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School vs. Wikipedia

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Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#251

Post by Dylan16807 »

GTP wrote: post #235
xg15 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But I think that this is a core difference between an encyclopaedia and a textbook. If you need the topics presented in an order that takes you from a certain level of understanding to the next, you need a textbook.

Well that's the problem. An encyclopedia should neither provide nor need such an ordering. But Wikipedia often does need it, while also not providing it, the worst of both worlds.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#253

Post by warner25 »

bawolff wrote: post #229
warner25 wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, but things I wonder: Do people learn surprising things about themselves from their own Wikipedia page, like a connection to some event or other person that they previously weren't aware of? Do they find their pages laughably incomplete or inaccurate?

If there were a Wikipedia page about me, I can imagine that it would probably highlight some insignificant thing (from my perspective) that got my name into a small town newspaper or school / employer public relations piece while omitting several of the facts from my personal top-5 list (in importance) about my own life.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#254

Post by BrandoElFollito »

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…

It depends on the topics. I have some knowledge in hard science topics and IT and like you I sometimes read the relevant pages.

They are usually great and very accurate. They are also usually in "layers" with more basic information first and then more details.

I guess this is because you can hardly argue with an integral, as opposed to who the greatest baseball player was.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#255

Post by aimor »

warner25 wrote: post #253
bawolff wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah, but things I wonder: Do people learn surprising things about themselves from their own Wikipedia page, like a connection to some event or other person that they previously weren't aware of? Do they find their pages laughably incomplete or inaccurate? If there were a Wikipedia page about me, I can imagine that it would probably highlight some insignificant thing (from my perspective) that got my name into a smal…

I suppose if I ever get my own Wikipedia page the first thing I should do is publish an autobiography.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#256

Post by brnaftr361 »

Uyuxo wrote: post #128
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.

"But history from things happening hundreds to thousands of years ago, predating modern media... sorry historians, it might as well be fiction." What? I'm confused on what you're saying here. Are you stating there are no primary sources on history from more than a few hundred years ago? All history is made up? I'm sure there are poor quality historical articles, but I wouldn't go so far to call all history "fiction".

History is very much an interpretive science. You can infer a lot of things from a site that predates written history. One of the salient examples were some severely deformed bodies found ritually positioned with assumed valuables. And that's all the context you get, and now you have to frame it with anthropologically modern references polluted with ideologies like Hobbes/Rousseau while conjointly projecting Holmberg's mistake into the past when the concept of "marginal" people didn't exist. There's a lot of errors that can arise and a lot of features that can metamorphose into only a distant conception of what once was.

And even then, records are questioned. Sometimes period historians really had to stick their necks out to speak the truth (and in the most literal sense) so direct impressions we have of certain elements of history may be reasonably called into question. And there are numerous historians that are known to have fabricated elements.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#257

Post by jacobolus »

skybrian wrote: post #237
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wikipedia isn't even a valid source for Wikipedia itself, First-hand direct presence isn't even a valid source for Wikipedia. Part of my account of the founding of amazon.com was removed because it wasn't "backed up by published citable sources". I pointed out that I would be the primary source cited by any such source, and was told that wasn't good enough: the contents had to be published somewhere else and then c…

That's a good rule. Anything you write in a Wikipedia article is written in "anonymous worker bee" mode. It doesn't count as written by you, even if you wrote it. Any editor could change what you wrote. This defeats the whole point of first-person testimony, where who said it matters. If you want to tell the story of something that happened at Amazon, you should write an article on your own website and publish it und…

Personal blogs, facebook posts, self-published papers on arxiv, web forum comments, etc. are not in general credible sources (for Wikipedia’s purposes) but can be in this kind of circumstance.

PaulDavisThe1st: you should definitely publish your anecdote(s) and corrections somewhere, and not just for Wikipedia’s benefit.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#258

Post by akolbe »

TrinaryWorksToo wrote: post #215
verisimilitudes wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

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

Well, for a particular set of fairly obscure science articles. It's quite different in the social sciences, for example. What people don't appreciate is that Wikipedia has very different strengths and weaknesses to Britannica.

Britannica doesn't contain outright hoaxes and nonsense. Examples:

https://www.theregister.com/2017/01/16/wikipedia_16_birthday... https://wikipediocracy.com/2022/08/11/wikipedias-credibility...

But Britannica can never be as up to date as Wikipedia:

https://www.inputmag.com/culture/queen-elizabeth-ii-death-wi...

Nor can it cover as many topics as Wikipedia.

Wikipedia's quality also depends on the topic area. Hard science and computing tend to be covered more adeptly than philosophy for example.

And article quality simply varies much more in Wikipedia. It ranges from some of the finest writing anywhere, rivalling anything in Britannica and surpassing it in up-to-dateness, to complete rubbish and intentionally falsified content.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#259

Post by elif »

tux3 wrote: post #214
elif wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 regula…

if you are genuinely interested in your misunderstanding, i would begin by listing the following assumptions you've made: - the element in my original anecdote was carbon - the wayback machine in 2004 captured a website exactly as it appeared in 2003

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#260

Post by yamtaddle »

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.

Chicago is so much more sane than MLA. I don't know why we insist on making high schoolers use MLA. They'll only need to use it if they become academics in some fields and if they've learned any other citation style they can pick up MLA just fine later.
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