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School vs. Wikipedia

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Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#281

Post by IncRnd »

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...

I'm glad you posted that information, because it really shows that random online information can often be wrong or conflict with other online authorities. Here are two quotes from an article that was posted 10 years after your link. [1]

  "There has been lots of research on the accuracy of Wikipedia, and the results
  are mixed—some studies show it is just as good as the experts, others show
  [that] Wikipedia is not accurate at all."
and later in that article

  They found that in general, Wikipedia articles were more biased—with 73
  percent of them containing code words, compared to just 34 percent in
  Britannica.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/hbsworkingknowledge/2015/01/20/...

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#282

Post by jerf »

bawolff wrote: post #242
jerf wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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?

Average, who can say. Modal, by number of contributions/edits, they absolutely are more motivated than a PhD. They may have spent their life studying a topic but Wikipedia isn't where they're generally going to put it.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#283

Post by bArray »

Wikipedia certainly has its biases, but I think for school children it is perfectly fine as a source. It's not as if they will read research papers instead, let alone understand the quality of their source.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#284

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

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…

Here is a simple idea that AFAIK has not been tried.

Limit "External Links" to only websites found in Google Scholar. More specifically, limit them to only academic sources. (Maybe limiting to .edu or country-specific educational TLDs, e.g., ac.uk, etc. is better. I realise Scholar is hardly a reliable filter for non-commercial sources, given Google's incentives. Remember "Knol".)

This could be an option. Maybe an HTTP header sent to Wikipedia:

   Academic-Only: on
The way to "fix the quality of article" is to fix the quality of sources. As it stands, Wikipedia can use any source it finds on the web. (Not to say they do in practice.) That can be an extremely low bar.

One can use Wikipedia solely as a path to "External Links" and/or "References". To the extent that articles just take their sentences from References or External Links, any verification needs to be done on the source, not the article. I use Wikipedia as the default search engine in Fennec. On desktop, I search Wikipedia from the command line with a custom script. The forward proxy scrubs the "X-Client-IP" header. Before reading an article, in the event I read the article instead of only using External LInks and references, I always skim the Talk: page.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Criticism_of_Google/Archive_1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Knol/Archive_1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Knol/Archive_2

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Knol/Archive_3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Knol/Archive_4

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#285

Post by nuancebydefault »

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…

If there is no decent reference available, IMHO the knowledge is useless anyways and might as well be deleted. Can anybody prove me wrong?

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#286

Post by xapata »

IncRnd wrote: post #281
TrinaryWorksToo wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm glad you posted that information, because it really shows that random online information can often be wrong or conflict with other online authorities. Here are two quotes from an article that was posted 10 years after your link. [1] "There has been lots of research on the accuracy of Wikipedia, and the results are mixed—some studies show it is just as good as the experts, others show [that] Wikipedia is not accur…

> code words

I'm not sure that's a great measure of bias. It's easy to write in an unbiased tone, yet still be biased.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#287

Post by witherk »

verisimilitudes wrote: post #239
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

> Wikipedia is often okay for science articles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman (4th paragraph)

I have definitely seen some bad science promoted for trans rights. But I don't really think "science" tells us what a women is, that's a social issue.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#289

Post by wpietri »

nkingsy wrote: post #231
wpietri wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an interesting claim. Where's your evidence? I'll also note you must have missed my question, as I don't think you have answered it.

disclaimer: Yes the grayzone hires RT reporters and has a strongly anti-us take on pretty much everything. Please don't spout "russian propagandist" takes. They've been heard plenty. This is the lack of truth I'm talking about. These are investigative journalists--a dying breed that western propagandists are attempting to make extinct. https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/10/wikipedia-formally-censor...

That's not evidence, that's a series of disconnected vague complaints from a publisher who is salty that they're not considered a reliable source. They complain about conflicts of interest, but I didn't see them even acknowledging their own. I also couldn't find any financial transparency, so it's not clear to me who is funding this or their other writing.

And I'll point out for the last time that you still haven't answered my initial question. If you're just going to keep dodging, I think I'm done here.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#290

Post by [deleted] »

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…

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