School vs. Wikipedia • Hacker News Board

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#161

Post by jacobolus » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 5:38 PM UTC

MichaelCollins wrote: post #93

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 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.

You would be amazed at the frequency with which “real” academics, journalists, lawyers, judges’ clerks, etc. plagiarize Wikipedia.

Teachers telling students they can’t under any circumstances cite Wikipedia trains this behavior.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#162

Post by reaperducer » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 5:40 PM UTC

aimor wrote: 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…

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.

It's always frustrating for me to see things in Wikipedia I know are wrong because I was in the room when a particular decision was made, or because I personally made the decision.

I gave up making corrections because they would always get reverted by someone in another country who wasn't even born when the event happened. Simply because there wasn't a random blogger live streaming it, and nobody's written a book about it, my knowledge remains my own.

Wikipedia is the ultimate example of deleting the world's history because it can't be linked to.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#163

Post by impalallama » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 5:40 PM UTC

Everyone knows that you just use wikipedia's own sources instead.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#164

Post by throwawaygal7 » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 5:41 PM UTC

Wikipedia is most young peoples go to source for knowledge. The way important entries frame a subject is considered to be a neutral observers take, but they're often anything but when it comes to politics, history and philosophy. Often these important entries are the personal fife of one or more admin who structured things according to personal preference.

An easy way to see this is to look at a topic that is split in the academy along geographical lines - the entry in wiki will often favour whatever region the original cabal sided with and give the other short thrift.

Meeting a wikipedia admin in real life is often eye opening and explains some of these choices.

The old encyclopedias were more transparent; siding with their own cultures scholars in a way that was generally more uniform. Wiki masquerades as the final objective authority but has the same old issues burried and obscured.

Even an undergrad intro course on a given historical subject will often come into violent conflict with a given entry.

The best entries are scientific topics, like botany or physics - and this impression of mine is probbaly based on ignorance.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#165

Post by calvinmorrison » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 5:41 PM UTC

bombcar wrote: post #139

calvinmorrison wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

One thing I wanted to add was - the 'story' of any persons life is dependent on biographers creating it.

Someone has to actually collect it all up together. Go talk to original people. Then you write a book and wikipedia will happily take it. They might not be happy to quote your great auntie Margaret who said there was a bastard son, but until some biographer writes that into a book nobody thinks it's real.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#166

Post by nathias » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 5:43 PM UTC

aimor wrote: 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…

one simple mechanism would be to freeze the article editing for a bit when it becomes a hot topic in US media

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#167

Post by MajimasEyepatch » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 5:44 PM UTC

squeaky-clean wrote: post #147

aimor wrote: 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…

Wikipedia is all about the citations. 90% of my Wikipedia edits are either adding citations or [Citation Needed] if I couldn't find a source for an uncited claim. 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.

I've definitely read some Wikipedia pages on niche technical topics in my field that were clearly written by someone with _some_ degree of expertise (maybe a grad student) but with no understanding of the purpose, standards, and style of Wikipedia. The voice is often all over the place.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#168

Post by jmchuster » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 5:44 PM UTC

When i was in school, the rule was also "you can't use the encyclopedia as a source". So it feels more like trying to get students to learn to find and use primary sources. Wikipedia actually makes this incredibly simple now, since everything has a citation link.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#169

Post by nkingsy » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 5:45 PM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #157

nkingsy wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't see any particular reason to think that Wikipedia is worse than what existed prior. What exemplar from, say, 1980, do you think was better in terms of information quality? I'm thinking back to going in to a library, where a given topic would generally have 0-3 books. Books often put together by a single person, a person often chosen because of personal relationships with a publisher, plus that publisher's int…

It worked for a time and now it is dying at the hands of bad-faith actors who have worked within their mechanism.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#170

Post by kube-system » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 5:45 PM UTC

throw10920 wrote: post #160

nkingsy wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> There is no solution. How an an explicit web of trust not a solution? Imagine a system where you can keep a local database of people/sites/pages you know and how much you trust them, selectively expose parts of that database to your immediate friends and/or the web as a whole, and lookup/query the databases exposed by contacts. "My friend F1 assigns a trust score of 0.9 to website W1, and I assign a trust score of…

You're described a system that tells you what your friends think, not a system that necessarily comes to any objective truth. The internet is already full of echo chambers of misplaced trust -- that's much of the problem.

Linking echo chambers to mutually trusted echo chambers isn't going to lead people to objective truth. It's going to introduce flat-earthers to ghost hunters.