Google books should be free to peruse for school students. That would be a good use of government money.
If people are against Google books, then the governments should scan and share all of human knowledge.
School vs. Wikipedia
81–90 of 501 posts
Re: School vs. Wikipedia
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was a junior in high school in 2003 and referenced Wikipedia for a particular element's molar mass. The wiki was actually wrong about this fundamental digital fact by a factor of like 3x, and my teacher got to i-told-you-so me about citations. Ever since then I've not been able to enjoy Wikipedia without scrutinizing the edit history
Why not just check the reference? If there isn't one it isn't to be trusted, if there is just cite that.
https://web.archive.org/web/20040409083026/https://en.wikipe...
the entire "references" section back then was one link
Re: School vs. Wikipedia
#83This 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.
It's very surprising to me that anybody would assume that, let alone that everybody would be presumed to assume that.
Re: School vs. Wikipedia
#84School rarely helps with learning and almost always harms learning. If you're still sending your kids to school, be mindful that you're doing that for reasons other than to help them learn.
Re: School vs. Wikipedia
#85The flaw in the policy isn't don't use Wikipedia. It's don't use Wikipedia but then do use Google and trust whatever comes up as top search result. That's bad policy.
Policy when I was in high school was don't quote Wikipedia, but feel free to chase sources cited by it, read those, and analyze and quote those. This still has the potential for bias, of course (the editors on Wikipedia will have pruned the set of sources cited by the article), but the meta-goal was to teach students how to search primary sources (read: "Actually get up and go to a library and open a book,") so it achieved that goal even if the books were biased.
Re: School vs. Wikipedia
#86You 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.
I still donate when asked, it’s one of the biggest achievements of free software. I wish I had more time to contribute to the pages, as I imagine that would be worth more to them than my 20 bucks.
Re: School vs. Wikipedia
#87Is this guy me? He could be me. Literally had this same conversation with my kids this week.
Re: School vs. Wikipedia
#88This 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…
I think this is completely wrong.
When I was in school (what the US would call K-12 school), our school library had Encyclopedia Brittanica and a few other large encyclopedias. We frequently used them as launching off points, because they almost always had a lot more information in them than "children's books" about a topic. In later years at school, it would start to make more sense to use the still-non-primary-source-books-but-still-much-more-detailed books in the library. In college university, we used a mixture of textbooks (still not primary sources!) and actual papers.
There is a complex web of information sources. Brittanica was fine back in my day as a "someone who knows something about this wrote up a really fine summary that will give you some directions". There's no reason for Wikipedia not to play this role today (it is both at least as accurate and more expansive than EB). There are many years of education before "seek[ing] out higher quality primary and secondary sources" makes much sense, and even then, the introduction you can get from Wikipedia will frequently stand you in good stead before doing that.
Yes, it is true that using Wikipedia the way you describe it is a bad habit, but that's precisely why children (and adults!) should be taught how best to use it. I remember being actually taught that EB was pretty much the entire summary of all human knowledge - laughable now. We can do better than that by embracing, not by rejecting, wikipedia.
Re: School vs. Wikipedia
#89Every now and then I like to read through Wikipedia pages for things I know more than the average person on. It keeps me skeptical of the things I read on there. For people unfamiliar with a subject (students) I think Wikipedia pages are misleading, poorly organized, and sometimes wrong. That doesn't make Wikipedia useless, but the author's best advice is to use Wikipedia as a map to other sources of information.
I don't think Wikipedia has a path forwards for fixing the quality of its articles. In my opinion it requires every page being rewritten by an expert with a single voice, as a traditional encyclopedia would have, which is the exact opposite of Wikipedia's core. Though I did check, and they have more than enough cash to write a traditional encyclopedia.
Re: School vs. Wikipedia
#90This 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. IMH…
Correct. If the children are going to get any value from the many, many hours spent in a school, why not use the library resources that the school pays vast fees to maintain access to (public, private, AND parochial all pay for these things), which require actual skills to be developed to use effectively? Why should the teacher earn a salary for telling children to type into a text box? A computer could do the job of telling kids to "search Wikipedia" for less money, but a teacher can be more helpful to train students in the core academic skillset that is formal research.
Why do we look at the state of affairs in which undergraduates even at "elite" schools arrive to universities completely unprepared to use any academic-caliber library research tools and consider that acceptable?