School vs. Wikipedia • Hacker News Board

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#371

Post by bnralt » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 10:45 PM UTC

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…

> For people unfamiliar with a subject (students) I think Wikipedia pages are misleading, poorly organized, and sometimes wrong.

This is true even if you're reading works from experts in a field. For instance, Robert Hoyland, Fred Donner, and Patricia Crone (until her death a few years ago) are some of the leading academics in the studies of early historical Islam. However, Donner's review of Hoyland's textbook thought it was misleading[1], Crone's review of Donner's textbook considered it misleading, and Crone's Hagarism is generally not accepted by any current scholar as far as I can tell.

That is to say, one needs to be skeptical no matter the source, as well as humble enough to realize that know more than others doesn't necessarily make your understanding more correct. It's also useful to try to understand the disagreements in the field and how they've developed.

[1] http://www.middleeastmedievalists.com/wp-content/uploads/201... [2] https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articl...

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#372

Post by OJFord » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 10:46 PM UTC

MajimasEyepatch wrote: post #167

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.

I've definitely read some Wikipedia pages on niche technical topics in my field that were clearly written by someone with _some_ degree of expertise (maybe a grad student) but with no understanding of the purpose, standards, and style of Wikipedia. The voice is often all over the place.

What stops me editing more (usually it's a grammatical/formatting error I want to fix, or where I think a link to another page is warranted) is IP blocks. I'm logged in! Why do you care what my IP is! I have a (small) track record but most importantly it's all going against my name and if I'm doing bad things you can just block me!

I understand anon IP blocks, of course. But not logged-in ones. Especially when (afaict) all of Mullvad's (London at least) IPs are blocked.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#373

Post by kbelder » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 10:53 PM UTC

gpm wrote: post #323

yamtaddle wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's other types of bad than wrongness.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#374

Post by LtWorf » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 11:07 PM UTC

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 remember having such an argument with a friend who is vehemently opposed to Wikipedia, because not written by experts, unlike Britannica.

I then opened a random page of Britannica, about an opera. And the phonetic pronunciation of the Italian name was incorrect (I'm a native Italian speaker) and it was how a brit might pronounce it.

In Wikipedia I would have fixed it. In Britannica the error is probably still there.

I presume that since I found an error in the first page I looked at, there probably are many other errors.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#375

Post by Kim_Bruning » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 11:14 PM UTC

dan_mctree wrote: post #315

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe you're counting differently? If near the end you have a dozen papers that you're sufficiently interested in that you're actively trying to access them already, that sounds pretty decent really.

Can you give an example of something you've been searching for?

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#376

Post by Test0129 » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 11:17 PM UTC

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…

It's transparent and unfortunately that's exactly why we know we can't trust it.

If you want an eye opening experience pick something in the news that might be scientific. Say, COVID. Then run a correlation between the release of news articles and the frequency of edits to Wikipedia.

In theory, this provides the most up to date information. In reality, Wikipedia is a disinformation farm. Contributors may think they are updating the "latest" version of "truth" (like a "fact" checker) but in reality they are making knee jerk decisions to sometimes literally change the definition of something.

Still not convinced a paper encyclopedia is better? Still worried a scary private corporation controls Encyclopedias? Steven Pruitt is a legendary "editor" (what an appropriate name) of wikipedia. Holding the record for the most Wikipedia edits of anyone by a large margin, he is a veritable gatekeeper of what Wikipedia defines as truth. Whereas in a corporation you might have this divided among dozens of experts in their field, one man with no known expertise in anything and a dramatically one-sided and well-known political leaning is in control of a LOT of information.

In summary, I refuse to donate to Wikipedia and actively promote other sources of information (such as scholarly articles, meta-analyses, expert blog posts, etc) as better secondary or primary sources of information. Parents, teachers, and schools are absolutely right to be suspect of Wikipedia. Aside from relatively niche, infrequently edited articles, Wikipedia is no better than asking your neighbor what he thinks about a subject. At least you might get a beer out of doing that, though.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#377

Post by PebblesRox » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 11:22 PM UTC

appenz wrote: post #34

Wrong school? Our local schools (Silicon Valley, CA) encourage kids to use Wikipedia. Your school may just be a little behind the times. The discussion now has moved to NLP models. GPT-3 models at this point can generate extremely high quality answers to complex questions. Is there still a point in asking a student to write a few paragraph on the definition and effect of acid rain if you can get that from OpenAI with…

An interesting exercise would be to have students generate the paragraph and then fact-check and edit it.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#378

Post by yellowapple » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 11:28 PM UTC

chobytes wrote: post #346

tomp wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would a math article need citations? A proof is a proof.

I always chuckle when I see some like basic logical steps slapped with "citation needed".

I similarly chuckle in cases where there's a citation covering the whole sentence but someone felt the need to slap a "citation needed" on a specific clause despite that clause being supported in the existing citation.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#379

Post by jumelles » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 11:30 PM UTC

GCA10 wrote: post #149

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…

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…

> 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.

This is tricky, because some editors on Wikipedia would interpret that as "original research" and remove it. The rule of thumb is that the citation needs to contain the information added, not just allude to it.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#380

Post by pogform » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 11:35 PM UTC

> And holy hell, don’t get me started on how they teach math or English, or this new "Code Red" shit.

I'm really interested in this off-handed remark from the author. Not having children of my own, and being many years removed from the US public school system, what exactly are they getting at here? I'm assuming it's related to common core?