School vs. Wikipedia

Post by BeetleB » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 9:20 PM UTC

meej wrote: post #187

ziml77 wrote: post #29

This is something new? When I was in high school back in 2004, we were already told to not use Wikipedia as a source. What most of us would do instead was use the references section to find resources. (Or if we were being lazy, we'd just go by what Wikipedia said and then copy its relevant citations)

No, it's old, and an outdated mindset. Since 2004 Wikipedia has greatly matured and most educators have relaxed their stance on it. I'm a librarian and my take on Wikipedia is that it's a great starting point but you'd never want to cite it directly.

Post by chobytes » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 9:23 PM UTC

squeaky-clean wrote: post #147

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 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.

Post by gpm » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 9:28 PM UTC

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #334

gpm wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by gubernation » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 9:31 PM UTC

jacobolus wrote: post #8

chatterhead wrote: post #2

You should be fighting this at the school. Wikipedia should not be used as a source for academic purposes; the sources being referenced on Wikipedia very well could be though and as such Wikipedia is an incredibly useful tool for surface level research and schools should absolutely be taking this approach to using it. They should not, under any circumstance, have children "Googling" the answer to questions. Most of t…

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…

Post by Dylan16807 » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 9:35 PM UTC

BeetleB wrote: post #340

Dylan16807 wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.