141–150 of 501 posts
It's a great place to orient yourself on a piece of subject matter, though! And I certainly agree that the dreck that makes up 95% of Google results should certainly not be cited academically.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
It's not the inconsistency that disqualifies it from academic citation, it's that it's a tertiary source . The Encyclopedia Brittanica isn't a moving target if you cite the edition, but it's also a tertiary source, so it's just as citable as Wikipedia is, that is to say, not (except if you're treating Wikipedia as a primary source, eg you're studying Wikipedia ) It's stupid to ban students from using Wikipedia- sure,…
Actually, it's probably pretty smart for schools to "ban" students from using Wikipedia, in order to encourage them to develop habits to use better things. If you let them use Wikipedia for their research, you're putting them in a situation to slouch into using it for most of their research (except for some source laundering at the end).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not the inconsistency that disqualifies it from academic citation, it's that it's a tertiary source . The Encyclopedia Brittanica isn't a moving target if you cite the edition, but it's also a tertiary source, so it's just as citable as Wikipedia is, that is to say, not (except if you're treating Wikipedia as a primary source, eg you're studying Wikipedia ) It's stupid to ban students from using Wikipedia- sure,…
> It's stupid to ban students from using Wikipedia- sure, Wikipedia isn't of uniformly high quality, but it can be a pretty good encyclopedia. It's just not something you're allowed to cite. Actually, it's probably pretty smart for schools to "ban" students from using Wikipedia, in order to encourage them to develop habits to use better things. If you let them use Wikipedia for their research, you're putting them in…
The thrust of the link here is that they aren't giving them alternatives, and just telling students to throw themselves into Google and hope they find something. Which, yes, isn't a bad skill to learn either- there's stuff to find out there- but it's setting them up for failure.
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?
In biology and medicine, pubmed is the most common ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ ) .
For general purpose you can use google scholar ( https://scholar.google.com/ ).
When you find an interesting article, both these tools will allow you to both seach backwards for articles that it cites, and search forwards for articles that cite it in turn. Repeated application can quickly help you expand the pool of potentially relevant articles (especially once you surface review articles in the citation chain, which can help tie things together and/or let you jump across to associated topics) .
Finally, both of these tools yield you a DOI which you can plug into scihub. You can also install the extension "Sci-Hub X Now!" to do this last bit for you. ( https://github.com/gchenfc/sci-hub-now )
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…
There is no solution. Perhaps truth was always an illusion, but the illusion has been destroyed and it is unravelling society.
A consensus of reputation used to govern these things, but now reputation means almost nothing and there are no mechanisms for consensus on the web. Attempts at consensus are all based in censorship and what remains of reputation is a perverted proxy for "ability to get attention".
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…
There are some math and physics articles that can go 10 paragraphs without a single citation. They'd be great blog posts or chapters in a book. But they're poor quality Wikipedia articles.
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…
We are all watching user-generated content destroy the very concept of truth, and Wikipedia is example A1. There is no solution. Perhaps truth was always an illusion, but the illusion has been destroyed and it is unravelling society. A consensus of reputation used to govern these things, but now reputation means almost nothing and there are no mechanisms for consensus on the web. Attempts at consensus are all based i…
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…
So on top-tier companies, the pages are cluttered with details of brief moves in and out of old headquarters buildings -- plus long-ago product rollouts and cancellations -- plus stock-market zigzags in 2013, 2015, etc. For authors/artists, each work is treated in isolation, without an effort to define their style and how it evolved.
There's no natural entry path for a subject expert to step in and make it all coherent. Instead, the mudslides just keep coming.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.
I don't understand why this bothers people. If something on Wikipedia is above or below my level, I just skip it. It takes all of three seconds to recognize. I've consistently found it to be a great starting point for self-study in all sorts of math.