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School vs. Wikipedia

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Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#221

Post by prova_modena »

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.

Yeah absolutely. I've seen non-wiki-savvy experts do these kind of edits, get reverted, and stop editing wikipedia forever because the whole experience left a sour taste in their mouth. I recently found the essay below targeted to exactly that audience, it's super useful to helping experts who want to contribute.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Expert_editors

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#222

Post by [deleted] »

scifibestfi wrote: post #11
chatterhead wrote: post #2

You should be fighting this at the school. Wikipedia should not be used as a source for academic purposes; the sources being referenced on Wikipedia very well could be though and as such Wikipedia is an incredibly useful tool for surface level research and schools should absolutely be taking this approach to using it. They should not, under any circumstance, have children "Googling" the answer to questions. Most of t…

> They should not, under any circumstance, have children "Googling" the answer to questions. Why not? Don't you Google answers to questions? It's what they will be doing most of their life.

[deleted]

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#223

Post by thrwyoilarticle »

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.

Foreign to who?

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#225

Post by yamtaddle »

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.

Books are still where the good stuff's at. Even some periodicals.

Not sure what went wrong with the Internet but it's not living up to the early hype, and doesn't really even seem to be heading the right direction.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#226

Post by akolbe »

localhost wrote: post #30
chatterhead wrote: post #2

You should be fighting this at the school. Wikipedia should not be used as a source for academic purposes; the sources being referenced on Wikipedia very well could be though and as such Wikipedia is an incredibly useful tool for surface level research and schools should absolutely be taking this approach to using it. They should not, under any circumstance, have children "Googling" the answer to questions. Most of t…

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.

Quite. Note rising executive salaries at the Wikimedia Foundation:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/e/e4/Wikim...

Latest financial report: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikim...

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#227

Post by warner25 »

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'd love to hear the perspective on this from some people (there must be dozens reading Hacker News) who actually have a Wikipedia page about themselves.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#228

Post by Nimitz14 »

xg15 wrote: post #195
hutzlibu wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 satisf…

Wikipedia is by definition a reference. If you want to learn something use different material. Trying to make wikipedia articles tutorials is out of scope (not that it isn't nice to get practical examples for concepts, which ime there often are!)

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#229

Post by bawolff »

warner25 wrote: post #227
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'd love to hear the perspective on this from some people (there must be dozens reading Hacker News) who actually have a Wikipedia page about themselves.

Most people are biased about themselves. In particular famous people often want to hide controversy.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#230

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

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 often okay for science articles.

I find many of the mathematics articles to be difficult to read. I'll look at a mathematics concept that I think I understand (or even use often), and it will be written in jargon that is completely incomprehensible to me.

However, where Wikipedia really has a problem is in contemporary politics. Anything that is even remotely political is probably controlled by one or another clique of editors. There are opposing cliques that battle over every Israel-Palestine article, or over whether to use the Serbian or Croatian name for village X that existed 200 years ago, or about whether hummus is Lebanese or Syrian or Israeli or Levantine. There are also subjects in which one clique has gained complete dominance and is able to completely control a whole topic area. If you start looking at the edit histories and talk pages of articles on one topic, you'll come to realize how influential relatively small numbers of motivated (and sometimes coordinated, though this is against Wikipedia's rules) editors can be.

That's why I'd take anything that's even remotely politically contentious on Wikipedia with an enormous grain of salt.

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