School vs. Wikipedia
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School vs. Wikipedia
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Re: School vs. Wikipedia
#2You 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.
Re: School vs. Wikipedia
#3The workaround is to use Wikipedia and quote the sources you find on the article.
Re: School vs. Wikipedia
#4You 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 t…
> 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.
Re: School vs. Wikipedia
#5Any 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.
Re: School vs. Wikipedia
#6The workaround is to use Wikipedia and quote the sources you find on the article.
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.
Re: School vs. Wikipedia
#7You 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 t…
> 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.
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.
Re: School vs. Wikipedia
#8You 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 t…
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.
Re: School vs. Wikipedia
#9I 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...
Re: School vs. Wikipedia
#10What's code red mean in this context?