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School vs. Wikipedia

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Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#191

Post by throwaway09223 »

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…

When was the last time you read through a copy of Encyclopedia Britannica? Have you done an apples to apples comparison? No encyclopedia is perfect, but as far as I can tell the "standard" encyclopedias are a lot worse.

My grandparents had bought a copy of Britannica decades ago and they had something like 50 years of its yearbooks. I would cite it sometimes and no one at school batted an eye. I remember reading through it and cross-referencing articles against Wikipedia and Wikipedia's accuracy was far superior.

The thing to keep in mind is that not only are all encyclopedias fraught with errors, primary sources are often wrong too! The goal isn't perfection, it's transparency -- and Wikipedia in this department is enormously better than any private encyclopedia you'll ever find.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#192

Post by nerdponx »

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.

Because that's essentially original research. If it's a known proof, it should exist in written form somewhere else, which you can cite. if it's novel, it belongs somewhere other than Wikipedia.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#193

Post by akolbe »

kube-system wrote: post #59
teeray wrote: post #13

I had teachers like this, some of them smugly defacing Wikipedia to try to prove their point. What they never realized is how quickly their vandalism was detected and removed. They never checked to see how persistent their edits were.

Vandalism is easy to spot though. Wrong but plausible information is difficult to identify.

Exactly. That's why the world thinks an "Alan MacMasters" invented the electric toaster. That particular hoax lasted ten years and spread far and wide:

https://wikipediocracy.com/2022/08/11/wikipedias-credibility...

Example from the BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/1D0xzxYf9ykH9gcYp9...

Several books have the false info too. Wikipedia is useful, but it is never a good idea to rely on Wikipedia blindly.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#194

Post by flaviut »

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…

How do we know you're not just making stuff up?

If you've got a good answer to that question I'm sure they'd love to hear it and to update their policy.

For what it's worth, you can write the information you know in a blog that can be linked back to you personally, and that's an acceptable source to cite.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#195

Post by xg15 »

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.

My personal annoyance with Wikipedia articles on advanced math is that often it's "monoid in the category of endofunctors" on steroids.

A lot of those articles seem to follow a pattern of: "An A is a B that also does C".

If you click on the link to understand what a B is, you get "B is a D in the space of Es with properties F and G".

and so on...

I can understand that this appears logically consistent and very satisfying for people who have already understood the concepts, but it doesn't help at all if you're trying to gain an understanding.

A good textbook has a sense of order in which dependent concepts are introduced. With Wikipedia, the task of discovering that order is outsourced to the reader. Maybe you could develop some kind of path finding algorithm to figure out the optimal reading order for understanding a given concept, but to my knowledge, that doesn't exist yet.

The other problem is that no shortcuts are offered. Even if you figure out the order yourself, Wikipedia gives you no hints how much of B, C, D, E and F you have to understand to get the idea of A. The expectation seems to be to read the entire articles on the dependent concepts, which can be long, rambling and full of obscure special cases.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#196

Post by musingsole »

ajford wrote: post #129
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…

> citations must be written in Comic Sans size 11 font with every third word italicized TBH, after having to follow MLA style guides and various other citation styles over my career, I feel like this isn't as out there as you intended! I hated having to put together citations because the rules always seemed entirely arbitrary and never seemed to capture what I thought was relevant info.

They also seem to have subtly shifted each time I revisit citation styling rules

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#197

Post by nerdponx »

GCA10 wrote: post #149
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…

Well said. It's especially frustrating to come across what I'll call "Mudslide Pages" for prominent entities. These consist of a decade or more of minor news items, piled atop one another. No effort to distill key elements of these entities' impact -- let alone the how and why of what they do. It's just endless what and when. So on top-tier companies, the pages are cluttered with details of brief moves in and out of…

This is different, because I think often those pages are written by the individuals themselves, or representatives for the companies.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#198

Post by paganel »

encylopinion wrote: post #111
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…

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.

Ignoring the very controversial topics, like Israel and Palestine or the current war in Ukraine, Wikipedia can be a very good starting point when it comes to history.

The entries are not exhaustive nor are all of them very scientific-sounding, but at least the basic facts which we sort of know of are there.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#199

Post by elif »

tux3 wrote: post #131
elif wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

i don't think you understand whats being said or you are misquoting me intentionally in poor faith

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#200

Post by jl6 »

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…

Time to write it down yourself somewhere?
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