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School vs. Wikipedia

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Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#91

Post by dhosek »

youainti wrote: post #44
thesuitonym wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Except encyclopedias don't have _actual sources_. They are based on source but don't include references as far as I remember.

They very much do have citations as I recall. Maybe not the junior encyclopedias they had your grade school, but any proper encyclopedia had citations.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#92

Post by freedomben »

aidenn0 wrote: post #76
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)

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.

I chase a lot of wikipedia citations, and this is a much bigger problem than I think most people realize. A huge chunk of citations (at least around 19th century history) is paywalled or is a printed source that is impossible to find and verify.

To be fair this is a problem for most academic papers and most books as well, so it's not unique to wikipedia. It does however, require a lot of "faith" to be exercised. As a skeptical person, I find that unsatisfactory.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#93

Post by MichaelCollins »

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 on Wikipedia and repeat it in their published work

When people say not to cite wikipedia, they're telling you to not do this. They're not asking you to plagiarize wikipedia.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#94

Post by dfee »

jermaustin1 wrote: post #55
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)

Or if we were being cheeky, made up our sources/citations (at least in my high school teacher ever actually verified). I doubt this would have worked in university, but I never attempted it.

I’d wager it’d work just fine in a university setting. 10 references per paper, 10 papers per student, 200 students in a course.

I doubt anyone is fetching and fact checking 2000 links a semester.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#95

Post by freedomben »

jimmar wrote: post #70

Some teachers like to play god in the classroom. Source: I'm a teacher. I try not to play god and impose non-sensical rules, but I could if I wanted to and nobody could do anything about it. Parents could complain, my department head could try to talk sense into me, but if I impose a rule saying that citations must be written in Comic Sans size 11 font with every third word italicized, then I'm within my rights to ta…

As someone who suffered under teachers who like to play god, and thrived under teachers like you, thank you.

> citations must be written in Comic Sans size 11 font with every third word italicized

you would become a legend if you did this :-D

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#96

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

biofox wrote: post #67
guywithahat wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it? Encyclopedias were not regarded as good sources before Wikipedia, and Wikipedia is demonstrably less accurate than encyclopedias and more biased towards their sponsors

If you're talking about something like Encyclopaedia Britannica or the ODNB, they are/were extensively peer-reviewed. I have seen plenty of references to both in scholarly literature. Infact, for some niche or historical topics, I often find my old print edition of EB to be more useful than Wikipedia.

Actual studies (even back in 2005) comparing EB and Wikipedia find Wikipedia to be at least as accurate as EB. The level of "peer review" in EB is generally overstated in the popular conception of that work.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#97

Post by twobitshifter »

If we’re thinking about sources:

Teacher primary source on policy

Student secondary source on citation policy

This blog post is third in line

It could be that the teacher is explaining to students, don’t copy and paste from Wikipedia, go to the source, and use Google Scholar to find your sources. If they’re using Scholar, are they still Googling? Maybe to a child.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#98

Post by mananaysiempre »

wobbly_bush wrote: post #74
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

... And at the same time, the English-language mathematics section is a fairly reliable and—in some cases—very broad reference, covering a range of viewpoints that would usually require trawling through half a dozen books for different subjects and target audiences. (It is rarely a good introduction, but then a single reference for a skilled reader is doable while a single introduction for every taste, background, and motivating problem is nigh-impossible.)

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#99

Post by influx »

jimmar wrote: post #70

Some teachers like to play god in the classroom. Source: I'm a teacher. I try not to play god and impose non-sensical rules, but I could if I wanted to and nobody could do anything about it. Parents could complain, my department head could try to talk sense into me, but if I impose a rule saying that citations must be written in Comic Sans size 11 font with every third word italicized, then I'm within my rights to ta…

Similarly to police unions, teacher unions prevent many of those checks. Public servants do not serve society by having unions.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#100

Post by jrumbut »

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…

> "scholars" citing Wikipedia could very well create a circular reference supporting some falsehood on a Wikipedia article.

Using Wikipedia and citing Wikipedia is perhaps ill advised.

Using Wikipedia and not citing Wikipedia is a real problem and how you create the circle of falsehoods.

This idea of not using Wikipedia introduces students to the academic dishonesty game. Priority one in writing a research paper is that it be a truthful reflection of your research, including limitations, accidents, mistakes, failures, etc, etc.

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