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School vs. Wikipedia

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Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#331

Post by codetrotter »

m463 wrote: post #272
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…

Maybe traditional encyclopedia might give wikipedia a run for the money on subjects, say toilet paper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_paper But wikipedia is far ahead on more practical articles like which way the toilet paper goes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_paper_orientation

Something I recently became aware of is that in some cases toilet paper orientation preference may be due to left handedness vs right handedness.

I am right handed and prefer to have the paper oriented over itself.

A member of my family is left handed and prefers to have the paper under itself. She once said that for her, with left handedness, having the paper under itself makes it easier to grab.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#332

Post by throwaway09223 »

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…

> If there’s no hyperlink, it’s lost

This just isn't true. Most wikipedia references have a hyperlink and a proper citation which can be looked up using traditional means. For example, a cite might look like this:

"Intel Pentium Processor G6950 (3M Cache, 2.80 GHz) with SPEC Code(s) SLBMS". Ark.intel.com. 2010-07-13. Archived from the original on 2011-03-09. Retrieved 2010-07-29.

The link to intel.com has rotted, but:

1) There's an archive of the page so the information hasn't been lost

2) There's also a full citation, with which you can write a letter to Intel asking them for the document in question ("Intel Pentium Processor G6950 (3M Cache, 2.80 GHz) with SPEC Code(s) SLBMS"). This is a lot more detail than you'd have in a traditional encyclopedia. If you're a researcher, the encyclopedia has given what you need to seek more detail from the primary source - and that's the whole point!

archive.org and wikipedia.org working together is really powerful.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#333

Post by random314 »

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…

Can you give examples of misleading articles? Are they political or nonpolitical?

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#334

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

gpm wrote: post #330
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Is this domain excluded in Google Scholar searches.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#335

Post by Dylan16807 »

threatofrain wrote: post #328
Dylan16807 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

> 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.

Okay, but I don't think those communities are relevant to this conversation.

> 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.

Number 1 is a weird assumption! Unless by "consult" you mean spend weeks studying a textbook, the problem is that consulting is too difficult! And if I understand "harsher" correctly you just said the other sites are harder to use, didn't you?

So then it's just "not an advanced math student", which may or may not be a majority of people on these pages but it's a very significant amount and it's the more important target for a general encyclopedia.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#336

Post by bobkazamakis »

influx wrote: post #99
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…

Similarly to police unions, teacher unions prevent many of those checks. Public servants do not serve society by having unions.

Police and teacher unions are terrible not because they are public servants but because our capitalist system provides them with no way to extract additional value.

Teachers don't have qualified immunity or get the privilege of shooting your dog, making it a pretty poor comparison.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#337

Post by chobytes »

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…

Agreed. My background is in math... and I find math wikipedia to be appealingly low quality. Both for reference and for a general audience.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#338

Post by ghaff »

nerdponx wrote: post #197
GCA10 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well said. It's especially frustrating to come across what I'll call "Mudslide Pages" for prominent entities. These consist of a decade or more of minor news items, piled atop one another. No effort to distill key elements of these entities' impact -- let alone the how and why of what they do. It's just endless what and when. So on top-tier companies, the pages are cluttered with details of brief moves in and out of…

This is different, because I think often those pages are written by the individuals themselves, or representatives for the companies.

I think it's more that's it's super-easy to add some factoid whether or not it really adds to the article in question. See what happens whenever a "notable" section gets started in some article in a community of any size.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#339

Post by BeetleB »

prerok wrote: post #304
IncRnd wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia, in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.org, specifically mentions this exact issue. [1] The content of any given article may recently have been changed, vandalized, or altered by someone whose opinion does not correspond with the state of knowledge in the relevant fields. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:General_disclaimer

Yes and any reader citing it would be best advised to check the page history and comments section. Teaching that to children would also be a good way of showing and exposing these vandalisms. They might learn to use it better then. Outright discarding one of the best sources of information humanity has ever created is IMHO just plain wrong. I would understand it if this were people writing doctorates but anything bel…

It's always good to tech people to check the history and comments. However, when you cite a Wikipedia article, you're supposed to cite a particular revision. That's what the "Cite" link does.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#340

Post by BeetleB »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #275
elif wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Are you playing a game here? Normally people provide relevant links. Even if this is showing bad sourcing, it still sources the important numbers. "External links" is helping with that too. And this 2003 vs. 2004 distinction is a waste of time when wikipedia has a perfectly good history feature. If I ask pretty please will you name the element?

I side with elif here.

> Normally people provide relevant links

It is relevant. It's pointing out that lots of articles back then were not well referenced. It doesn't have to be his article. I know this quite well as I added a lot of stuff to Wikipedia in those days, and never provided a reference. No one challenged me.

Likely the page he got his information from didn't provide any reference for that number.

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