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School vs. Wikipedia

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Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#171

Post by thebooktocome »

influx wrote: post #99
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.

In my locality, the union is the last line of defense for teachers who don’t want to teach creationism, abstinence, and the like. Local politicians are far easier for a vocal minority to bully.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#172

Post by karaterobot »

Seems like the purpose of these research papers in school got lost somewhere. They are an opportunity to develop skills and judgment, not to do important scholarly work. By saying "don't use Wikipedia" they are missing an opportunity to teach kids how to find and vet resources. Wikipedia does have a ton of issues: as do, evidently, some of the top peer-reviewed journals in the world. So, the provenance of a citation is not enough, and focusing on it is beside the point. The skill schools should be teaching is how to sift the wheat from the chaff, since that will be more valuable later on.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#173

Post by bilbo0s »

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…

I played God in the opposite direction. That way you teach the lesson without having to ban Wikipedia. (I should state that the purpose of this particular module is to illustrate the dangers of scientific misinformation. And this is only one of the exercises in that module. But all are illustrative in a way that students in the age of social media can readily relate to.)

1st Exercise serves as an intro to the subject

1 - Find articles on Wikipedia, or information on social media sources, with factually incorrect information in them. Science articles are a good source of these. Molecular weights are wrong. Physics formulas off. That sort of thing.

2 - Assign a short essay on a subject that these wikipedia pages claim to expound on.

3 - Kids will ask if they can use Wikipedia. Tell them yes, but emphasize that you wouldn't advise it as a person should be skeptical of anything they read on the internet. Let them know that lot of the information out there is false.

4 - Vast majority of the kids will ignore your advice and the same incorrect information will make an appearance in each of their essays. Grade them normally. So most will earn D or F.

5 - Since everyone did so poorly, agree to drop the D or F grades and just assign another short essay. This one on the use of internet information sources to disseminate misinformation. (In my case, scientific misinformation. But the same exercise works for whatever subject you are teaching.)

Use the entire exercise to inform the discussion of scientific misinformation. (Or, again, misinformation in whatever subject you are teaching.) This discussion is the real launch of the module.

Further exercises in the module go into the dangers of medical misinformation. Importance of factual information in decision making. etc etc. It's the most fun module because by the end, the students don't trust me. (In fact, they trust no one.) It has become a game, and they're all listening extremely carefully to every word I say expecting another gotcha. In a very real way, they've learned to be skeptical even of teachers. They've begun to trust only what they can verify. And you realize your work is done.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#174

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#175

Post by EGreg »

sk55 wrote: post #138
EGreg wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I disagree that the old school books are better. It is like saying MacOS 7 is better than today’s Linux that has many people fixing bugs and expanding its features over the years

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#176

Post by tomp »

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.

Why would a math article need citations? A proof is a proof.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#177

Post by rvba »

I dont understand thr current trend on Wikipedia to add long quotes by various people to the articles. This makes fhr articles less concise. It also feels like reading material for 5th grade.

I tried deleting those few times but often this led to edit wars. It feels as if in some cases some D tier people want to be quoted on wikipedia for stuff, so they add own quotes and "guard" them from taking them down.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#178

Post by ohwellhere »

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 solving for trust rather than "truth". Of course, there may be no truth, hence GP's:

> > Perhaps truth was always an illusion

But my interpretation of what they meant by "very concept of truth" is something like "consensus reality;" where the vast majority of people trust something is true. A network of trust is fragmented bubbles of distinct truths.

> What would be wrong with this system?

For starters, I don't know that it's a priori better than the current fragmented bubbles of distinct truths we have. Are more fragmented bubbles better? For some populations or people, maybe; for society? It's less clear.

But I think the real thing wrong with web of trust systems is that the value is tied up in network effects and you have to solve for adoption.

---

I say that as someone who generally thinks this is a useful way of approaching the problem of trust. I've brainstormed building this too many times to count. :)

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#179

Post by bhk »

hutzlibu wrote: post #123
encylopinion wrote: post #111

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.

A problem in mathematics is that mathematicians do not always agree on the definitions of things -- even very fundamental concepts [1] [2] -- and so Wikipedia in the interest of neutrality presents all definitions in use. In a given textbook, an author will choose one set of definitions and stick with them, which makes things manageable for the reader. In Wikipedia, the number of alternative interpretations of a sentence grows geometrically with the number of ambiguous terms.

[1] What is a "natural number" (do they start at 0 or 1?)

[2] What is a "function"? Does it carry along a "co-domain"?

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#180

Post by simiones »

tomp wrote: post #176
squeaky-clean wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why would a math article need citations? A proof is a proof.

Only for experts capable of following the proof. For everyone else, it's a magical formula.

Not to mention, I very very much doubt that those articles prove every property they present (since I've never seen a math text of any kind do that, essentially).

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