Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

School vs. Wikipedia

ratfactor.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 501 posts

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#21

Post by ajford »

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.

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.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#22

Post by mikkergp »

kixxauth wrote: post #5

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…

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.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#23

Post by mountainb »

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.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#24

Post by mrweasel »

atestu wrote: post #3

The workaround is to use Wikipedia and quote the sources you find on the article.

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.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#25

Post by roywiggins »

dfxm12 wrote: post #9

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 nee…

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).

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#26

Post by mellosouls »

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.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#28

Post by mountainb »

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…

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.).

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#29

Post by ziml77 »

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)

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#30

Post by localhost »

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…

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.

Post reply on HN