7 ms·

Isn't that essentially appeal to authority? As long as the information is factually correct it doesn't really matter where it came from.

marcoperaza 11y ago
Appeal to authority is totally valid when the authority is an expert in the subject matter. >As long as the information is factually correct it doesn't really matter where it came from. And who is the arbiter of factual correctness? Or conceptual correctness. I've noticed that lots of Wikipedia articles are completely inaccessible to people without lots of domain knowledge. I find that math articles in particular tend to obfuscate rather than elucidate.
- adwf 11y ago
  Yes, a lot of the math/science articles are terribly written. Somewhere in a drawer I have a dusty old Physics degree, but even on subjects I understand very well, the Wikipedia article is frequently badly written and hard to comprehend.
- TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
  I don't remember Britannica being any better. Britannica was purely a social signalling tool. The content was secondary. People bought it as evidence of middle class disposable income, not because they seriously expected to learn anything from it. My family couldn't afford Britannica, so I had to walk to a local library to read it. I remember it being fascinating from an "I didn't know that was even a thing" angle, but close to useless for learning about specific topics - mostly because the learning needed an entire book, not a short article. Wikipedia is great for factual gazeteer-type information about people and places, but it has the same problem with math and science - i.e. you literally can't teach the content in that format. I've sometimes wondered about a WikiTextBook site which has definitive and progressive tutorials/lessons on topics that don't fit the 'pedia format, starting from pre-school all the way up to post-grad. Online courses do this already, and some of them are very good at it. But it would be useful to have everything collected on a single site instead of scattered all over the web.
  - marcoperaza 11y ago
    >I've sometimes wondered about a WikiTextBook site which has definitive and progressive tutorials/lessons on topics that don't fit the 'pedia format, starting from pre-school all the way up to post-grad. There is a wikibooks, though I think it falls short of your ideal. https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page
  - hackuser 11y ago
    > Britannica was purely a social signalling tool. The content was secondary. People bought it as evidence of middle class disposable income, not because they seriously expected to learn anything from it. I'm not sure what basis you could have to say that. Have you seen a survey? Britannica was and I assume still is respected by academia as a serious, accurate reference tool.
  - tzs 11y ago
    > I've sometimes wondered about a WikiTextBook site which has definitive and progressive tutorials/lessons on topics that don't fit the 'pedia format, starting from pre-school all the way up to post-grad. I've wanted something similar, but going the other way. That is, you start at post-grad level and can expand things to lower level as needed. For instance, an article in this format on the prime number theorem would start out stating the theorem and presenting a proof at a level that you'd see if this was a proof from a mathematics journal. At any step in the proof you could expand the article in two ways. 1. Horizontal expansion. This fills in omitted steps, but stays at the same level. 2. Vertical expansion. This explains the step in terms of less advanced material. Expanded material could further be expanded, both horizontally and vertically. So for instance suppose that in the top level proof of the prime number theorem an integral appeared and was evaluated. Expanding horizontally would fill in the details of how you evaluate that integral. But suppose you have not studied calculus. You could expand that integral vertically, and keep expanding, until you get down to an explanation of calculus. That would give you essentially a course in calculus--but just the calculus needed to support the prime number theorem proof. This could be the basis of an alternative way to teach math and physics (and other sciences). Pick a set of interesting, advanced results, chosen so that when you expand all of them the bottom level will have covered the complete undergraduate math and physics curriculum. I think this could be a good approach because it provides more motivation. Everything you learn at the bottom level is motivated because it is needed for that specific advanced result you are trying to learn. Contrast that to the current approach where you have long stretches of material that might not seem interesting but that you are learning because you are told you'll need in 3 or 4 years when you are finally getting to look at interesting stuff.
- vacri 11y ago
  > Appeal to authority is totally valid when the authority is an expert in the subject matter. John Muir lived in the 19th century. Yosemite Park has a bit more done to it and learned about it since then. Marconi straddled the 19th and 20th centuries, but claiming that his writings would inform you about wireless telephony as we currently know it is beyond foolish. They were experts in their time, but much has changed since then. > I find that math articles in particular tend to obfuscate rather than elucidate. Irony that you wouldn't use simpler English terms in this criticism :)
  - marcoperaza 11y ago
    >Irony that you wouldn't use simpler English terms in this criticism :) Haha, you got me there. I think you'd enjoy Orwell's essay, "Politics and the English Language". https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm
    - vacri 11y ago
      Thank you, I'll check it out.
pjc50 11y ago
"Factually correct" is never the whole story. You can produce many radically different articles with no incorrect factual statements that lead the reader to different conclusions. WP tries to correct this with "neutral point of view", but that too is a mirage. History and politics in particular require interpretation in order to make sense of the material at all. Fundamentally compiling an encyclopedia is an act of summarising - declaring certain information to be more important, interesting or relevant - and it is impossible to eradicate subjectivity from that.
- vacri 11y ago
  > it is impossible to eradicate subjectivity from that. One of the strangest criticisms I see about WP is that it's subjective about things like politics or biographies. These are subjective topics, and as such it's impossible to be wholly objective about them, even from the most well-intentioned, educated, neutral point of view. It's a strange criticism, because usually the critic will have no problems in ignoring the subjectivity of their suggested alternative, or sometimes conveniently neglect to provide an alternative at all.
- pixl97 11y ago
  Omission of information while still providing facts can lead the reader to incorrect outcomes also. Take this example. Bob hit John in the face. Based on that information alone it seems like an unprovoked attack in which Bob is an aggressive attacker. Yet the statement is still factual. Bob hit John in the face because he was choking Mary to death. In this statement we see Bob as the defender and not the aggressor. With more information we could see why the situation unfolded in the first place, but many times it won't be available and things get left to interpretation. To agree with what you are saying above, large parts of human life are subjective, not because reality is subjective, but because information loss leaves us to interpret events via our biases.

marcoperaza 11y ago

Appeal to authority is totally valid when the authority is an expert in the subject matter. >As long as the information is factually correct it doesn't really matter where it came from. And who is the arbiter of factual correctness? Or conceptual correctness. I've noticed that lots of Wikipedia articles are completely inaccessible to people without lots of domain knowledge. I find that math articles in particular tend to obfuscate rather than elucidate.

adwf 11y ago
Yes, a lot of the math/science articles are terribly written. Somewhere in a drawer I have a dusty old Physics degree, but even on subjects I understand very well, the Wikipedia article is frequently badly written and hard to comprehend.
TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
I don't remember Britannica being any better. Britannica was purely a social signalling tool. The content was secondary. People bought it as evidence of middle class disposable income, not because they seriously expected to learn anything from it. My family couldn't afford Britannica, so I had to walk to a local library to read it. I remember it being fascinating from an "I didn't know that was even a thing" angle, but close to useless for learning about specific topics - mostly because the learning needed an entire book, not a short article. Wikipedia is great for factual gazeteer-type information about people and places, but it has the same problem with math and science - i.e. you literally can't teach the content in that format. I've sometimes wondered about a WikiTextBook site which has definitive and progressive tutorials/lessons on topics that don't fit the 'pedia format, starting from pre-school all the way up to post-grad. Online courses do this already, and some of them are very good at it. But it would be useful to have everything collected on a single site instead of scattered all over the web.
- marcoperaza 11y ago
  >I've sometimes wondered about a WikiTextBook site which has definitive and progressive tutorials/lessons on topics that don't fit the 'pedia format, starting from pre-school all the way up to post-grad. There is a wikibooks, though I think it falls short of your ideal. https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page
- hackuser 11y ago
  > Britannica was purely a social signalling tool. The content was secondary. People bought it as evidence of middle class disposable income, not because they seriously expected to learn anything from it. I'm not sure what basis you could have to say that. Have you seen a survey? Britannica was and I assume still is respected by academia as a serious, accurate reference tool.
- tzs 11y ago
  > I've sometimes wondered about a WikiTextBook site which has definitive and progressive tutorials/lessons on topics that don't fit the 'pedia format, starting from pre-school all the way up to post-grad. I've wanted something similar, but going the other way. That is, you start at post-grad level and can expand things to lower level as needed. For instance, an article in this format on the prime number theorem would start out stating the theorem and presenting a proof at a level that you'd see if this was a proof from a mathematics journal. At any step in the proof you could expand the article in two ways. 1. Horizontal expansion. This fills in omitted steps, but stays at the same level. 2. Vertical expansion. This explains the step in terms of less advanced material. Expanded material could further be expanded, both horizontally and vertically. So for instance suppose that in the top level proof of the prime number theorem an integral appeared and was evaluated. Expanding horizontally would fill in the details of how you evaluate that integral. But suppose you have not studied calculus. You could expand that integral vertically, and keep expanding, until you get down to an explanation of calculus. That would give you essentially a course in calculus--but just the calculus needed to support the prime number theorem proof. This could be the basis of an alternative way to teach math and physics (and other sciences). Pick a set of interesting, advanced results, chosen so that when you expand all of them the bottom level will have covered the complete undergraduate math and physics curriculum. I think this could be a good approach because it provides more motivation. Everything you learn at the bottom level is motivated because it is needed for that specific advanced result you are trying to learn. Contrast that to the current approach where you have long stretches of material that might not seem interesting but that you are learning because you are told you'll need in 3 or 4 years when you are finally getting to look at interesting stuff.
vacri 11y ago
> Appeal to authority is totally valid when the authority is an expert in the subject matter. John Muir lived in the 19th century. Yosemite Park has a bit more done to it and learned about it since then. Marconi straddled the 19th and 20th centuries, but claiming that his writings would inform you about wireless telephony as we currently know it is beyond foolish. They were experts in their time, but much has changed since then. > I find that math articles in particular tend to obfuscate rather than elucidate. Irony that you wouldn't use simpler English terms in this criticism :)
- marcoperaza 11y ago
  >Irony that you wouldn't use simpler English terms in this criticism :) Haha, you got me there. I think you'd enjoy Orwell's essay, "Politics and the English Language". https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm
  - vacri 11y ago
    Thank you, I'll check it out.

pjc50 11y ago

"Factually correct" is never the whole story. You can produce many radically different articles with no incorrect factual statements that lead the reader to different conclusions. WP tries to correct this with "neutral point of view", but that too is a mirage. History and politics in particular require interpretation in order to make sense of the material at all. Fundamentally compiling an encyclopedia is an act of summarising - declaring certain information to be more important, interesting or relevant - and it is impossible to eradicate subjectivity from that.

vacri 11y ago
> it is impossible to eradicate subjectivity from that. One of the strangest criticisms I see about WP is that it's subjective about things like politics or biographies. These are subjective topics, and as such it's impossible to be wholly objective about them, even from the most well-intentioned, educated, neutral point of view. It's a strange criticism, because usually the critic will have no problems in ignoring the subjectivity of their suggested alternative, or sometimes conveniently neglect to provide an alternative at all.
pixl97 11y ago
Omission of information while still providing facts can lead the reader to incorrect outcomes also. Take this example. Bob hit John in the face. Based on that information alone it seems like an unprovoked attack in which Bob is an aggressive attacker. Yet the statement is still factual. Bob hit John in the face because he was choking Mary to death. In this statement we see Bob as the defender and not the aggressor. With more information we could see why the situation unfolded in the first place, but many times it won't be available and things get left to interpretation. To agree with what you are saying above, large parts of human life are subjective, not because reality is subjective, but because information loss leaves us to interpret events via our biases.