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School vs. Wikipedia

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Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#201

Post by wpietri »

nkingsy wrote: post #169
wpietri wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see any particular reason to think that Wikipedia is worse than what existed prior. What exemplar from, say, 1980, do you think was better in terms of information quality? I'm thinking back to going in to a library, where a given topic would generally have 0-3 books. Books often put together by a single person, a person often chosen because of personal relationships with a publisher, plus that publisher's int…

It worked for a time and now it is dying at the hands of bad-faith actors who have worked within their mechanism.

That's an interesting claim. Where's your evidence?

I'll also note you must have missed my question, as I don't think you have answered it.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#202

Post by akolbe »

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…

"The apparent accuracy of a Wikipedia article is inversely proportional to the depth of the reader's knowledge of the topic." – Kozierok's First Law

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#203

Post by NavinF »

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…

I've noticed a similar phenomenon on pages about machine learning. There are entire sections about now-obsolete ideas that people only talked about for a few months before moving on.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#204

Post by thebooktocome »

scythe wrote: post #150
thebooktocome wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_differential_equatio... Repetitive content, written at several levels simultaneously, weird fixations on tangential topics.

>written at several levels simultaneously, I don't understand why this bothers people. If something on Wikipedia is above or below my level, I just skip it. It takes all of three seconds to recognize. I've consistently found it to be a great starting point for self-study in all sorts of math.

A novice isn’t always going to know the difference between something they could understand with effort and something they don’t have the context to understand.

It’s an incredibly common cause of anxiety in math education, and even if you’re not personally affected by it others may be.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#205

Post by jacobolus »

anon400232 wrote: post #75
js8 wrote: post #56

To me this misses what age group of kids are we talking about. If you're 12 and writing an essay on something as an exercise, go use Wikipedia. You will likely not be able to understand the primary sources, and secondary sources might be mixed bag. If you're in college, that's a different story. You should prefer primary sources, but Wikipedia is still a great starting point. I would say the primary problem is that l…

As valued as SciHub and LibGen may be, they are repositories of mostly disjoint materials. They are not seamlessly interconnected. As a very basic bar to strive for, I don't think either offer full text search over their contents. Any recommendedation for third party tools that might help?

Start with https://scholar.google.com or similar citation indices. When the full paper is not freely available, you can often paste a DOI into sci-hub.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#206

Post by ilyanep »

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.

A large number of my larger edits are fixing up voice / tone to make an article read more like an encyclopedia and less like an excited blog post.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#207

Post by jrm4 »

That's funny, I literally have this discussion at the beginning of every semester of my college "Technology for Information Professionals" class.

It's such a good icebreaker. Always starts with a timid "Oh, I can see reasons for both" and ends with "What were my teachers thinking? Anyway we would just cite the articles that Wikipedia cited to lol"

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#208

Post by akolbe »

flaviut wrote: post #194
reaperducer wrote: post #162

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. It's always frustrating for me to see things in Wikipedia I know are wrong because I was in the room when a particular decision was made, or because I personally made the decision. I gave up making corrections because they would always get reverted by someon…

How do we know you're not just making stuff up? If you've got a good answer to that question I'm sure they'd love to hear it and to update their policy. For what it's worth, you can write the information you know in a blog that can be linked back to you personally, and that's an acceptable source to cite.

Well, blogs generally aren't acceptable sources to cite in Wikipedia. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:Blog

Press sources do often have minor or major inaccuracies which can then get perpetuated in Wikipedia.

"What people outside do not appreciate is that a newspaper is like a soufflé, prepared in a hurry for immediate consumption. This of course is why whenever you read a newspaper account of some event of which you have personal knowledge it is nearly always inadequate or inaccurate. Journalists are as aware as anyone of this defect; it is simply that if the information is to reach as many readers as possible, something less than perfection has often to be accepted." —David E. H. Jones, in New Scientist, Vol. 26

Wikipedians, for that matter, are aware of this defect too (or ought to be), because a great many press articles about Wikipedia contain absolute clangers.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#209

Post by krastanov »

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…

Could you give examples of these topics?

Most math and physics pages I have seen on wikipedia are about as good as an average textbook. The French wikipedia is way better for math, but the English one is not bad.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#210

Post by jrm4 »

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…

This is literally the worst idea I've ever heard here on HN. Completely guts the core of what makes Wikipedia great. It's not a classic "encyclopedia" and that's GOOD.
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