461–470 of 501 posts
Teachers are overpaid and mostly pretty stupid. School boards are bureaucracies that prioritize student learning somewhere near the bottom of the list. What do you expect?
Where can I get a job as an overpaid high school teacher?
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…
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33124973
> Give a single example of how the Encyclopedia Britannica be worse than random idiots, foreign agents, and shills on Wikipedia.
I received no answer, which is what I expected. It was easier to flag the comment, because this forum is pathetic.
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The Wikimedia Foundation does not edit Wikipedia. So what I said above has got little to do with the information quality on the level of an individual article. I still find it interesting though that the organisation attracts so many politicos. And as far as the Wikimedia Foundation's Strategy 2030 is concerned, it's absolutely relevant. A lot of people in the volunteer community felt that the result of the strategy…
> what I said above has got little to do with the information quality In that case I wish you luck in finding the right place to discuss it.
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If there is no decent reference available, IMHO the knowledge is useless anyways and might as well be deleted. Can anybody prove me wrong?
You're getting downvoted, but I think for Wikipedia you're correct. Wikipedia's purpose is not to be a cutting-edge repository of all truth. It's to conveniently organize all the knowledge that can be looked up. That's because every bit of it needs to be verifiable by non-expert editors. If there's some knowledge that can't be looked up, then that's not Wikipedia's problem to solve.
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Are those pages inaccurate? Any examples?
I wouldn't say they're inaccurate; Just unfocused. Can't think of an example off the top of my head, but it's super weird seeing a whole paragraph about something that's only relevant to historians followed by 1 sentence about something that revolutionized the field a few years ago and is now widely deployed in production.
I work in ML and have found wikipedia to be a very important reference when I do any research. Which is what an encyclopedia is supposed to be.
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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…
> Limit "External Links" to only websites found in Google Scholar. Do we really want Google to have even more authority of what is considered accepted truths in society?
At the same time, it would be silly not to admit Scholar is quite useful. Not everyone has a subscription to a large collection of academic journals and many papers are often published via non-commercial websites, as pre-prints, etc.
Imagine prohibiting Wikipedia editors from using Google Search when researching Wikipedia articles. If they are allowed to use it then that means Google has some control over what is cited in Wikipedia.
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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.
However, you just made my point, which is that, "random online information can often be wrong or conflict with other online authorities."
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I think this was your point (the last few sentences), but those 16 or so hoaxes cited are on absolutely obscure subjects .. A children's book character "Amelia Bedelia" ? A subspecies of raccoon ?? .. So yes you're going to have articles that matter to 1 person per year get skewed, and that sucks .. and it's unfortunate for whatever poor soul wants to use those 1/yr-viewed articles that are misleading .. but I'm not…
How about "desert"? Wikipedia's "desert" article said for almost a year that the mean winter temperature in cold deserts, such as those found in Greenland and Antarctica, is typically between +4 and –2 °C. False info inserted: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Desert&diff=prev&... False info deleted: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Desert&diff=60327... The desert article was classified as a "Good…
But you know I was just thinking earlier today reading a Wikipedia article and looking at some of the citations, and I thought that even with it's shortcomings, it has the potential to make readers, especially those that are curious, actually question what they're reading.. And I think when compared to like Britanica, thats a very positive aspect.
Meaning.. I know that citations are all over academia and research areas, but they aren't in a lot of k-9 textbooks .. and maybe for someone who doesn't go on to higher education, they can potentially have that questioning-effect.
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…
Controversial pages on Wikipedia (contemporary politics, etc) are typically hard to edit. Others are easy to edit. Vandalism is rare and temporary, and nobody is going fight earnestly over topics such as how a light bulb or an electric engine works, or when a certain building was build or most historical events, etc. Wikipedia does not absolve you from checking references or the credibility of the text, but it does a…
For such instances it is always advisable to go directly to genuine source materials, e.g., case records or legal documents. Were I a teacher I would not accept any compiled source as a citation because the skill of digging deep enough to find the closest thing to the truth is too valuable to do otherwise.