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It seems the greatest value of Wikipedia is consistently as a repository of citations. The reliance of moderation or review of those citations is the question.

It seems the greatest value of Wikipedia is consistently as a repository of citations. The reliance of moderation or review of those citations is the question. EDIT: I hear complaints from students all the time that they are not allowed to cite Wikipedia. I tell them no you should instead cite the Wikipedia citations. They invariably tell me how much better they do academically because of that.

mikece 4y ago
What would be the best alternative to Wikipedia at getting a list of citations on a topic quickly? For academic research I consider the content of the page as "Yeah, maybe" but the citations to be more useful in terms of digging to deeper sources faster. The argument could be made that the ability of almost anyone to edit Wikipedia is a form of peer review but for edge topics it's tough to tell who has the chops to be editing a page and who doesn't.
- corrral 4y ago
  > What would be the best alternative to Wikipedia at getting a list of citations on a topic quickly? If you're looking for major/important sources to read on a topic, not just a quick way to halfway-fake a works-cited section, I've found it valuable to locate some representative, recent academic book in the field and read the author's introduction and other pre-chapter-1 material. These will often include a lot of name-dropping of what are considered major works in the field. There may also be a list of abbreviations the book will use, and those often include several major works in the field that'll come up often in the body text. That's your list of books and papers to find and read. Repeat that technique with each of those books and papers, too, if you want to keep going deeper. Often you can get enough off an Amazon or Google preview of a book for this to work. Plus, libraries exist, and you pull that kind of information out of several books (which can be handy—anything that appears more than once deserves special attention) in less than an hour, without checking anything out. And there's always Library Genesis, which may not have every book but probably has at least one in your interest area that can be mined in this way. Wikipedia's sort of useful for this, at least for tracking down a first work to attack with this approach, but the problem is that many articles don't cite highly-regarded or authoritative or landmark works on the topic, so much as whatever the author(s) happened to have handy or what was easiest to find online (a whole hell of a lot of great information is still not available on the Web, even in 2022, including material in very recent books, not just pre-Web ones, or is available on the Web but only in poorly- or not-indexed-by-web-search-engines under-copyright ebooks).
  - jacobolus 4y ago
    The most useful tool is the academic citation graph, e.g. via Google Scholar. Start with a couple keywords. Click through the "cited by n" links on the top few papers. For papers that don’t have PDFs freely available, find DOIs and put them into Sci-hub. Books can often be found at the Internet Archive, Google Books, or libgen. At the start, skim skim skim. Look at what links forward and backward from the papers you see. Hunt for new keywords to try. Go a few hops all around the graph. It often doesn’t take too long to get a rough lay of the land.
    - corrral 4y ago
      Thanks for the reminder—I often forget about Google's various less-prominent tools and services.
    - stevenjgarner 4y ago
      Academic citation graphs are invaluable WHERE the topic is academic, but this post (like most citations I would venture to say) is an example of citing Wikipedia that would generally not be considered academic or in the results of the articles and case law of scholar.google.com. There is a huge body of knowledge that lies (dare I say) in a Google search. You just need to know how to evaluate the search results with a reasonable criteria of notability, relevance, accuracy, etc.
  - DiggyJohnson 4y ago
    Very well said, I'm writing a book (popular narrative non-fiction) and the research process has led me to the exact same conclusion. Find a couple "pinnacle" books related to the domain/subject/question you're interested in, and read the Preface, Introduction, Ch. 1, etc. This is often the only place in a book authors are candid enough to directly answer the question of "why am I writing this and how does it relate to what other's have done?" No shade intended, if anything I need to work on this style. I'm too nervous of making it sound like other people's ideas are my own, but then I end up writing a block of defensive-sounding citation & qualification, and nobody wants to read that... Anyways, well said.
  - stevenjgarner 4y ago
- pcrh 4y ago
  Wikipedia may be a good start if you're completely clueless about a topic. But, academically-speaking, it doesn't last long. You're not going to be able to produce anything more insightful than a fresher's last minute sunday night essay using wikipedia.
- asdff 4y ago
  It depends on your field, but most fields publish review articles. These are written by a single author or two in the field, and perform no new analysis beyond just listing all the current info about the field. Here is an example for oncology, this one is periodically republished every few years as more info is learned by the field: https://aacrjournals.org/cancerdiscovery/article/12/1/31/675608/Hallmarks-of-Cancer-New-DimensionsHallmarks-of https://aacrjournals.org/cancerdiscovery/article/12/1/31/675...
- bonoboTP 4y ago
  Usually you can find survey/review articles, or textbooks and look at what they cite. You can also try to find websites of research groups in the area with good reputations and check out their recent works and the citations therein. Especially works that you see multiple times using this approach will be important core works, from which you can go further. General Google searches and Google Scholar keyword searches and exploring the citation graph are also useful.
jacobolus 4y ago
It’s really unfortunate that people copy claims made in Wikipedia (often without double-checking any other source) but then don’t cite Wikipedia. Often the claims made by Wikipedia are wrong, misleading, sloppy, one-sided, etc., and this (widespread) practice helps to perpetuate those problematic claims by making it seem that other authors are independently claiming the same thing. Then when future Wikipedia editors or others look for evidence of something, they find a number of sources that seem to corroborate the claim, but under close inspection turn out to a circular chain built on flimflam; unfortunately that close inspection often never happens. Students should be encouraged to cite Wikipedia when they found information in Wikipedia, so that when they grow up and start writing real research papers they will continue citing Wikipedia when they find information there. Finding information somewhere and then not citing it (or citing some random other source that actually says something different) erodes the whole academic project. Any teacher who tells their students not to cite Wikipedia should be ashamed.
- Dma54rhs 4y ago
  It's difficult to impossible to impossible to actually fix those mistakes on Wikipedia. Its good theory only on paper without any change in real life.
  - jacobolus 4y ago
    It is entirely possible to fix those mistakes (one at a time) on Wikipedia.... if you do the research work to find out what happened. But this takes significant effort (like, a half-day of research to sort out one claim), and then sometimes back and forth with other Wikipedians to convince people that you actually chased down the real story. The problem is that for every mistake someone is willing to put effort into fixing, there are another 100 that nobody ever notices.
    - s1artibartfast 4y ago
      I find obvious errors all the time, but the pages are locked. This is enough of a barrier to stop me from trying to fix it. Sometimes the discussion will have the same correction listed but overruled by partisan Wikipedians.
retcon 4y ago
Sadly I think that the value of Wikipedia in this lamentable example of judicial laziness and professional under funding is the web just happens to be more easily searched than LEXIS. Easily != competently. Ed. competently replaced usefully
mountainb 4y ago
The citations on Wikipedia articles are often either broken, in a foreign language, or not up to an academic standard. However, following this practice is what eventually lead me to stop using Wikipedia for anything. When I tried to trace the citations to make my research easier, I found it actually made it a lot slower because I kept running into junk. Before I actually paid attention to the citations on a broad selection of articles, I was under the mistaken belief that Wikipedia was "good enough."
- MisterMower 4y ago
  They have weird requirements for citations. Want to cite a link to a blog where a guy has spent 20,000 hours researching a topic but doesn’t have a degree? Not allowed. Want to post a link to a NYT article written by a journalist with no relevant experience in that same field? Go for it. It’s really strange. It’s like they’re aiming for narrative over fact or something.
  - asdff 4y ago
    To be fair usually when the nyt article is wrong they issue a retraction and when the blogger is wrong they triple down
    - 15amxn15 4y ago
    - pwdisswordfish0 4y ago
      Citation needed.
the_af 4y ago
If I understand the article correctly, it's not about incorrect information -- i.e. it's not claiming Wikipedia misleads judges because the articles are wrong -- but about "influence" of Wikipedia on decisions; an influence that could be gamed by an adversarial actor. References themselves are gameable. They argue references mentioned in Wikipedia are more likely to be cited by a judge! This is not about the quality of Wikipedia, but about its undue influence and how easy it is to game it, references included!
- Spooky23 4y ago
  Judges would consult encyclopedias and similar resources 40 years ago. The difference is that a crowdsourced resource like Wikipedia is easier to manipulate by people who understand the system. There are plenty of PR specialists who get client articles pushed into Wikipedia or updated to their liking. Wikipedia is a treasure, but it’s also vulnerable to a bunch of different attacks.
  - the_af 4y ago
    Agreed. But that's not about the quality of the articles themselves, and certainly not about their references!
- RickJWagner 4y ago
  You're close to an important issue, I think. False ideas can be spread simply by overemphasizing biased true statements and disregarding true statements that don't fit the narrative. The effect can be multiplied by controlling the discussion through selecting the right 'questions' that are discussed. Snopes is the exemplar.
bonoboTP 4y ago
It's so silly for teachers to say "you are not allowed to cite Wikipedia". It's a cart-before-horse approach, mindless rule-following. The principle in academic writing is that you cite whatever you used for your research. IF you read the Wikipedia article and base some of your conclusions on its synthesis, then you MUST cite Wikipedia, citing the sources of Wikipedia would be misleading IF you don't read those cited sources yourself. It's all about traceability and credit assigment. You can of course cite also what Wikipedia cites but you have to cite Wikipedia if you use claims from there that you didn't actually get from looking at the source cited by Wikipedia. However! It's also important to teach students how sources differ in quality or "authoritativeness". The problem with citing Wikipedia is not the citing per se but relying on that source. A peer reviewed academic journal is considered more reliable, although no source should be taken as gospel and definitive truth, especially on controversial topics. You can even cite blog posts, personal letters, and even personal oral communication! The point is to let the reader know where your info comes from. Making students memorize rules like "don't cite Wikipedia" just results in a cargo cult, not actual understanding of critical thinking related to sources.

mikece 4y ago

What would be the best alternative to Wikipedia at getting a list of citations on a topic quickly? For academic research I consider the content of the page as "Yeah, maybe" but the citations to be more useful in terms of digging to deeper sources faster. The argument could be made that the ability of almost anyone to edit Wikipedia is a form of peer review but for edge topics it's tough to tell who has the chops to be editing a page and who doesn't.

corrral 4y ago
> What would be the best alternative to Wikipedia at getting a list of citations on a topic quickly? If you're looking for major/important sources to read on a topic, not just a quick way to halfway-fake a works-cited section, I've found it valuable to locate some representative, recent academic book in the field and read the author's introduction and other pre-chapter-1 material. These will often include a lot of name-dropping of what are considered major works in the field. There may also be a list of abbreviations the book will use, and those often include several major works in the field that'll come up often in the body text. That's your list of books and papers to find and read. Repeat that technique with each of those books and papers, too, if you want to keep going deeper. Often you can get enough off an Amazon or Google preview of a book for this to work. Plus, libraries exist, and you pull that kind of information out of several books (which can be handy—anything that appears more than once deserves special attention) in less than an hour, without checking anything out. And there's always Library Genesis, which may not have every book but probably has at least one in your interest area that can be mined in this way. Wikipedia's sort of useful for this, at least for tracking down a first work to attack with this approach, but the problem is that many articles don't cite highly-regarded or authoritative or landmark works on the topic, so much as whatever the author(s) happened to have handy or what was easiest to find online (a whole hell of a lot of great information is still not available on the Web, even in 2022, including material in very recent books, not just pre-Web ones, or is available on the Web but only in poorly- or not-indexed-by-web-search-engines under-copyright ebooks).
- jacobolus 4y ago
  The most useful tool is the academic citation graph, e.g. via Google Scholar. Start with a couple keywords. Click through the "cited by n" links on the top few papers. For papers that don’t have PDFs freely available, find DOIs and put them into Sci-hub. Books can often be found at the Internet Archive, Google Books, or libgen. At the start, skim skim skim. Look at what links forward and backward from the papers you see. Hunt for new keywords to try. Go a few hops all around the graph. It often doesn’t take too long to get a rough lay of the land.
  - corrral 4y ago
    Thanks for the reminder—I often forget about Google's various less-prominent tools and services.
  - stevenjgarner 4y ago
    Academic citation graphs are invaluable WHERE the topic is academic, but this post (like most citations I would venture to say) is an example of citing Wikipedia that would generally not be considered academic or in the results of the articles and case law of scholar.google.com. There is a huge body of knowledge that lies (dare I say) in a Google search. You just need to know how to evaluate the search results with a reasonable criteria of notability, relevance, accuracy, etc.
- DiggyJohnson 4y ago
  Very well said, I'm writing a book (popular narrative non-fiction) and the research process has led me to the exact same conclusion. Find a couple "pinnacle" books related to the domain/subject/question you're interested in, and read the Preface, Introduction, Ch. 1, etc. This is often the only place in a book authors are candid enough to directly answer the question of "why am I writing this and how does it relate to what other's have done?" No shade intended, if anything I need to work on this style. I'm too nervous of making it sound like other people's ideas are my own, but then I end up writing a block of defensive-sounding citation & qualification, and nobody wants to read that... Anyways, well said.
- stevenjgarner 4y ago
pcrh 4y ago
Wikipedia may be a good start if you're completely clueless about a topic. But, academically-speaking, it doesn't last long. You're not going to be able to produce anything more insightful than a fresher's last minute sunday night essay using wikipedia.
asdff 4y ago
It depends on your field, but most fields publish review articles. These are written by a single author or two in the field, and perform no new analysis beyond just listing all the current info about the field. Here is an example for oncology, this one is periodically republished every few years as more info is learned by the field: https://aacrjournals.org/cancerdiscovery/article/12/1/31/675608/Hallmarks-of-Cancer-New-DimensionsHallmarks-of https://aacrjournals.org/cancerdiscovery/article/12/1/31/675...
bonoboTP 4y ago
Usually you can find survey/review articles, or textbooks and look at what they cite. You can also try to find websites of research groups in the area with good reputations and check out their recent works and the citations therein. Especially works that you see multiple times using this approach will be important core works, from which you can go further. General Google searches and Google Scholar keyword searches and exploring the citation graph are also useful.

jacobolus 4y ago

It’s really unfortunate that people copy claims made in Wikipedia (often without double-checking any other source) but then don’t cite Wikipedia. Often the claims made by Wikipedia are wrong, misleading, sloppy, one-sided, etc., and this (widespread) practice helps to perpetuate those problematic claims by making it seem that other authors are independently claiming the same thing. Then when future Wikipedia editors or others look for evidence of something, they find a number of sources that seem to corroborate the claim, but under close inspection turn out to a circular chain built on flimflam; unfortunately that close inspection often never happens. Students should be encouraged to cite Wikipedia when they found information in Wikipedia, so that when they grow up and start writing real research papers they will continue citing Wikipedia when they find information there. Finding information somewhere and then not citing it (or citing some random other source that actually says something different) erodes the whole academic project. Any teacher who tells their students not to cite Wikipedia should be ashamed.

Dma54rhs 4y ago
It's difficult to impossible to impossible to actually fix those mistakes on Wikipedia. Its good theory only on paper without any change in real life.
- jacobolus 4y ago
  It is entirely possible to fix those mistakes (one at a time) on Wikipedia.... if you do the research work to find out what happened. But this takes significant effort (like, a half-day of research to sort out one claim), and then sometimes back and forth with other Wikipedians to convince people that you actually chased down the real story. The problem is that for every mistake someone is willing to put effort into fixing, there are another 100 that nobody ever notices.
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    I find obvious errors all the time, but the pages are locked. This is enough of a barrier to stop me from trying to fix it. Sometimes the discussion will have the same correction listed but overruled by partisan Wikipedians.

retcon 4y ago

Sadly I think that the value of Wikipedia in this lamentable example of judicial laziness and professional under funding is the web just happens to be more easily searched than LEXIS. Easily != competently. Ed. competently replaced usefully

mountainb 4y ago

The citations on Wikipedia articles are often either broken, in a foreign language, or not up to an academic standard. However, following this practice is what eventually lead me to stop using Wikipedia for anything. When I tried to trace the citations to make my research easier, I found it actually made it a lot slower because I kept running into junk. Before I actually paid attention to the citations on a broad selection of articles, I was under the mistaken belief that Wikipedia was "good enough."

MisterMower 4y ago
They have weird requirements for citations. Want to cite a link to a blog where a guy has spent 20,000 hours researching a topic but doesn’t have a degree? Not allowed. Want to post a link to a NYT article written by a journalist with no relevant experience in that same field? Go for it. It’s really strange. It’s like they’re aiming for narrative over fact or something.
- asdff 4y ago
  To be fair usually when the nyt article is wrong they issue a retraction and when the blogger is wrong they triple down
  - 15amxn15 4y ago
  - pwdisswordfish0 4y ago
    Citation needed.

the_af 4y ago

If I understand the article correctly, it's not about incorrect information -- i.e. it's not claiming Wikipedia misleads judges because the articles are wrong -- but about "influence" of Wikipedia on decisions; an influence that could be gamed by an adversarial actor. References themselves are gameable. They argue references mentioned in Wikipedia are more likely to be cited by a judge! This is not about the quality of Wikipedia, but about its undue influence and how easy it is to game it, references included!

Spooky23 4y ago
Judges would consult encyclopedias and similar resources 40 years ago. The difference is that a crowdsourced resource like Wikipedia is easier to manipulate by people who understand the system. There are plenty of PR specialists who get client articles pushed into Wikipedia or updated to their liking. Wikipedia is a treasure, but it’s also vulnerable to a bunch of different attacks.
- the_af 4y ago
  Agreed. But that's not about the quality of the articles themselves, and certainly not about their references!
RickJWagner 4y ago
You're close to an important issue, I think. False ideas can be spread simply by overemphasizing biased true statements and disregarding true statements that don't fit the narrative. The effect can be multiplied by controlling the discussion through selecting the right 'questions' that are discussed. Snopes is the exemplar.

bonoboTP 4y ago

It's so silly for teachers to say "you are not allowed to cite Wikipedia". It's a cart-before-horse approach, mindless rule-following. The principle in academic writing is that you cite whatever you used for your research. IF you read the Wikipedia article and base some of your conclusions on its synthesis, then you MUST cite Wikipedia, citing the sources of Wikipedia would be misleading IF you don't read those cited sources yourself. It's all about traceability and credit assigment. You can of course cite also what Wikipedia cites but you have to cite Wikipedia if you use claims from there that you didn't actually get from looking at the source cited by Wikipedia. However! It's also important to teach students how sources differ in quality or "authoritativeness". The problem with citing Wikipedia is not the citing per se but relying on that source. A peer reviewed academic journal is considered more reliable, although no source should be taken as gospel and definitive truth, especially on controversial topics. You can even cite blog posts, personal letters, and even personal oral communication! The point is to let the reader know where your info comes from. Making students memorize rules like "don't cite Wikipedia" just results in a cargo cult, not actual understanding of critical thinking related to sources.