101–110 of 501 posts
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)
I think this is the first sentence I've read about an internet encyclopedia that started with "Back in my day..."
For starters it would be nice if established articles had a level of protection by default - e.g. don't immediately publish changes, but await for consensus and/or a known reputable contributor accepting those changes. This would both help avoiding vandalism, and maintaining the quality level of the wiki pages altogether.
Then another thing I'd like to see is recently changed sections being highlighted - e.g. an added sentence/word/reference, a deleted section, etc., would all be useful to see. Combine this highlighting with the previous idea of withheld contributions (i.e. show the new contribution, but mark it with a warning that it's not yet confirmed legitimacy, and even offer the user to vote if it's a legit edit or not).
Basically, Wikipedia needs to transition from a 'raw information first' approach to something that also addresses edit history in an immediately visible way.
To 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?
Every 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 d…
Both were still a decent place to start, but they're both often only "right" from a certain point of view.
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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.
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> 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…
> Wikipedia isn't even a valid source for Wikipedia itself, First-hand direct presence isn't even a valid source for Wikipedia. Part of my account of the founding of amazon.com was removed because it wasn't "backed up by published citable sources". I pointed out that I would be the primary source cited by any such source, and was told that wasn't good enough: the contents had to be published somewhere else and then c…
Now you need to get cited by someone else before wikipedia will accept it. (and preferably someone else needs to be cited too of course)
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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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> 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 knowle…
Every 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 d…