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School vs. Wikipedia

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Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#11

Post by scifibestfi »

chatterhead wrote: post #2

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 t…

> 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.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#12

Post by kube-system »

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.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#13

Post by teeray »

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.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#15

Post by tablespoon »

jacobolus wrote: post #8
chatterhead wrote: post #2

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 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. h…

> 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.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#16

Post by jacobolus »

tablespoon wrote: post #15
jacobolus wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. h…

> 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 supp…

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.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#17

Post by tablespoon »

jacobolus wrote: post #16
tablespoon wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 supp…

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 the…

> 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.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#18

Post by FeepingCreature »

scifibestfi wrote: post #11
chatterhead wrote: post #2

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 t…

> 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.

Yes, and depending on topic, I discard 10% to 90% of the results out of hand.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#19

Post by NegativeLatency »

kube-system wrote: post #12

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 e…

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.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#20

Post by thesuitonym »

jacobolus wrote: post #8
chatterhead wrote: post #2

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 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. h…

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.

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