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School vs. Wikipedia

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Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#31

Post by tablespoon »

mountainb wrote: post #23

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. Search…

> 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.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#32

Post by orangepurple »

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…

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.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#33

Post by chatterhead »

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.

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.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#34

Post by appenz »

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?

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#35

Post by whatshisface »

mountainb wrote: post #28
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…

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…

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."

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#37

Post by AlotOfReading »

mountainb wrote: post #28
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…

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…

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

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#38

Post by SoftTalker »

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…

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).

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#39

Post by JumpCrisscross »

ziml77 wrote: post #29

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)

> 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.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#40

Post by projektfu »

thesuitonym wrote: post #20
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 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 overvie…

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.

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