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School vs. Wikipedia

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Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#421

Post by c7b »

In my experience the wikipedia articles themselves are good, but the references unfortunately less so. Way too many newspaper-style sources, the academic papers range from 'the actual original paper on the topic' to 'obscure'.

I wish articles had a section similar to the literature review in academic papers, that could raise the quality a lot. I think it'd need some nudging/template to get that somewhat consistent (like the boxes they have on many articles that are connected via a common theme, those are great).

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#422

Post by bowsamic »

howenterprisey wrote: post #386
Test0129 wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Leaving aside your other points, it's beyond ludicrous to claim that Steven Pruitt controls anything on Wikipedia. Please take more care that you yourself don't repeat random misinformation about Wikipedia.

Surely someone with millions of edits factually does control a lot on Wikipedia, by definition

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#423

Post by pgcj_poster »

verisimilitudes wrote: post #239
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…

> Wikipedia is often okay for science articles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman (4th paragraph)

> Trans women have a gender identity that does not align with their male sex assignment at birth, while intersex women may have sex characteristics that do not fit typical notions of female biology.

Even if you don't believe that trans women are women, it seems inarguably correct that they identify as women in spite of having been identified as male when they were born. You could complain about the vocabulary, I guess, but there's no set of vocabulary that won't upset someone.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#424

Post by tuukkah »

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.

Further, unbiased articles may easily contain biased words. Especially since Wikipedia is an international projects, the articles describe multiple points of view, and the "code words" of the research were terms such as the following: "tax breaks, minimum wage, fuel efficiency [--] death tax, border security, war on terror".

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#425

Post by jcampbell1 »

IncRnd wrote: post #281
TrinaryWorksToo wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're about the same accuracy according to this data: https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/study-wikipedia-as-a...

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…

That is some seriously selective quoting. The next sentence says the code word count is due to Wikipedia having longer articles.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#426

Post by vkou »

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.

A lot of organizations actively undermine society by existing, but we generally have to respect freedom of association, even for people we don't like.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#427

Post by LunicLynx »

Probably the most simple fact is, that Wikipedia destroyed an industry. While this industry came down they sowed the seed of not trusting a source where everybody could do what they did.

For free.

I’m with the OP on this. There are probably mistakes. Especially on highly contentious articles (politics). But in general it is the best collection of factual information out there.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#428

Post by Broken_Hippo »

spc476 wrote: post #385
codetrotter wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think handness has anything to do with it. I'm left handed and I prefer the paper oriented over itself.

My partner is left handed and prefers the same. (I do, too, but I'm right handed)

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#429

Post by melagonster »

yamtaddle wrote: post #327
winphone1974 wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

at least most of new research article is online, although we still have problems with publish company, but everything is towards to better way. e.g., Germany government and now maybe White House are standing at side support open every article.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#430

Post by Broken_Hippo »

IncRnd wrote: post #273
jancsika wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I wrote a dissertation on Conlon Nancarrow's Player Piano Study No. 36. Skimming the facts in the article on Conlon Nancarrow, everything looks to be both true and relevant to Nancarrow's life and musical output. I could make a few small improvements. E.g.…

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

And encyclopedias can easily not have your subject, be based on wrong information, and so on.

Teachers treated them like fact until high school, though: Only in my senior year (1995-1996) were we told that while we could get basic information from an encyclopedia - to help us search for information - we couldn't use the encyclopedia itself as a source of information.

I don't understand why folks aren't treating wikipedia the same way. In general, a wikipedia article is going to give a fairly good faith overview of a subject. There are going to be more subjects than could fit in an encyclopedia. Many articles will be more in-depth and a good number have references: In other words, you can go off and read the source material if you want and use that for more information.

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