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?
School vs. Wikipedia
71–80 of 501 posts
Re: School vs. Wikipedia
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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Re: School vs. Wikipedia
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 p…
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).
Re: School vs. Wikipedia
#74This 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.
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.
Re: School vs. Wikipedia
#75To 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 l…
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?
Re: School vs. Wikipedia
#76This 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)
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.
Re: School vs. Wikipedia
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 p…
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).
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.
Re: School vs. Wikipedia
#78Earlier 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…
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.
Re: School vs. Wikipedia
#79I 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.
Re: School vs. Wikipedia
#80This 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…
> 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…
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.