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School vs. Wikipedia

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181–190 of 501 posts

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#181

Post by SevenNation »

> If I thought it would be even remotely worth doing, I would fight this shit at the school. Sadly, I do not.

This statement (and the general sense of the author's emotional state) makes me wonder whether the author has actually spoken with teachers or is getting his information from his kids. Kids are just as capable of spinning facts for effect as adults. Or ignoring nuance. Or straight up misinterpretation.

Before "fighting" the school, the first step should be to understand the school's position. Then the teacher's position. Only after the actual facts are on the table should a decision about action be taken.

The author appears to be doing the same thing he rails against the school for doing: treating a single source as the beginning and end of the story.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#182

Post by akolbe »

twobitshifter wrote: post #86
localhost wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was wondering about the money thing and found this on ... Wikipedia :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation Seems like >$235MM in net assets excluding the $100MM in the Wikimedia endowment and growing at a healthy rate YoY.

I still donate when asked, it’s one of the biggest achievements of free software. I wish I had more time to contribute to the pages, as I imagine that would be worth more to them than my 20 bucks.

Donate to the Internet Archive instead. Performs a vital service for Wikipedia, archiving sources before they disappear off the internet, so you can still verify Wikipedia content when the cited source is gone.

Start donating to Wikipedia again when they are honest about their financial situation.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

And on the Wikimedia Endowment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#185

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#186

Post by nkingsy »

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…

I won't argue the trust system presented here other than to say it sounds exhausting.

I want everyone to get as close a proximity to the truth as is possible and for us as a society to achieve consensus around what are the facts and what should be done about them.

What you describe, at scale, is a social credit system. It does feel like an inevitability and one that will produce unprecedented collateral damage, but may save civilization.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#187

Post by meej »

ziml77 wrote: post #29

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)

No, it's old, and an outdated mindset. Since 2004 Wikipedia has greatly matured and most educators have relaxed their stance on it. I'm a librarian and my take on Wikipedia is that it's a great starting point but you'd never want to cite it directly.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#189

Post by nerdponx »

MajimasEyepatch wrote: post #167
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.

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.

I've seen this too. Sometimes they seem like they are copied and pasted from whatever the person already happened to be writing when they came across the Wikipedia page.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#190

Post by Tijdreiziger »

reaperducer wrote: post #162
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 someon…

Write a blog post or website with your knowledge, then you can reference that from Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is explicitly not meant to be a primary source (indeed, no encyclopedia is).

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