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School vs. Wikipedia

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Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#261

Post by flaviut »

akolbe wrote: post #208
flaviut wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Interesting--looks like I came across an older policy document. But in this case, it sounds like the author is an established and published expert on this topic, so their blog would be acceptable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_and_usin...

> The author is an established expert on the topic of the article whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable third-party publications, except for exceptional claims.[4] Take care when using such sources: if the information in question is really worth reporting, someone else will probably have done so.[5]

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#262

Post by [deleted] »

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)

[deleted]

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#263

Post by xg15 »

threatofrain wrote: post #241
xg15 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal annoyance with Wikipedia articles on advanced math is that often it's "monoid in the category of endofunctors" on steroids. A lot of those articles seem to follow a pattern of: "An A is a B that also does C". If you click on the link to understand what a B is, you get "B is a D in the space of Es with properties F and G". and so on... I can understand that this appears logically consistent and very satisf…

There are alternative wikis for math and they’re way harsher.¹² Wikipedia is the middle ground between math wikis written by current students and professionals vs pedagogues.³ But I’d argue that if you want pedagogy or step by step proofs, then why not simply buy a well vetted textbook, of which math has many? Also, Wikipedia tried a wiki textbook project and no doubt people were very unsatisfied because they couldn’…

That's certainly true, buy I think it also makes it quite unsuited as a reference (except for people who are already familiar with the concepts and just need a quick reminder).

Wikipedia math articles are not useful to get a shallow understanding of a topic. On the contrary, it pulls you into a rabbit hole of dependent concepts just for you just to be able to understand the words in the article's summary.

From an actual reference, I'd expect that it gives a brief, self-contained description of the basic idea of a concept, without going too deep into specifics, possibly with a "see also". That's not what Wikipedia does.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#265

Post by thrwyoilarticle »

datadata wrote: post #233
thrwyoilarticle wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Several books have the false info too Sounds like we shouldn't trust books blindly, either. Is there a source we can trust blindly?

I think pedagogical goal is exactly to prevent the act of blindly trusting any source, regardless of source quality. Trust fails without verification, so the idea of a blindly trusted source is self defeating.

That's more optimistic than my impression. I view it as a mix of a few things:

- What often happens when a person is surprised to learn something: they assume most other people don't know it and become eager to repeat it without further nuance or investigation. Like moon landing conspiracy theorists who learn that there are no stars in the photos.

- The hazing, elitist attitude surrounding knowledge. I suffered, therefore you should suffer. From this perspective, it doesn't make sense for there to be a gargantuan, selfless compilation of knowledge more accessible than any library in history. It must be wrong.

- People are lazy and will paraphrase the Wiki page that appears at the top of a web search for the topic.

It's much easier to say Wikipedia can't be trusted than to instil upon pupils an understanding of epistemology, a distrust of what authority figures tell them, an appreciation of academic honesty, and the knowledge of how to construct a good bibliography.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#266

Post by palunon »

tomp wrote: post #176
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.

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

Aside from the fact that proofs are often difficult to verify, one cannot prove what a monoid or a vector space is. They are definitions, and to make sure the ones in the article match what is used in the mathematical community, you need citations.

And yes, sometimes there are conflicts. In France, we have two competing definition of a limit (relating to wether you include the point in its neighbourhood), one being the traditional one, taught in schools, and one being the one that's become the world standard and used from university onwards.

How do you arbiter that on wikipedia without sources ?

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#267

Post by kjkjadksj »

aidenn0 wrote: post #76
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)

Since 2004, Wikipedia has gotten better and random pages on the internet have gotten worse. Uncovering useful primary sources on the internet that aren't paywalled has had a steady upwards-trend of difficulty.

But sci hub exists now

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#268

Post by Cyberdog »

floppydisc wrote: post #252

Just out of curiosity; has anyone here contributed to Wikipedia?

Yes, back before I lost faith in the project. I actually initiated some somewhat-notable articles such as those on Tank Man (the Tiananmen Square protester) and traditional ("hand-drawn") animation.

Most of my more recent contributions have been fixing typos/grammar or removing obvious spam, but I've given up on doing even that little as of late.

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#269

Post by kjkjadksj »

NegativeLatency wrote: post #19
kube-system wrote: post #12

This is probably a relic of what these teachers learned 20+ years ago when the internet had an higher ratio of academically spirited content, and wasn’t yet entirely full of people trying to make a buck with pages that merely look like content to googlebot. Do schools still have subscriptions to things like LexisNexis? I feel like it would be eye opening to many students to see just how different an academic search e…

Most (all?) of my schools did have a subscription (early 2000's), but it was only accessible at school on the school computers, so I basically never used it, because I did my homework/research at home.

Most schools have off campus proxies you can use now

Re: School vs. Wikipedia

#270

Post by yamtaddle »

brnaftr361 wrote: post #243
yamtaddle wrote: post #217

This is a good thing to point out (guess what: books are still way better than both, yes, physical books, I know they shouldn't be in this The Year of Our Lord 2022 but they are, the whole "information superhighway" and "making all the world's information accessible at your fingertips" hasn't worked out as well as we thought it would) but I was really hoping this post would be a showdown between lies taught in school…

Textbooks are obscenely limited. Interactive feedback is gone, animation is gone. I mean trigonometry is so much easier to understand if you have moving visualizations of what everything means. And because of the obscene costs of textbooks, and the various moats that publishers have, including book-specific curricula, and the very low effort options they have for homework assigning and grading student get tied into a…

I would agree that the Internet has delivered spectacularly well in a few kinds of instruction. But if you're looking for raw, across-all-disciplines knowledge, books still win and it's not even particularly close. They shouldn't, but somehow they do.

Library Genesis is probably the best free part of the Web by a country mile, as far as raw disseminating-human-knowledge goes, and it's supposed to be illegal. And its utility is based on... giving you free access to books, periodicals, and papers.

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