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School vs. Wikipedia

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Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#311

Post by ccn0p »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #230
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 an…

this 100%. and so many things have been politicized which then causes revisionist/selective history that it's hard to trust a lot of the content... sadly. I used to have so much faith and hope in wikipedia.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#312

Post by concordDance »

EGreg wrote: post #113
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 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.)

> Wikipedia is far more trustworthy than local news channels even about recent events, and everything is sources (casualty count: who said it etc.)

That's more due to the very low quality of news.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#313

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

witherk wrote: post #287
verisimilitudes wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's clearly a scientific issue, but also a social issue. There is a scientific definition of what a woman is, and there is a social definition (which is very close to the scientific definition, but which does depend a bit on culture and which can change over time). A lot of the debate comes from people talking past one another, without acknowledging that they're using the same word to discuss different topics.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#314

Post by scythe »

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.

>It’s an incredibly common cause of anxiety in math education

I question whether this can be a root cause of anxiety. Simply not understanding stuff does not normally cause anxiety. Most people don't get anxious looking at, for example, Chinese characters.

On the other hand, imputing that something should be frightening can actually cause a fear response:

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1993-20380-001

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030105110...

https://www.nature.com/articles/nn1968

Teaching students that incomprehensible math should frighten them doesn't seem like a good approach. There are no grades or critical teachers when you're passively reading a Wikipedia article.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#315

Post by dan_mctree »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #122
FeepingCreature wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and depending on topic, I discard 10% to 90% of the results out of hand.

This is par for the course. When doing a library course in university, I learned that you typically end up discarding up to 99% of sources. (very rough rule of thumb: you get say something like 1000 hits, review the top 100 titles, read the top 10 abstracts, and select the remaining article(s) as a source. Wash rinse repeat)

If your 1000 hits is roughly reasonable to you, mind if I ask how you find so many sources? In something I'm interested in, I rarely find even a dozen hits on things that seem vaguely related. And for more than half of those, I can't even find access.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#316

Post by concordDance »

witherk wrote: post #287
verisimilitudes wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

One of wikipedias biggest issues is its inability to cope with words that have different but overlapping meanings.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#317

Post by [deleted] »

xapata wrote: post #286
IncRnd wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#318

Post by j7f3 »

THENATHE wrote: post #306

Wikipedia is the single greatest tool mankind has ever developed for the internet. Where else can you get a mostly correct and accurate understanding of essentially any topic known to man for free, and then have resources for further research if desired. Even if Wikipedia isn’t 100% correct on everything, I can’t think of any resource that is (that is also free).

yeah that's rather correct when it comes to the English language Wikipedia

but the Polish language Wikipedia has been hijacked by the right wing nut jobs

it's public knowledge by now not to trust Wikipedia in Poland unless you're one of them

also Polish politicians use Wikipedia to boost their profiles, they treat is as a free self aggrandizement platform

everyone knows they edit their own profiles and wipe out any unflattering info

Polish Wikipedia is a poster child for what could go wrong when you leave editing to the common people

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#320

Post by adhesive_wombat »

hindsightbias wrote: post #308
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…

Wiki is transparent in a self-referential sense only. History started in 1992. If there’s no hyperlink, it’s lost. Pick any wiki page and see all the dead, rotting citations. I’d bet any mining of actually working citations would average closer to 2015. It used to be people citing something from the 70’s or 80’s would get strange looks from people who lived then, now I see Millenials looking at Gen-Z kids that way. H…

Maybe, but with the extensive number of books, journals, magazines and newspapers scanned and available to view on the Internet Archive, it's never been easier to add or verify a printed source citation.

Also various other newspaper archives have mind-numbing amounts of scanned material dating back well over 100 years, and the Wikipedia Library provides free access to these resources for editors.

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