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School vs. Wikipedia

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Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#321

Post by jefftk »

mountainb wrote: post #28
jacobolus wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If scholars find some claim on Wikipedia and repeat it in their published work, they should unquestionably cite Wikipedia. When scholars fail to cite Wikipedia, a few years later other Wikipedia editors come back and cite that work as evidence for the original claim, sometimes for claims that turn out to be nonsense, and people trying to figure out what happened won’t notice that the citation chain is a circle. Cf. h…

Horsehockey. Wikipedia cannot be cited because it is not a static resource. Occasionally, its citations can be cited. But generally, if you have ever tried to actually follow those citations, you will frequently discover that the authors and editors of the page are full of shit, and you will see why professionals tend to issue the blanket recommendation to avoid ever using it for anything. Minute for minute, research…

> Wikipedia cannot be cited because it is not a static resource

Regardless of the merits of citing Wikipedia, if you do want to cite it you can reference a specific revision. Or include the date and time you accessed it, from which anyone else can determine the revision. This puts Wikipedia in a much better position than citing URLs in general, which are mostly not version-controlled.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#322

Post by dublin »

yamtaddle wrote: post #225
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.

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.

But real books on real topics have been getting purged from libraries (especially school libraries) for well over a decade now. In many school districts, older books containing actual truths, are destroyed rather than marked as removed from circulation and re-sold. Some libraries I know of locally purged almost all of their books on "old, white" history, and replaced them with "more modern" bullshit works by "CRT" writers.

To the point of this article, much of this is driven by the teachers, who say they will not accept sources that might have "social biases" (as if it were possible for any book to not have those!) The library then purges those books because "no one has checked them out in a couple of years".

The sad thing is that almost 100% of books being added to the libraries fall into just a few categories: Books promoting or "celebrating" perverted sex of any and all kinds (including pretty much all "youth fiction"), Manga, or "Graphic Novels" (let's face it, some have good artwork, but are really just nicely bound and printed comic books, usually with little to no redeeming educational value.)

Sadly, I don't know a single person under 30 who has a clue how to actually use a library to find real sources - they all just default to Googling. The web is amazing, but what's NOT on it is staggering, and of amazing quality and scholarship (which is itself a lost art...)

More worryingly, I've seen a LOT of valuable content vanish from the search engines, which just shoves that content right down the memory hole, using the same flawed logic as those high school librarians - no one's asked for it recently.

We lose access to and context for valuable information when our search engines (it's all about the money from hits and eyeballs) only keep what is "popular". Alas, we've replaced Carnegie Libraries with Kardashian libraries, to our great loss...

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#323

Post by gpm »

yamtaddle wrote: post #219
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.

Wikipedia's math articles are so bad that I can't even follow the ones about things I already know.

Wikipedia's math articles can be dense and assume you're an expert, but I've never known them to be wrong.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#324

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

ccn0p wrote: post #311
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…

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.

If you want to see the mother of all Wikipedia cabals, take a look at the Eastern European mailing list, which was exposed more than 10 years ago.

It was a group of editors who conspired to game Wikipedia's rules (for example, "thou shalt not revert more than three times per day" can be circumvented by calling in a friend to revert for you). What makes the story really crazy is that they were exposed by Wikileaks, which published a giant stack of email threads between the conspirators.

This is a run-down of some of the things the most powerful member of the group, an administrator, said: https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Wikipediametric_mailinglist/Piotr....

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#325

Post by nathias »

PopePompus wrote: post #212
nathias wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

one simple mechanism would be to freeze the article editing for a bit when it becomes a hot topic in US media

That is frequently done. A recent example is the article on "recession", which was frozen around the time that the US had two consecutive quarters of negative growth (often used as a definition for a recession). https://www.npr.org/2022/07/29/1114599942/wikipedia-recessio... There are differing levels of "frozen", which require differing levels of editor seniority to be allowed to edit.

nice, I had no idea, I just remember seeing the edit wars on some hot topics a while ago

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#326

Post by cjohnson318 »

Arguing about the relative strengths of Wikipedia versus Brittanica highlights the core issue that very few things are irrefutable fact that can be proven and expressed concisely with natural language, and that most things are beliefs, and interpretations of biased or limited observations.

Both sources are "mostly accurate", it's just that some teachers think that using the internet for research is too easy; "carrying books back and forth across the library builds character".

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#327

Post by yamtaddle »

winphone1974 wrote: post #297
yamtaddle wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm confused by what you think the internet is, and this hype you feel it's failing?

Are you not familiar with the hype that it'd become the end-all-be-all repository of human knowledge? It's been talked about that way since at least the 90s. It's not uncommon to see people on this site post sentiments that it has achieved that—in some fields, kinda, in many others you can barely scratch the surface before you have to hit a library (probably a university library, and you may need ILL) to keep going, or if you're very lucky the book you need exists in digital form and you can buy or pirate a copy, but the "open Web" simply does not have the info you want, and even if it does have it, it's a crap-shoot whether it's presented and organized at least as well as some print version you could get instead.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#328

Post by threatofrain »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #251
GTP wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wikipedia math has competition and they are generally much harsher than Wikipedia, which indicates the direction which communities of volunteers wish to go when they disagree with Wikipedia's execution.

https://ncatlab.org/

https://kerodon.net/

https://stacks.math.columbia.edu/

The people who are looking up references to advanced math concepts are likely students who are already on a mainstream pedagogical pathway and are looking to fill in holes to a concept map they're already building.

The use case of someone who (1) does not wish to consult the vast and well-discussed pedagogy of math and (2) is not an advanced math student and thus wishes to have stand-alone math definitions is a Very special case.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#329

Post by tbt »

JediWing wrote: post #130
tbt wrote: post #84

School rarely helps with learning and almost always harms learning. If you're still sending your kids to school, be mindful that you're doing that for reasons other than to help them learn.

That is a bold claim. In my experience school gave me exposure to subjects I would not have thought or been interested to explore on my own, and put structure around dedicated learning time. I have kids. I send them to school. They are learning! You might have a leg to stand on if your argument weren't so incredibly absolutist. I could certainly concede that American schools may be a less than optimal way to learn wi…

It rarely helps with learning vs. natural counterfactuals. It harms by socializing kids to not believe that their own curiosity is hopeworthy.

See John Taylor Gatto's work.

Instead of inefficient spending for large, programmed classes, you should have daycare/day supervision with lots of resources (books, internet, age-appropriate tinker equipment like electronics and tools and so on, microscopes, telescopes, a few adults on hand who are experts in whatever topic to help kids get traction / navigate), more free-rangness, less authoritarianness, more mastery learning, more apprenticeship.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#330

Post by gpm »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #284
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 HT…

Unfortunately, I don't think that works at all. Not all universities use education specific TLDs, and not all departments/labs in universities with a domain name under an education specific TLD actually keep there website under that TLD.

Completely random example of such a lab (and if you check publications you'll see they host papers under this domain name) https://www.honeylab.org/

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