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School vs. Wikipedia

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Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#241

Post by threatofrain »

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…

There are alternative wikis for math and they’re way harsher.¹² Wikipedia is the middle ground between math wikis written by current students and professionals vs pedagogues.³ But I’d argue that if you want pedagogy or step by step proofs, then why not simply buy a well vetted textbook, of which math has many?

Also, Wikipedia tried a wiki textbook project and no doubt people were very unsatisfied because they couldn’t compete with textbooks, which often have a singular pedagogical vision behind it. It’s hard to compete with famous well discussed texts.

I’m happy with Wikipedia as a reference which supplements those students who are already studying the material; in other words, those students looking up topics in Linear Algebra are taking or have taken the course already.

[1]: https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/linear+algebra

[2]: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/algebra/#Lin

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_algebra

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#242

Post by bawolff »

jerf wrote: post #156
greiskul wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which sponsors does Wikipedia have?

"Sponsor" may not be the right word, but Wikipedia by its nature ends up privileging the most motivated. Sadly, "the most motivated" are not always the most reliable. Sometimes they are! Lots o' love to the That Guy who is obsessed with the 14th century French poetry, and writes an entry that the most detail-oriented academic could hardly hope for. But in general... it's not a good bet.

This is such a weird criticism.

Before wikipedia you had academics writing things like this. You really think the average wikipedian is more "motivated" then the average academic with a PhD who spent their life studying some topic?

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#243

Post by brnaftr361 »

yamtaddle wrote: post #217

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…

Textbooks are obscenely limited. Interactive feedback is gone, animation is gone. I mean trigonometry is so much easier to understand if you have moving visualizations of what everything means. And because of the obscene costs of textbooks, and the various moats that publishers have, including book-specific curricula, and the very low effort options they have for homework assigning and grading student get tied into a shitty ecosystem at great cost with zero optionality. And how many students have spent how many hours of their lives reinventing the wheel to build mental models to do shit that was done decades ago?

As opposed to the internet, where you can find a variety of options using different modalities and have direct feedback visually, numerically or otherwise through parametric models that can give you instantaneous feedback. Shit even Desmos alone can give you a huge deal of insight by tossing variables in and instantly seeing the results as opposed to taking 3 minutes every time you change a var with the TI-84 CE bullshit academia forces onto students. Oh and it's all free of cost. Shit there are even open source textbooks now, but nobody uses them.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#245

Post by eesmith »

biofox wrote: post #67
guywithahat wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it? Encyclopedias were not regarded as good sources before Wikipedia, and Wikipedia is demonstrably less accurate than encyclopedias and more biased towards their sponsors

If you're talking about something like Encyclopaedia Britannica or the ODNB, they are/were extensively peer-reviewed. I have seen plenty of references to both in scholarly literature. Infact, for some niche or historical topics, I often find my old print edition of EB to be more useful than Wikipedia.

As a concrete example, I've come across several papers who cite Claude Shannon's entry on Information Theory, from Encyclopaedia Britannica vol. 12, p. 246b, and recommend it as a good starting point in the field.

It's available at https://archive.org/details/encyclopdiabrita12chic/page/n307... .

I think it's a better intro than the Wikipedia one for someone looking for an intro overview.

The Wikipedia has a bunch more cross-references and goes into more depth.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#246

Post by bawolff »

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 wikipedia is not trying to report the capital-T Truth. Its goal is to summarize human knowledge found by others.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#247

Post by akolbe »

yucky wrote: post #240
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.

Yeah the Tides Foundation manages their funding, probably the most politically biased foundation in the US.

Tides holds well over $100 million in Wikimedia/Wikipedia donations by now in an Endowment – and they have never once published an audited financial report for the incomings and outgoings of this Endowment fund:

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

This is in addition to something like $280 million held by the Wikimedia Foundation as of end of March 2022 (the most recent data available).

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

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#248

Post by Dylan16807 »

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…

My ability to evaluate people's ability to evaluate people's ability to evaluate people's ability to evaluate article truth is very low.

In other words, a web of trust trying to replace Wikipedia is useless to me after a couple hops, so next to zero material will be covered by it.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#249

Post by avgcorrection »

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.

You could cite all of the notations that you introduce because that tends to be a mess.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#250

Post by bawolff »

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.

> Or even an old school reference book like The Art of Computer Programming by Donald Knuth is better for algorithms.

It is rediculous to compare an encyclopedia like wikipedia to an advanced text like Knuth. They aren't trying to do the same thing.

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