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I have a distinct memory of a high school class: We were being taught about the internet. The teacher made a weirdly specific rant about how wikipedia was unsa

I have a distinct memory of a high school class: We were being taught about the internet. The teacher made a weirdly specific rant about how wikipedia was unsafe. Two slides later and we were told that org domains were more trustable than com. I pointed out that wikipedia was an org domain. I was sent to the principal's office. Fun times.

MattGaiser 5y ago
Similar memory. Librarian went on a rant about the evils of Wikipedia and instead directed us to these random websites. Wikipedia at least has some level of review.
- fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
  On the other hand, there’s been at least one case where unsourced information on Wikipedia was cribbed for published articles and then the published article was used as a citation for the Information on Wikipedia
  - jcranmer 5y ago
    https://xkcd.com/978/ https://xkcd.com/978/ I've definitely run into a few cases where this loop exists already, the most annoying one being the age of the Susquehanna River (whose current cite for age is a publication which explicitly cites Wikipedia).
    - bobmaxup 5y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Circular_reference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Circular_reference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenesis_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenesis_... There are also some bots that help auto tag articles with these issues
  - femto 5y ago
    The opposite happened to me. I wrote an article, which 7 years later was plagiarised on Amazon. My article got taken down on the basis that it plagiarised the Amazon book. Fortunately the publication dates made it pretty clear what had happened and it got fixed [1]. I never bothered to take it further, so the plagurist's book is still available and has been used as a citation in other Wikipedia articles [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Jindalee_Operational_Radar_Network#Accusations_of_Plagiarism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Jindalee_Operational_Rada... [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=Joseph+Babatunde+Fagoyinbo+site:wikipedia.org https://www.google.com/search?q=Joseph+Babatunde+Fagoyinbo+s...
jcranmer 5y ago
Our classroom discussion of Wikipedia was "You should never cite Wikipedia... because it's an encyclopedia, and you should never cite encyclopedic knowledge anyways." Otherwise, the general sentiment of Wikipedia at school was that it was a good resource for finding resources. As for .com versus .org, I think we may have been told that .org was somewhat more trustworthy than .com. But we were generally told to favor .gov over both anyways; outside of that, it was a matter of understanding the webpage context to know who was publishing the content and attempting to assess their biases and how that affects the trustworthy content. Definitely would have been something about how even a .edu page might not reflect academic research anyways (since students might have their own personal webspaces on a .edu site).
- nsxwolf 5y ago
  The further back in time you go the more ignorance and skepticism of Wikipedia you find. When I was in college in the early 2000s the professors would say “don’t use Wikipedia, anyone can edit it so you can’t trust anything it says”
  - pdonis 5y ago
    The thing about Wikipedia is not so much that it's "unreliable", it's that, for any topic that is at all disputed, in order to know if what you're reading on Wikipedia is reliable, you have to already be knowledgeable about the topic, in which case you don't need to find out about it on Wikipedia.
    - livre 5y ago
      In order to know if anything you are reading anywhere is reliable you have to already be knowledgeable about the topic. It doesn't matter if you are reading about it on Wikipedia, a random blog, a printer book or a published paper. The thing about Wikipedia is that for most popular topics that you aren't knowledgeable about you can be sure they've been reviewed by thousands of users and kept somewhat reliable and up to date, unlike reading the same topic on a random blog or an old printed book.

MattGaiser 5y ago

Similar memory. Librarian went on a rant about the evils of Wikipedia and instead directed us to these random websites. Wikipedia at least has some level of review.

fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
On the other hand, there’s been at least one case where unsourced information on Wikipedia was cribbed for published articles and then the published article was used as a citation for the Information on Wikipedia
- jcranmer 5y ago
  https://xkcd.com/978/ https://xkcd.com/978/ I've definitely run into a few cases where this loop exists already, the most annoying one being the age of the Susquehanna River (whose current cite for age is a publication which explicitly cites Wikipedia).
  - bobmaxup 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Circular_reference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Circular_reference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenesis_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenesis_... There are also some bots that help auto tag articles with these issues
- femto 5y ago
  The opposite happened to me. I wrote an article, which 7 years later was plagiarised on Amazon. My article got taken down on the basis that it plagiarised the Amazon book. Fortunately the publication dates made it pretty clear what had happened and it got fixed [1]. I never bothered to take it further, so the plagurist's book is still available and has been used as a citation in other Wikipedia articles [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Jindalee_Operational_Radar_Network#Accusations_of_Plagiarism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Jindalee_Operational_Rada... [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=Joseph+Babatunde+Fagoyinbo+site:wikipedia.org https://www.google.com/search?q=Joseph+Babatunde+Fagoyinbo+s...

jcranmer 5y ago

Our classroom discussion of Wikipedia was "You should never cite Wikipedia... because it's an encyclopedia, and you should never cite encyclopedic knowledge anyways." Otherwise, the general sentiment of Wikipedia at school was that it was a good resource for finding resources. As for .com versus .org, I think we may have been told that .org was somewhat more trustworthy than .com. But we were generally told to favor .gov over both anyways; outside of that, it was a matter of understanding the webpage context to know who was publishing the content and attempting to assess their biases and how that affects the trustworthy content. Definitely would have been something about how even a .edu page might not reflect academic research anyways (since students might have their own personal webspaces on a .edu site).

nsxwolf 5y ago
The further back in time you go the more ignorance and skepticism of Wikipedia you find. When I was in college in the early 2000s the professors would say “don’t use Wikipedia, anyone can edit it so you can’t trust anything it says”
- pdonis 5y ago
  The thing about Wikipedia is not so much that it's "unreliable", it's that, for any topic that is at all disputed, in order to know if what you're reading on Wikipedia is reliable, you have to already be knowledgeable about the topic, in which case you don't need to find out about it on Wikipedia.
  - livre 5y ago
    In order to know if anything you are reading anywhere is reliable you have to already be knowledgeable about the topic. It doesn't matter if you are reading about it on Wikipedia, a random blog, a printer book or a published paper. The thing about Wikipedia is that for most popular topics that you aren't knowledgeable about you can be sure they've been reviewed by thousands of users and kept somewhat reliable and up to date, unlike reading the same topic on a random blog or an old printed book.