias (And thus know what an
| encyclopedia is for) and those who have only used Wikipedia.
| They don't understand that an encyclopedia is a place to get
| a quick overview of a subject, but then use the _actual
| sources_ of the information to write their papers.
| projektfu wrote:
| But only if they actually read the claim. This is the same
| as for scholars that cite the source of a claim they found
| in a paper that is, itself, cited from some other paper.
| Often you see a game of telephone in these citations.
| Because it's not looked at well to give a factual claim you
| found in a review paper, researchers often cite the claim
| as it was cited in the review paper, but they don't always
| investigate the claim themselves. This leads to a game of
| telephone.
|
| A lot of high-profile factoids are like this. The claim
| that 95% of diets fail, for example, is a specious one that
| developed after a citation chain like this. The original
| analysis said that 95% of the sample finished the study
| above the lowest weight they reached. Through motivated
| rephrasing and citation laundering, this became 95% of
| diets fail, often paired with the suggestion that dieters
| always return to a weight higher than where they started.
|
| Yet, you can find this claim being re-issued again and
| again in the introductions to papers about all sorts of
| topics related to dieting.
|
| Another thing I have seen is where the source of the claim
| gets lost. It starts out as something like "Grainger 2003"
| and then eventually turns into "Grander 2013", a
| nonexistent paper with a ton of citations.
|
| So, if you read an article and don't read the cited
| article, please reference only the article you read.
| youainti wrote:
| Except encyclopedias don't have _actual sources_. They are
| based on source but don't include references as far as I
| remember.
| dhosek wrote:
| They very much do have citations as I recall. Maybe not
| the junior encyclopedias they had your grade school, but
| any proper encyclopedia had citations.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| I got away with this once. I used wikipedia as the source
| on a table that everyone in the field knows by heart
| anyway. When questioned about it (I think briefly?) I said
| I'd personally edited the article and checked that the
| table was correct (which I had!) . --~~~~
| cycomanic wrote:
| That is actually common for all encyclopaedias, they do
| generally cite secondary sources. Especially if the primary
| sources are not easily verifiable. Similarly they should (I
| haven't actually checked if they do) cite a translation of
| an ancient Greek text, not the original Greek text.
| mountainb wrote:
| Horsehockey. Wikipedia cannot be cited because it is not a
| static resource. Occasionally, its citations can be cited.
| But generally, if you have ever tried to actually follow
| those citations, you will frequently discover that the
| authors and editors of the page are full of shit, and you
| will see why professionals tend to issue the blanket
| recommendation to avoid ever using it for anything.
|
| Minute for minute, research time is better spent on a real
| resource than it is spent trying to sift something useful
| from the trillion page shit-vault that is Wikipedia.
|
| Newspapers and textbooks aren't serious sources either, which
| is why academic research manuals usually forbid their usage
| except in some specific circumstances (such as using them as
| primary sources, for illustrative purposes, as evidence of
| what media reported at the time, etc.).
| raegis wrote:
| To be fair, you can cite a Wikipedia page along with the
| last revision date. And the complete revision history is
| available, I believe. I would expect researchers to include
| revision dates with any Wikipedia citation.
| nico wrote:
| > because it is not a static resource
|
| What do you consider a "static resource"?
| gmfawcett wrote:
| It's trivial to cite a specific snapshot of a Wikipedia
| page. A citation isn't an authoritative source in itself,
| its sole purpose is to point the reader at the source of
| information, whatever it may be. There are plenty of bona
| fide academic citations that point at sources of terrible
| quality.
| jacobolus wrote:
| Okay, you don't like Wikipedia, newspapers, or textbooks as
| sources.
|
| What about journal papers and monographs published by
| academic publishing houses? I read academic works on a
| daily basis, and they are chock full of nonsense, even from
| high-impact journals. Sometimes just sloppy scholarship
| uncritically repeating dubious claims (sometimes even found
| on Wikipedia then not credited!), but other times
| intentional fabrications. In the academic literature you
| can find misattributions of discoveries, serious
| calculation errors, sources that say the opposite of what
| they are cited to say, claims from notorious fabulists and
| mentally ill people credulously repeated, false history,
| faked study data, nonsensical mathematical models
| extrapolating trivial numbers of data points far outside
| their original range, invented interviews, legends
| presented as factual, speculation presented as factual,
| promotion of snake oil, amateur psychiatric diagnoses based
| on fragmentary evidence, apologies for genocide, and
| whatever other bad thing you might imagine.
|
| Students should be taught to critically examine these
| sources and look for biases, mistakes, and incongruities.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Those are some incredibly broad and strong statements. What
| do you mean by professionals? What field? I know plenty
| academics who often start looking at Wikipedia as a first
| entry to a topic, and it is not uncommon to cite Wikipedia
| for example for a common definition. Yes for many things
| you would not cite Wikipedia because you would rather cite
| primary sources. That's also why I don't understand your
| statement about newspapers, there are plenty of fields
| (e.g. Political science, history) where newspapers
| magazines are important primary sources. The argument that
| things change is also week, books change as well so we cite
| the Edition, similarly you should cite Wikipedia (as well
| as other online sources) with a retrieval date.
| jefftk wrote:
| _> Wikipedia cannot be cited because it is not a static
| resource_
|
| Regardless of the merits of citing Wikipedia, if you do
| want to cite it you can reference a specific revision. Or
| include the date and time you accessed it, from which
| anyone else can determine the revision. This puts Wikipedia
| in a much better position than citing URLs in general,
| which are mostly not version-controlled.
| mordae wrote:
| If you date your citation, you can easily find it in the
| page history. Revisions are immutable.
| whatshisface wrote:
| These threads always reveal that different people have had
| wildly different experiences with Wikipedia. I wish
| everyone would clarify what those experiences actually were
| so we could answer questions like "is it only some parts of
| Wikipedia."
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| What are you talking about? Wikipedia has a perfectly
| adequate page on how to cite it [1] and provides tools that
| account for how dynamic it is in generating citations.
| Newspapers and textbooks are also regularly cited to
| demonstrate general facts of knowledge and are usually
| accepted anywhere other tertiary sources would also be
| appropriate.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_Wikipedia
| tablespoon wrote:
| > If scholars find something on Wikipedia and put it in their
| papers, they should absolutely cite Wikipedia.
|
| Yeah, _but scholars shouldn 't be putting things from
| Wikipedia in their paper at all_ (except, perhaps, in the
| very narrow case were Wikipedia is the _object_ of their
| study).
|
| _Wikipedia isn 't even a valid source for Wikipedia itself_,
| and "scholars" citing Wikipedia could very well create a
| circular reference supporting some falsehood on a Wikipedia
| article.
| jacobolus wrote:
| Wikipedia is an excellent source about many topics, and a
| mediocre source about many other topics. For example, the
| article
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodesics_on_an_ellipsoid was
| mostly written by the world's foremost expert about
| geodesics on an ellipsoid, and would be a fine source.
|
| Edit to add an aside: In my opinion it is worth teaching
| students to look at Wikipedia's talk pages and history
| pages to help them critically examine articles.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Wikipedia is an excellent source about many topics, and
| a mediocre source about many other topics.
|
| Wikipedia is a moving target, so it could be a terrible
| source on a topic for the _hour you 're looking at it_,
| and much better at other times. Trouble is, those other
| times don't do you any good. That inconsistency means it
| can't ever really be an "excellent" source.
| roywiggins wrote:
| It's not the _inconsistency_ that disqualifies it from
| academic citation, it 's that it's a _tertiary source_.
| The Encyclopedia Brittanica isn 't a moving target if you
| cite the edition, but it's also a tertiary source, so
| it's just as citable as Wikipedia is, that is to say, not
| (except if you're treating Wikipedia as a primary source,
| eg you're _studying Wikipedia_ )
|
| It's stupid to ban students from _using_ Wikipedia- sure,
| Wikipedia isn 't of uniformly high quality, but it can be
| a pretty good encyclopedia. It's just not something
| you're allowed to _cite_.
|
| If a school doesn't want students to read Wikipedia _at
| all_ they really should provide an alternative
| encyclopedia that the school thinks is high enough
| quality for students to use (but still not cite), I think
| you can get subscriptions to Encyclopedia Brittanica now?
| But that costs actual money.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > It's stupid to ban students from using Wikipedia- sure,
| Wikipedia isn't of uniformly high quality, but it can be
| a pretty good encyclopedia. It's just not something
| you're allowed to cite.
|
| Actually, it's probably pretty smart for schools to "ban"
| students from using Wikipedia, in order to encourage them
| to develop _habits_ to use _better_ things. If you let
| them use Wikipedia for their research, you 're putting
| them in a situation to slouch into using it for _most_ of
| their research (except for some source laundering at the
| end).
| roywiggins wrote:
| Sure, if you give them access to a better encyclopedia,
| that's not a terrible idea, I just think it's silly to
| have an absolute ban- "read at least two different
| encyclopedias" instead, maybe? "Cite N secondary sources
| you didn't find on Wikipedia"? And then they can find out
| for themselves how good or bad quality wikipedia is.
|
| The thrust of the link here is that they aren't giving
| them alternatives, and just telling students to throw
| themselves into Google and hope they find something.
| Which, yes, isn't a bad skill to learn either- there's
| stuff to find out there- but it's setting them up for
| failure.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| Have you _actually_ used Wikipedia? Nothing on it is as
| fast moving as you're making it out to be.
|
| There are hundreds of unpaid volunteers at all times
| prowling for and reverting vandalism. The most popular
| articles are next to impossible to change. And to top it
| all off, if a large amount of vandalism happens on one
| article, it just gets reverted and locked for a while so
| no changes can happen, period.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Yes and books are moving targets as well, we have figured
| out ways to deal with that, cite the edition. Similar
| should most definitely cite the access date when you cite
| wikipedia.
| bombcar wrote:
| Yep, if you cite Wikipedia (and you should if you're
| using it as a source) you can use the fixed URL: https://
| en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Y_Combinator&oldi...
|
| Then anyone following can see what you saw.
| [deleted]
| pessimizer wrote:
| There shouldn't be original research on Wikipedia, so any
| citation of Wikipedia would be better sourced directly
| from the reference linked to by Wikipedia.
|
| Circular references aren't only a problem when it
| involves Wikipedia. You shouldn't ever be citing sources
| who only claim to be communicating the work of others,
| outside of being an antiquities scholar when the original
| works have been lost.
| jacobolus wrote:
| That invented falsehoods "shouldn't be on Wikipedia" is
| not much consolation when in practice academics,
| journalists, and others regularly copy false claims from
| Wikipedia without independently fact checking them or
| citing where they got them. Nor does it ultimately much
| matter whether false or distorted claims were deliberate
| or just mistakes, and whether they were invented on
| Wikipedia or invented somewhere else.
| jrumbut wrote:
| > "scholars" citing Wikipedia could very well create a
| circular reference supporting some falsehood on a Wikipedia
| article.
|
| Using Wikipedia and citing Wikipedia is perhaps ill
| advised.
|
| Using Wikipedia and not citing Wikipedia is a real problem
| and how you create the circle of falsehoods.
|
| This idea of not using Wikipedia introduces students to the
| academic dishonesty game. Priority one in writing a
| research paper is that it be a truthful reflection of your
| research, including limitations, accidents, mistakes,
| failures, etc, etc.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > Wikipedia isn't even a valid source for Wikipedia itself,
|
| First-hand direct presence isn't even a valid source for
| Wikipedia. Part of my account of the founding of amazon.com
| was removed because it wasn't "backed up by published
| citable sources". I pointed out that I would be the primary
| source cited by any such source, and was told that wasn't
| good enough: the contents had to be published somewhere
| else and then cited on Wikipedia.
|
| [ EDIT: BTW, the page on the history of Amazon still has
| some bullshit in the early section (maybe others too, I
| wouldn't know), mostly because a journalist or book author
| misunderstood something, and now it's enshrined as the
| wikipedia version of the truth. The citation requirements
| are a good idea, but they don't protect against the nature
| of humanity ]
| skybrian wrote:
| That's a good rule.
|
| Anything you write in a Wikipedia article is written in
| "anonymous worker bee" mode. It doesn't count as written
| by you, even if you wrote it. Any editor could change
| what you wrote. This defeats the whole point of first-
| person testimony, where who said it matters.
|
| If you want to tell the story of something that happened
| at Amazon, you should write an article on your own
| website and publish it under your own name. Then anyone
| can cite it (including Wikipedia) as written by you, and
| it can't be changed or removed without your consent.
|
| (Some might not think a personal blog is a good enough
| citation, but that's their problem.)
| jacobolus wrote:
| Personal blogs, facebook posts, self-published papers on
| arxiv, web forum comments, etc. are not in general
| credible sources (for Wikipedia's purposes) but can be in
| this kind of circumstance.
|
| PaulDavisThe1st: you should definitely publish your
| anecdote(s) and corrections somewhere, and not just for
| Wikipedia's benefit.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| Originally it was permitted, but too many people abused
| this and wasted a lot of volunteer time. :-(
|
| Now you need to get cited by someone else before
| wikipedia will accept it. (and preferably someone else
| needs to be cited too of course)
| bombcar wrote:
| It's outsourcing verification, and it mostly works, but
| "small tidbits" like you find in Hacker News comments now
| and then will likely never make it.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| > _If scholars find some claim on Wikipedia and repeat it in
| their published work_
|
| When people say not to cite wikipedia, they're telling you to
| not do this. They're not asking you to plagiarize wikipedia.
| jacobolus wrote:
| You would be amazed at the frequency with which "real"
| academics, journalists, lawyers, judges' clerks, etc.
| plagiarize Wikipedia.
|
| Teachers telling students they can't under any
| circumstances cite Wikipedia trains this behavior.
| gubernation wrote:
| orangepurple wrote:
| Poppycock. Wikipedia is not a repository of primary sources
| nor original research. It merely aggregates information from
| outside sources and should be used as a reference tree.
| scifibestfi wrote:
| > They should not, under any circumstance, have children
| "Googling" the answer to questions.
|
| Why not? Don't you Google answers to questions? It's what they
| will be doing most of their life.
| ajford wrote:
| Because early school-age children haven't honed their
| bullshit detectors yet. Seriously though, I'm currently
| fighting that with my two kids.
|
| They're now old enough that they're becoming netizens of
| their own and searching for things and learning on their own,
| but after having to correct a few misconceptions, I've had to
| sit down with them and explain how they can't trust
| everything they find in a search and how to perform their own
| research and validate.
|
| However, getting them to really grasp that while young isn't
| super easy.
| scifibestfi wrote:
| The same applies to school and teachers. Everyone is taught
| some bullshit in school. I just think the difference is
| quantity of bullshit (the internet has more).
| ajford wrote:
| True, but one hopes (perhaps foolishly) that there's
| enough oversight between various parents talking to their
| kids about what they're learning, other teachers, and
| standardized testing.
|
| It worked for most of us, but politics is creeping into
| everything and budgets are getting cut all over the
| place.
| verisimilitudes wrote:
| > Don't you Google answers to questions?
|
| No. I don't use it at all.
|
| > It's what they will be doing most of their life.
|
| Everyday I hate this website and the people on it more.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| Yes, and depending on topic, I discard 10% to 90% of the
| results out of hand.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| This is par for the course. When doing a library course in
| university, I learned that you typically end up discarding
| up to 99% of sources. (very rough rule of thumb: you get
| say something like 1000 hits, review the top 100 titles,
| read the top 10 abstracts, and select the remaining
| article(s) as a source. Wash rinse repeat)
| dan_mctree wrote:
| If your 1000 hits is roughly reasonable to you, mind if I
| ask how you find so many sources? In something I'm
| interested in, I rarely find even a dozen hits on things
| that seem vaguely related. And for more than half of
| those, I can't even find access.
| chatterhead wrote:
| Are you suggesting I'm also a school aged child? Because,
| that's the only way your point works as an equivalency.
|
| Learning isn't just about solving problems it's about
| understanding concepts. Teaching concepts is fundamental to
| understanding methods. Googling is a method to solving a
| problem. You're suggesting teaching methods in a discussion
| about corrupting conceptual instruction; which is the exact
| thing the school is doing.
| [deleted]
| jefftk wrote:
| _> Wikipedia should not be used as a source for academic
| purposes_
|
| It's not a primary source, or a secondary source, but it's a
| great tertiary source for getting an overview of an area, and
| as a tertiary source (like other encyclopedias historically) it
| has a major role in academic work.
| ravenstine wrote:
| The nice thing about Wikipedia is that it is free of
| distraction, often very detailed, and has lots of _citations_
| that make it a great jumping-off point for finding other
| sources of information and verifying statements.
|
| Wikipedia, in my opinion, fails in that there _is_ a bias
| with anything that remotely involves politics or health
| science. Students need to be taught that Wikipedia is _NOT_
| an objective source, and that basically no source of
| information is truly objective.
| localhost wrote:
| Was wondering about the money thing and found this on ...
| Wikipedia :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation
|
| Seems like >$235MM in net assets excluding the $100MM in the
| Wikimedia endowment and growing at a healthy rate YoY.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| I still donate when asked, it's one of the biggest
| achievements of free software. I wish I had more time to
| contribute to the pages, as I imagine that would be worth
| more to them than my 20 bucks.
| akolbe wrote:
| Donate to the Internet Archive instead. Performs a vital
| service for Wikipedia, archiving sources before they
| disappear off the internet, so you can still verify
| Wikipedia content when the cited source is gone.
|
| Start donating to Wikipedia again when they are honest
| about their financial situation.
|
| See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Sign
| post/2...
|
| And on the Wikimedia Endowment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wi
| ki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
| localhost wrote:
| Thanks for the insider baseball on Wikipedia; I didn't
| know any of this. Will make sure I continue to support
| Internet Archive and take any money that I might have
| earmarked for Wikipedia and send it their way (along with
| employer match!)
| yucky wrote:
| Yeah the Tides Foundation manages their funding, probably the
| most politically biased foundation in the US.
| akolbe wrote:
| Tides holds well over $100 million in Wikimedia/Wikipedia
| donations by now in an Endowment - and they have never once
| published an audited financial report for the incomings and
| outgoings of this Endowment fund:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/
| 2...
|
| This is in addition to something like $280 million held by
| the Wikimedia Foundation as of end of March 2022 (the most
| recent data available).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/
| 2...
| akolbe wrote:
| Quite. Note rising executive salaries at the Wikimedia
| Foundation:
|
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/e/e4/Wikim.
| ..
|
| Latest financial report: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped
| ia/foundation/1/1e/Wikim...
| ziml77 wrote:
| This is something new? When I was in high school back in 2004, we
| were already told to not use Wikipedia as a source. What most of
| us would do instead was use the references section to find
| resources. (Or if we were being lazy, we'd just go by what
| Wikipedia said and then copy its relevant citations)
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _in high school back in 2004, we were already told to not use
| Wikipedia as a source_
|
| I think we all assumed the situation had evolved.
| guywithahat wrote:
| Why would it? Encyclopedias were not regarded as good sources
| before Wikipedia, and Wikipedia is demonstrably less accurate
| than encyclopedias and more biased towards their sponsors
| bananarchist wrote:
| [citation needed]
| greiskul wrote:
| Which sponsors does Wikipedia have?
| jerf wrote:
| "Sponsor" may not be the right word, but Wikipedia by its
| nature ends up privileging the most motivated. Sadly,
| "the most motivated" are not always the most reliable.
| Sometimes they are! Lots o' love to the That Guy who is
| obsessed with the 14th century French poetry, and writes
| an entry that the most detail-oriented academic could
| hardly hope for. But in general... it's not a good bet.
| bawolff wrote:
| This is such a weird criticism.
|
| Before wikipedia you had academics writing things like
| this. You really think the average wikipedian is more
| "motivated" then the average academic with a PhD who
| spent their life studying some topic?
| jerf wrote:
| Average, who can say. Modal, by number of
| contributions/edits, they absolutely are more motivated
| than a PhD. They may have spent their life studying a
| topic but Wikipedia isn't where they're generally going
| to put it.
| bawolff wrote:
| If your counting by number of edits that's basically a
| tautology:
|
| People who edit wikipedia make more edits than people who
| don't edit Wikipedia. Well no shit.
|
| If you want to do an apples to apples comparison, compare
| how many hours people edit wikipedia vs how many hours
| PhD candidates spend writing their dissertation. i think
| on average traditional accademia rewards obsessiveness
| much more than wikipedia does.
| biofox wrote:
| If you're talking about something like Encyclopaedia
| Britannica or the ODNB, they are/were extensively peer-
| reviewed. I have seen plenty of references to both in
| scholarly literature. Infact, for some niche or historical
| topics, I often find my old print edition of EB to be more
| useful than Wikipedia.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Actual studies (even back in 2005) comparing EB and
| Wikipedia find Wikipedia to be at least as accurate as
| EB. The level of "peer review" in EB is generally
| overstated in the popular conception of that work.
| eesmith wrote:
| As a concrete example, I've come across several papers
| who cite Claude Shannon's entry on Information Theory,
| from Encyclopaedia Britannica vol. 12, p. 246b, and
| recommend it as a good starting point in the field.
|
| It's available at https://archive.org/details/encyclopdia
| brita12chic/page/n307... .
|
| I think it's a better intro than the Wikipedia one for
| someone looking for an intro overview.
|
| The Wikipedia has a bunch more cross-references and goes
| into more depth.
| bluGill wrote:
| Yes, and in school (wikipedia didn't exist until after I
| graduated) I still was not allowed to reference an
| encyclopedia. We had them in the library and they were
| considered at best a good introduction before you find
| real source material.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| It's very surprising to me that anybody would assume that,
| let alone that everybody would be presumed to assume that.
| wobbly_bush wrote:
| Not all content there is good. I see the pages on some
| political content, or in general a lot of content about
| country X (intentionally omitted) are of pretty poor quality.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| ... And at the same time, the English-language mathematics
| section is a fairly reliable and--in some cases--very broad
| reference, covering a range of viewpoints that would
| usually require trawling through half a dozen books for
| different subjects and target audiences. (It is rarely a
| good _introduction_ , but then a single reference for a
| skilled reader is doable while a single introduction for
| every taste, background, and motivating problem is nigh-
| impossible.)
| bombcar wrote:
| For factual areas that don't change much Wikipedia can be
| exceptionally good. You're not likely to have a drawn-out
| edit war over a mathematical topic (I'm sure there are
| examples, but the final admin decision is likely to be
| "show both sides".
|
| Same with the census detail pages you find everywhere;
| they're probably accurate for that point in time, because
| nobody really cares.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Since 2004, Wikipedia has gotten better and random pages on the
| internet have gotten worse. Uncovering useful primary sources
| on the internet that aren't paywalled has had a steady upwards-
| trend of difficulty.
| freedomben wrote:
| I chase a lot of wikipedia citations, and this is a much
| bigger problem than I think most people realize. A huge chunk
| of citations (at least around 19th century history) is
| paywalled or is a printed source that is impossible to find
| and verify.
|
| To be fair this is a problem for most academic papers and
| most books as well, so it's not unique to wikipedia. It does
| however, require a lot of "faith" to be exercised. As a
| skeptical person, I find that unsatisfactory.
| bombcar wrote:
| Wikipedia also requires citations to be _secondary_
| sources, so you have to find someone reporting about
| whatever it was, because Wikipedia isn 't for original
| research.
|
| This can make it more difficult for things that nobody ever
| bothered reporting.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| >This can make it more difficult for things that nobody
| ever bothered reporting.
|
| My dad is wrapping up the first monograph on a not too
| obscure New Deal artist who had a long career and plenty
| of notable works (at least in his niche).
|
| The entire wikipedia page was written by my dad. If you
| search the artist there's plenty of hits on art for sale
| by him, but not much on the man himself.
|
| My father who was a journalist and now a researcher has
| done several projects and he's been the first 'story'
| written for a lot of these projects.
|
| When the Philadelphia Union started a feeder team named
| after the historical club in Bethlehem - they called him
| up and asked him if he owned the copyright! In fact,
| basically all of the pictures and details, later written
| into a book done by another local soccer journo type, was
| dug up by him. A lot of this information was either in
| microfiche or in dusty piles in the Bethlehem area
| library. Now it's diligently organized and stored online.
|
| One of the things he's told me about his work is it's
| immensely difficult to put a story together that is
| cohesive. Even for someone who's relatives are still
| alive, and for the soccer club? He could probably have
| made up half of the articles and didn't.
|
| All of these things to find out that wikipedia will
| delete your article for non-importance because there's a
| lack of recent news links online to it.
| bombcar wrote:
| Deleting for non-notoriety is one of the saddest parts of
| Wikipedia. Flag it as "meh" but deleting it entire, ouch.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| One thing I wanted to add was - the 'story' of any
| persons life is dependent on biographers creating it.
|
| Someone has to actually collect it all up together. Go
| talk to original people. Then you write a book and
| wikipedia will happily take it. They might not be happy
| to quote your great auntie Margaret who said there was a
| bastard son, but until some biographer writes that into a
| book nobody thinks it's real.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| But sci hub exists now
| jermaustin1 wrote:
| Or if we were being cheeky, made up our sources/citations (at
| least in my high school teacher ever actually verified). I
| doubt this would have worked in university, but I never
| attempted it.
| dfee wrote:
| I'd wager it'd work just fine in a university setting. 10
| references per paper, 10 papers per student, 200 students in
| a course.
|
| I doubt anyone is fetching and fact checking 2000 links a
| semester.
| Snitch-Thursday wrote:
| I was about to say, wikipedia by citations was a big help to
| me. I just had to do Words citation feature to make it look
| right and poof the teachers were happy.
| elif wrote:
| I was a junior in high school in 2003 and referenced Wikipedia
| for a particular element's molar mass.
|
| The wiki was actually wrong about this fundamental digital fact
| by a factor of like 3x, and my teacher got to i-told-you-so me
| about citations.
|
| Ever since then I've not been able to enjoy Wikipedia without
| scrutinizing the edit history
| AQuantized wrote:
| Why not just check the reference? If there isn't one it isn't
| to be trusted, if there is just cite that.
| elif wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20040409083026/https://en.wikip
| e...
|
| the entire "references" section back then was one link
| tux3 wrote:
| Hmm, on that 2004 Wikipedia page it lists the atomic
| weight of carbon as 12.0107, and the one link in the
| reference section (Los Alamos National Laboratory) lists
| it as 12.011.
|
| That's the correct number for the molar mass of carbon,
| as far as I know, it doesn't look off by 3x!
| elif wrote:
| i don't think you understand whats being said or you are
| misquoting me intentionally in poor faith
| tux3 wrote:
| I'm always happy to be corrected if I've misunderstood.
| I'm not sure what the link demonstrates, though, I opened
| it and I just don't see anything like you described.
|
| About poor faith, these kind of accusations happens so
| often, there's plenty of existing essays and material on
| whether you should assume people are posting in bad
| faith. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:AOBF is a good
| reference, it's used pretty regularly.
| elif wrote:
| if you are genuinely interested in your misunderstanding,
| i would begin by listing the following assumptions you've
| made: - the element in my original anecdote was carbon -
| the wayback machine in 2004 captured a website exactly as
| it appeared in 2003
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Are you playing a game here?
|
| Normally people provide relevant links. Even if this is
| showing bad sourcing, it still sources the important
| numbers. "External links" is helping with that too.
|
| And this 2003 vs. 2004 distinction is a waste of time
| when wikipedia has a perfectly good history feature.
|
| If I ask pretty please will you name the element?
| BeetleB wrote:
| I side with elif here.
|
| > Normally people provide relevant links
|
| It is relevant. It's pointing out that lots of articles
| back then were not well referenced. It doesn't have to be
| _his_ article. I know this quite well as I added a lot of
| stuff to Wikipedia in those days, and never provided a
| reference. No one challenged me.
|
| Likely the page he got his information from didn't
| provide any reference for that number.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| But the linked page has a very thorough source for its
| numbers; it just happens to be in the "external links"
| section. And looking through those links for a couple
| minutes they seem to pretty well cover the text.
|
| The lines are not individually cited but that's a
| stylistic thing, not a failure to have references. I'm
| sure there's several lines without backing but overall
| this has reasonable links and I don't think it supports
| the narrative about having "one" reference and getting a
| "fundamental digital fact" wrong like that.
|
| So I would like to see the real example. Or one that is
| equivalently bad. And linking it would be in the best
| interests of a fruitful discussion; it's not like a
| particular element is going to be a controversial issue
| that causes a time-wasting tangent.
| meej wrote:
| No, it's old, and an outdated mindset. Since 2004 Wikipedia has
| greatly matured and most educators have relaxed their stance on
| it. I'm a librarian and my take on Wikipedia is that it's a
| great starting point but you'd never want to cite it directly.
| BeetleB wrote:
| That's exactly what your parent is saying.
| davidjfelix wrote:
| I think the issue isn't citing it directly, it's citing it
| incorrectly. Wikipedia is a snapshot collective understanding
| of a topic, hopefully in a meaningfully cited manner. It's
| not that it contains false information or unreviewed
| information, it's that you're attempting to cite a discussion
| and collective work that is constantly in flux. I think that
| if you were inclined to actually do investigative work, you'd
| find yourself:
|
| * Interviewing "experts" (their level of expertise would be
| something you'd need to establish since no third party has
| prescribed that) who contribute and discuss the topic.
|
| * Referencing cited sources.
|
| * Referencing edit history and reverted changes, rejected
| sources, etc.
|
| I think the issue is that academia has a lot of systems in
| place (I'd argue that they're only partially effective) that
| help establish credibility of experts and sources through
| "academic honesty" policies.
|
| IMO, part of figuring out how to properly cite wikipedia will
| come with a reckoning that academic honesty isn't 100% nor
| are the arguments of authority that come from academia quite
| enough to establish credibility. I think that's the real
| issue -- this shorthand is pretty good, but it doesn't mesh
| with wikipedia's own shorthand.
| sbf501 wrote:
| > When I was in high school back in 2004,
|
| I think this is the first sentence I've read about an internet
| encyclopedia that started with "Back in my day..."
| atestu wrote:
| The workaround is to use Wikipedia and quote the sources you find
| on the article.
| mattwest wrote:
| Exactly. Wikipedia is a tool for finding sources. They're
| already cited at the bottom. Just click the footnote, navigate
| to the source, and fact check it.
| user3939382 wrote:
| That's what TFA says
| mrweasel wrote:
| Isn't that exactly what Wikipedia wants you to do? You can put
| anything on Wikipedia without a source anyway.
|
| What I find obnoxious is that these are the same schools that
| will hand the kids a ChromeBook without being critical of
| Google incentive.
| ceedan wrote:
| To avoid the wikipedia issue (and also because research papers
| are a pony show) I wrote grade school research papers that were
| so obscure (at the time), that I used a geocities page as my
| source. Myotonic Fainting Goats... some dude who had a farm of
| them wrote up some web page about them.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| If we're thinking about sources:
|
| Teacher primary source on policy
|
| Student secondary source on citation policy
|
| This blog post is third in line
|
| It could be that the teacher is explaining to students, don't
| copy and paste from Wikipedia, go to the source, and use Google
| _Scholar_ to find your sources. If they're using Scholar, are
| they still Googling? Maybe to a child.
| raydiatian wrote:
| What is most interesting about this article is that this doctrine
| seems not to have changed for 20 years. I was told the exact same
| thing back in the early 00's: "Wikipedia is the devil".
|
| It's a well known fact to anybody that has passed through them
| that public schools are a fucking joke. It's not the teachers
| fault, it's the budget's fault.
|
| Another point with regard to this article is that the notion of
| single-source citation is absolutely stupid. At CERN, do you
| think scientists see a single event that confirms the existence
| of the Higgs boson, and then declare victory? Absolutely not. So
| why would you rely on one article saying that "X" is true. Use
| Wikipedia, and Google, and synthesize an averaged perspective, or
| at least a perspective that takes into account incongruencies
| between sources if nothing less. The irony then of me assuming
| that public schools are still peddling "Wikipedia=bad" based on a
| single article is not lost on me.
| jjackson21 wrote:
| google search with site:edu
| yamtaddle wrote:
| This is a good thing to point out (guess what: books are still
| way better than both, yes, physical books, I know they shouldn't
| be in this The Year of Our Lord 2022 but they are, the whole
| "information superhighway" and "making all the world's
| information accessible at your fingertips" hasn't worked out as
| well as we thought it would) but I was really hoping this post
| would be a showdown between lies taught in school and the more-
| correct versions on characterized-by-teachers-as-unreliable
| Wikipedia. That would have been funny.
| brnaftr361 wrote:
| Textbooks are _obscenely_ limited. Interactive feedback is
| gone, animation is gone. I mean trigonometry is so much easier
| to understand if you have moving visualizations of what
| everything means. And because of the _obscene_ costs of
| textbooks, and the various moats that publishers have,
| including book-specific curricula, and the very low effort
| options they have for homework assigning and grading student
| get tied into a shitty ecosystem at great cost with zero
| optionality. And how many students have spent how many hours of
| their lives reinventing the wheel to build mental models to do
| shit that was done decades ago?
|
| As opposed to the internet, where you can find a variety of
| options using different modalities and have direct feedback
| visually, numerically or otherwise through parametric models
| that can give you instantaneous feedback. Shit even Desmos
| alone can give you a huge deal of insight by tossing variables
| in and instantly seeing the results as opposed to taking 3
| minutes every time you change a var with the TI-84 CE bullshit
| academia forces onto students. Oh and it's all free of cost.
| Shit there are even open source textbooks now, but nobody uses
| them.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| I would agree that the Internet has delivered spectacularly
| well in a few kinds of instruction. But if you're looking for
| raw, across-all-disciplines knowledge, books still win and
| it's not even particularly close. They shouldn't, but somehow
| they do.
|
| Library Genesis is probably the best free part of the Web by
| a country mile, as far as raw disseminating-human-knowledge
| goes, and it's supposed to be illegal. And its utility is
| based on... giving you free access to books, periodicals, and
| papers.
| [deleted]
| mherdeg wrote:
| I'm actually really glad that schools are sending the message
| "don't use Wikipedia as a trusted source". Students and parents
| naturally being contrarians will ... use Wikipedia, or learn to
| read primary sources and re-cite them, which is a step towards
| primary source research and a step in the direction of critical
| media consumption.
|
| If students and teachers happen to notice that the Wikipedia
| consensus is close to reality ... that's a great side effect.
| Teaching them that the raw consensus of most Internet users is
| generally trustworthy is a pro-social exercise (even if you do it
| in a sneaky way by triggering students' rebellious instincts).
| And teaching them that their teachers are misguided in the way
| they talk about Wikipedia is, arguably, also a good critical-
| thinking exercise.
|
| An alternate exercise that schools or parents could do is to have
| their kid try to introduce a false fact into Wikipedia and see
| how long it lasts or whether it can enter reality via
| citogenesis. It's better that kids are not introduced to this
| concept. I'm glad that it's not done.
| Cyberdog wrote:
| But what about when the Wikipedia consensus is quite far from
| reality? If your only source for most or all of your
| information is Wikipedia, you will never know.
| THENATHE wrote:
| Wikipedia is the single greatest tool mankind has ever developed
| for the internet. Where else can you get a _mostly_ correct and
| accurate understanding of essentially any topic known to man for
| free, and then have resources for further research if desired.
|
| Even if Wikipedia isn't 100% correct on everything, I can't think
| of any resource that is (that is also free).
| j7f3 wrote:
| yeah that's rather correct when it comes to the English
| language Wikipedia
|
| but the Polish language Wikipedia has been hijacked by the
| right wing nut jobs
|
| it's public knowledge by now not to trust Wikipedia in Poland
| unless you're one of them
|
| also Polish politicians use Wikipedia to boost their profiles,
| they treat is as a free self aggrandizement platform
|
| everyone knows they edit their own profiles and wipe out any
| unflattering info
|
| Polish Wikipedia is a poster child for what could go wrong when
| you leave editing to the common people
| bArray wrote:
| Wikipedia certainly has its biases, but I think for school
| children it is perfectly fine as a source. It's not as if they
| will read research papers instead, let alone understand the
| quality of their source.
| cjohnson318 wrote:
| Arguing about the relative strengths of Wikipedia versus
| Brittanica highlights the core issue that very few things are
| irrefutable fact that can be proven and expressed concisely with
| natural language, and that most things are beliefs, and
| interpretations of biased or limited observations.
|
| Both sources are "mostly accurate", it's just that _some_
| teachers think that using the internet for research is too easy;
| "carrying books back and forth across the library builds
| character".
| impalallama wrote:
| Everyone knows that you just use wikipedia's own sources instead.
| throwawaygal7 wrote:
| Wikipedia is most young peoples go to source for knowledge. The
| way important entries frame a subject is considered to be a
| neutral observers take, but they're often anything but when it
| comes to politics, history and philosophy. Often these important
| entries are the personal fife of one or more admin who structured
| things according to personal preference.
|
| An easy way to see this is to look at a topic that is split in
| the academy along geographical lines - the entry in wiki will
| often favour whatever region the original cabal sided with and
| give the other short thrift.
|
| Meeting a wikipedia admin in real life is often eye opening and
| explains some of these choices.
|
| The old encyclopedias were more transparent; siding with their
| own cultures scholars in a way that was generally more uniform.
| Wiki masquerades as the final objective authority but has the
| same old issues burried and obscured.
|
| Even an undergrad intro course on a given historical subject will
| often come into violent conflict with a given entry.
|
| The best entries are scientific topics, like botany or physics -
| and this impression of mine is probbaly based on ignorance.
| appenz wrote:
| Wrong school? Our local schools (Silicon Valley, CA) encourage
| kids to use Wikipedia. Your school may just be a little behind
| the times.
|
| The discussion now has moved to NLP models. GPT-3 models at this
| point can generate extremely high quality answers to complex
| questions. Is there still a point in asking a student to write a
| few paragraph on the definition and effect of acid rain if you
| can get that from OpenAI within seconds?
| Cyberdog wrote:
| The point isn't to have the kid write the essay about acid
| rain. The point is to teach the kid about acid rain and have
| them demonstrate an understanding of it. If the kid just turns
| in an AI-written essay that they may not have even read, they
| have learned nothing.
| user3939382 wrote:
| Wikipedia's editorial policies result in the amplification and
| ossification of (political, academic, medical, etc.)
| establishment narratives and standards, which are often corrupt
| for a wide variety of reasons.
|
| I'm not suggesting I have a silver bullet solution to this
| problem, but as a result I tend to disagree that Wikipedia is
| this holy grail of knowledge. That's only true for
| uncontroversial topics. For everything else, you have to find all
| the silenced users on the talk pages to learn about the real
| scope of a topic.
| fonix232 wrote:
| betwixthewires wrote:
| Teachers are overpaid and mostly pretty stupid. School boards are
| bureaucracies that prioritize student learning somewhere near the
| bottom of the list. What do you expect?
| JediWing wrote:
| My understanding of "don't cite Wikipedia" is the same for "don't
| cite the Encyclopedia". By failing to use a primary source,
| you're subjecting yourself to the interpretation and biases of
| someone who has already ingested the source material and formed
| an opinion.
|
| It's a great place to orient yourself on a piece of subject
| matter, though! And I certainly agree that the dreck that makes
| up 95% of Google results should certainly not be cited
| academically.
| jimmar wrote:
| Some teachers like to play god in the classroom. Source: I'm a
| teacher. I try not to play god and impose non-sensical rules, but
| I could if I wanted to and nobody could do anything about it.
| Parents could complain, my department head could try to talk
| sense into me, but if I impose a rule saying that citations must
| be written in Comic Sans size 11 font with every third word
| italicized, then I'm within my rights to take points off for
| deviations from the assignment instructions. Society places a lot
| of trust in teachers, and there are few checks against bad
| teachers.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| I played God in the opposite direction. That way you teach the
| lesson without having to ban Wikipedia. (I should state that
| the purpose of this particular module is to illustrate the
| dangers of scientific misinformation. And this is only one of
| the exercises in that module. But all are illustrative in a way
| that students in the age of social media can readily relate
| to.)
|
| 1st Exercise serves as an intro to the subject
|
| 1 - Find articles on Wikipedia, or information on social media
| sources, with factually incorrect information in them. Science
| articles are a good source of these. Molecular weights are
| wrong. Physics formulas off. That sort of thing.
|
| 2 - Assign a short essay on a subject that these wikipedia
| pages claim to expound on.
|
| 3 - Kids will ask if they can use Wikipedia. Tell them yes, but
| emphasize that you wouldn't advise it as a person should be
| skeptical of anything they read on the internet. Let them know
| that lot of the information out there is false.
|
| 4 - Vast majority of the kids will ignore your advice and the
| same incorrect information will make an appearance in each of
| their essays. Grade them normally. So most will earn D or F.
|
| 5 - Since everyone did so poorly, agree to drop the D or F
| grades and just assign another short essay. This one on the use
| of internet information sources to disseminate misinformation.
| (In my case, scientific misinformation. But the same exercise
| works for whatever subject you are teaching.)
|
| Use the entire exercise to inform the discussion of scientific
| misinformation. (Or, again, misinformation in whatever subject
| you are teaching.) This discussion is the real launch of the
| module.
|
| Further exercises in the module go into the dangers of medical
| misinformation. Importance of factual information in decision
| making. etc etc. It's the most fun module because by the end,
| the students don't trust me. (In fact, they trust no one.) It
| has become a game, and they're all listening extremely
| carefully to every word I say expecting another gotcha. In a
| very real way, they've learned to be skeptical even of
| teachers. They've begun to trust only what they can verify. And
| you realize your work is done.
| daveslash wrote:
| Re>> _" if I impose a rule saying that citations must be
| written in Comic Sans size 11 font with every third word
| italicized."_ You would not be "playing God"; that would be the
| opposite. [Que Church Lady] _Satan_!
|
| Snark aside, thank you for your contributions. Re >> _" there
| are few checks against bad teachers"_ -- do you think there
| should be more checks or do you think well intentioned checks
| could be weaponized _against_ good teachers?
| ajford wrote:
| > citations must be written in Comic Sans size 11 font with
| every third word italicized
|
| TBH, after having to follow MLA style guides and various other
| citation styles over my career, I feel like this isn't as out
| there as you intended! I hated having to put together citations
| because the rules always seemed entirely arbitrary and never
| seemed to capture what I thought was relevant info.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Chicago is so much more sane than MLA. I don't know why we
| insist on making high schoolers use MLA. They'll only need to
| use it if they become academics in _some_ fields and if they
| 've learned _any_ other citation style they can pick up MLA
| just fine later.
| musingsole wrote:
| They also seem to have subtly shifted each time I revisit
| citation styling rules
| freedomben wrote:
| As someone who suffered under teachers who like to play god,
| and thrived under teachers like you, _thank you_.
|
| > _citations must be written in Comic Sans size 11 font with
| every third word italicized_
|
| you would become a _legend_ if you did this :-D
| bombcar wrote:
| I could see it as a easy example of the "brown M&Ms" theory:
| https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2012/02/14/146880432/.
| ..
| influx wrote:
| Similarly to police unions, teacher unions prevent many of
| those checks. Public servants do not serve society by having
| unions.
| thebooktocome wrote:
| In my locality, the union is the last line of defense for
| teachers who don't want to teach creationism, abstinence, and
| the like. Local politicians are far easier for a vocal
| minority to bully.
| bobkazamakis wrote:
| Police and teacher unions are terrible not because they are
| public servants but because our capitalist system provides
| them with no way to extract additional value.
|
| Teachers don't have qualified immunity or get the privilege
| of shooting your dog, making it a pretty poor comparison.
| kixxauth wrote:
| Any new media has this problem. I know we think of digital media
| as being old and well understood at this point, but that's far
| from the truth.
|
| Media moves too quickly for most people to understand it. By the
| time you understand it, it changes again. That was true for
| newspapers, radio, television, digital media, and now ubiquitous
| computing.
|
| As people who build these media platforms (hackers) we need to do
| a better job designing the technology for humans and educating
| people to approach it with a more sophisticated mindset.
|
| Ex; social media has been a disaster.
|
| Remember, it was not that long ago that everyone got their
| information from the same places. This is going to be a long
| road.
| mikkergp wrote:
| I actually think this is some not too minor part of the
| misinformation problem we have today. Sure some of it is
| willful, but simultaneously almost any common sense notion you
| have about how to do research these days has a big fucking
| asterix next to it, and may have been born of a time of
| different communication patterns.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| I am not sure at which level his kids are.
|
| It's more than fine for elementary school, not fine for
| university... and there is spectrum in between.
| Aspos wrote:
| So a wrapper with a random legitimate-lloking URL, a custom CSS
| styling which would serve wikipedia content with some random
| wacky headers and footers would do as a source in your kid's
| school?
| devteambravo wrote:
| It's all part of the scam. What are we gonna do about it?
| Legitimately asking.. Have a 7yo and I'm afraid for their future.
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