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School vs. Wikipedia

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Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#211

Post by verisimilitudes »

throwaway09223 wrote: post #191
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 thro…

No post body was provided.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#212

Post by PopePompus »

nathias wrote: post #166
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

That is frequently done. A recent example is the article on "recession", which was frozen around the time that the US had two consecutive quarters of negative growth (often used as a definition for a recession).

https://www.npr.org/2022/07/29/1114599942/wikipedia-recessio...

There are differing levels of "frozen", which require differing levels of editor seniority to be allowed to edit.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#213

Post by hutzlibu »

thebooktocome wrote: post #204
scythe wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>written at several levels simultaneously, 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.

A novice isn’t always going to know the difference between something they could understand with effort and something they don’t have the context to understand. It’s an incredibly common cause of anxiety in math education, and even if you’re not personally affected by it others may be.

For sure, but Wikipedia aims to be a Encyclopedia and not a math course.

Now it surely would be nice, if it could work more like it.

That wikipedia knows my skill set and automatically hides or show additional paragraphs in certain topics etc. or even the paragraph in a simpler language etc.

But this a bit more ambitious - and not really achievable with the current approach. So if I want a math course, I search for a math course.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#214

Post by tux3 »

elif wrote: post #199
tux3 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm always happy to be corrected if I've misunderstood. I'm not sure what the link demonstrates, though, I opened it and I just don't see anything like you described.

About poor faith, these kind of accusations happens so often, there's plenty of existing essays and material on whether you should assume people are posting in bad faith. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:AOBF is a good reference, it's used pretty regularly.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#215

Post by TrinaryWorksToo »

verisimilitudes wrote: post #211
throwaway09223 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thro…

Quoted post unavailable.

They're about the same accuracy according to this data: https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/study-wikipedia-as-a...

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#216

Post by Someone »

simiones wrote: post #180
tomp wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

You’ll always need some axioms to build on.

If you allow that, proofs made using proof assistants prove every property they present.

And of course, Principia Mathematica (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principia_Mathematica) is a non-computer example.

Both get tedious fast if you try to understand a proof from the axioms up. That’s why you’ll rarely find a publication starting from almost zero.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#217

Post by yamtaddle »

This is a good thing to point out (guess what: books are still way better than both, yes, physical books, I know they shouldn't be in this The Year of Our Lord 2022 but they are, the whole "information superhighway" and "making all the world's information accessible at your fingertips" hasn't worked out as well as we thought it would) but I was really hoping this post would be a showdown between lies taught in school and the more-correct versions on characterized-by-teachers-as-unreliable Wikipedia. That would have been funny.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#218

Post by thrwyoilarticle »

akolbe wrote: post #193
kube-system wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Several books have the false info too

Sounds like we shouldn't trust books blindly, either.

Is there a source we can trust blindly?

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#219

Post by yamtaddle »

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.

Wikipedia's math articles are so bad that I can't even follow the ones about things I already know.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#220

Post by jacobolus »

pessimizer wrote: post #140
jacobolus wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia is an excellent source about many topics, and a mediocre source about many other topics. For example, the article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodesics_on_an_ellipsoid was mostly written by the world’s foremost expert about geodesics on an ellipsoid, and would be a fine source. Edit to add an aside: In my opinion it is worth teaching students to look at Wikipedia’s talk pages and history pages to help the…

There shouldn't be original research on Wikipedia, so any citation of Wikipedia would be better sourced directly from the reference linked to by Wikipedia. Circular references aren't only a problem when it involves Wikipedia. You shouldn't ever be citing sources who only claim to be communicating the work of others, outside of being an antiquities scholar when the original works have been lost.

That invented falsehoods “shouldn’t be on Wikipedia” is not much consolation when in practice academics, journalists, and others regularly copy false claims from Wikipedia without independently fact checking them or citing where they got them. Nor does it ultimately much matter whether false or distorted claims were deliberate or just mistakes, and whether they were invented on Wikipedia or invented somewhere else.
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