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School vs. Wikipedia

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Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#131
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Hmm, on that 2004 Wikipedia page it lists the atomic weight of carbon as 12.0107, and the one link in the reference section (Los Alamos National Laboratory) lists it as 12.011.

That's the correct number for the molar mass of carbon, as far as I know, it doesn't look off by 3x!

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wikipedia also requires citations to be secondary sources, so you have to find someone reporting about whatever it was, because Wikipedia isn't for original research. This can make it more difficult for things that nobody ever bothered reporting.

>This can make it more difficult for things that nobody ever bothered reporting.

My dad is wrapping up the first monograph on a not too obscure New Deal artist who had a long career and plenty of notable works (at least in his niche).

The entire wikipedia page was written by my dad. If you search the artist there's plenty of hits on art for sale by him, but not much on the man himself.

My father who was a journalist and now a researcher has done several projects and he's been the first 'story' written for a lot of these projects.

When the Philadelphia Union started a feeder team named after the historical club in Bethlehem - they called him up and asked him if he owned the copyright! In fact, basically all of the pictures and details, later written into a book done by another local soccer journo type, was dug up by him. A lot of this information was either in microfiche or in dusty piles in the Bethlehem area library. Now it's diligently organized and stored online.

One of the things he's told me about his work is it's immensely difficult to put a story together that is cohesive. Even for someone who's relatives are still alive, and for the soccer club? He could probably have made up half of the articles and didn't.

All of these things to find out that wikipedia will delete your article for non-importance because there's a lack of recent news links online to it.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#133
I'm actually really glad that schools are sending the message "don't use Wikipedia as a trusted source". Students and parents naturally being contrarians will ... use Wikipedia, or learn to read primary sources and re-cite them, which is a step towards primary source research and a step in the direction of critical media consumption.

If students and teachers happen to notice that the Wikipedia consensus is close to reality … that's a great side effect. Teaching them that the raw consensus of most Internet users is generally trustworthy is a pro-social exercise (even if you do it in a sneaky way by triggering students' rebellious instincts). And teaching them that their teachers are misguided in the way they talk about Wikipedia is, arguably, also a good critical-thinking exercise.

An alternate exercise that schools or parents could do is to have their kid try to introduce a false fact into Wikipedia and see how long it lasts or whether it can enter reality via citogenesis. It's better that kids are not introduced to this concept. I'm glad that it's not done.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stopped using Wikipedia a while ago. Its math and science content is too nonsensical to be useful. I occasionally read a history article, maybe once every 6 months. But history from things happening hundreds to thousands of years ago, predating modern media... sorry historians, it might as well be fiction. I'm sure someone has thought long and hard about why the content is losing quality.

"Its math and science content is too nonsensical to be useful." Can you name a example? I found them to be generally of higher quality than controversial topics. So maybe not always with the best didactic approach, but usually a good start. And then I follow the links, if I want to dive in deep. Wikipedia is useful for me, for quickly checking something. Not scientifically dive into a deep topic.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_differential_equatio...

Repetitive content, written at several levels simultaneously, weird fixations on tangential topics.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#135
post #89

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…

I stopped using Wikipedia a while ago. Its math and science content is too nonsensical to be useful. I occasionally read a history article, maybe once every 6 months. But history from things happening hundreds to thousands of years ago, predating modern media... sorry historians, it might as well be fiction. I'm sure someone has thought long and hard about why the content is losing quality.

As someone who reads a lot of history, please head over to r/AskHistorians

It has very strong moderation, and low quality answers are deleted. Their papers cite methods and hypothesis which removes a lot of "fiction" from the equation.

Also, they get quoted in mainstream media too. The content quality is out of this world.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#137

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 fee…

Searching for and finding relevant information is a skill all unto itself.

Telling people outright to not use the two most common starting tools (Google and Wikipedia) is probably a bad idea.

Telling people that they can definitely do better than JUST using the starter tools definitely seems like the right path.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#138
post #113
post #89

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…

I have found the opposite… there is hardly a consistsntly more organized and accurate source that is accessible to the public, but I would be glad to hear what it is if you have one in mind. Wikipedia is far more trustworthy than local news channels even about recent events, and everything is sources (casualty count: who said it etc.)

I think Wikipedia is a great start to finding content at a general level.

Though, vertical specific niches often have better sources of information. For e.g. Examine.com currently seems better for nutrition and supplement information. Or even an old school reference book like The Art of Computer Programming by Donald Knuth is better for algorithms.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia also requires citations to be secondary sources, so you have to find someone reporting about whatever it was, because Wikipedia isn't for original research. This can make it more difficult for things that nobody ever bothered reporting.

>This can make it more difficult for things that nobody ever bothered reporting. My dad is wrapping up the first monograph on a not too obscure New Deal artist who had a long career and plenty of notable works (at least in his niche). The entire wikipedia page was written by my dad. If you search the artist there's plenty of hits on art for sale by him, but not much on the man himself. My father who was a journalist…

Deleting for non-notoriety is one of the saddest parts of Wikipedia. Flag it as "meh" but deleting it entire, ouch.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 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…

There shouldn't be original research on Wikipedia, so any citation of Wikipedia would be better sourced directly from the reference linked to by Wikipedia.

Circular references aren't only a problem when it involves Wikipedia. You shouldn't ever be citing sources who only claim to be communicating the work of others, outside of being an antiquities scholar when the original works have been lost.

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