7 ms·

You should be fighting this at the school. Wikipedia should not be used as a source for academic purposes; the sources being referenced on Wikipedia very well c

You should be fighting this at the school. Wikipedia should not be used as a source for academic purposes; the sources being referenced on Wikipedia very well could be though and as such Wikipedia is an incredibly useful tool for surface level research and schools should absolutely be taking this approach to using it. They should not, under any circumstance, have children "Googling" the answer to questions. Most of these kids parents already use that phrase as a keystone of their parental pedagogy and they don't need that in school, too. Wikipedia is wonderful. They have more money then they will ever need so don't donate; but, they are great. Everyone should have a copy of Wikipedia locally updated yearly.

jefftk 4y ago
> Wikipedia should not be used as a source for academic purposes It's not a primary source, or a secondary source, but it's a great tertiary source for getting an overview of an area, and as a tertiary source (like other encyclopedias historically) it has a major role in academic work.
- ravenstine 4y ago
  The nice thing about Wikipedia is that it is free of distraction, often very detailed, and has lots of citations that make it a great jumping-off point for finding other sources of information and verifying statements. Wikipedia, in my opinion, fails in that there is a bias with anything that remotely involves politics or health science. Students need to be taught that Wikipedia is NOT an objective source, and that basically no source of information is truly objective.
  - coding123 4y ago
    This is very true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidentified_flying_object https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidentified_flying_object If you read that, you will walk away thinking aliens have not visited this planet. Probably definitively believe it. The reality is, we have no fing clue if they have or not. You can feel the skeptics just edit all day long denying anything. I'm sure by 2050 the article on god's existence will be less discussion on both sides and just say that people that believe are crazy. If anything remotely falls under "pseudoscience" even if there is science backing parts of it up, wikipedia just completely bombs the crap out of believers.
jacobolus 4y ago
If scholars find some claim on Wikipedia and repeat it in their published work, they should unquestionably cite Wikipedia. When scholars fail to cite Wikipedia, a few years later other Wikipedia editors come back and cite that work as evidence for the original claim, sometimes for claims that turn out to be nonsense, and people trying to figure out what happened won’t notice that the citation chain is a circle. Cf. https://xkcd.com/978/ https://xkcd.com/978/ Teaching students not to cite the sources they use is a horrible teaching practice which does harm to academia. Better is to teach students to critically examine every source they use and consider its limitations (in Wikipedia’s case, being a volunteer project by a wide range of pseudonymous strangers), follow up on claims made there, check other sources for contrary claims and analyses, etc. Every source has biases and limitations. You can find plenty of fabrications and distortions snuck into e.g. New York Times stories, undergraduate history textbooks, or Supreme Court decisions. These sources should also be examined critically.
- tablespoon 4y ago
  > If scholars find something on Wikipedia and put it in their papers, they should absolutely cite Wikipedia. Yeah, but scholars shouldn't be putting things from Wikipedia in their paper at all (except, perhaps, in the very narrow case were Wikipedia is the object of their study). Wikipedia isn't even a valid source for Wikipedia itself, and "scholars" citing Wikipedia could very well create a circular reference supporting some falsehood on a Wikipedia article.
  - jacobolus 4y ago
    Wikipedia is an excellent source about many topics, and a mediocre source about many other topics. For example, the article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodesics_on_an_ellipsoid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodesics_on_an_ellipsoid was mostly written by the world’s foremost expert about geodesics on an ellipsoid, and would be a fine source. Edit to add an aside: In my opinion it is worth teaching students to look at Wikipedia’s talk pages and history pages to help them critically examine articles.
    - 4y ago
scifibestfi 4y ago
> They should not, under any circumstance, have children "Googling" the answer to questions. Why not? Don't you Google answers to questions? It's what they will be doing most of their life.
- FeepingCreature 4y ago
  Yes, and depending on topic, I discard 10% to 90% of the results out of hand.
  - Kim_Bruning 4y ago
    This is par for the course. When doing a library course in university, I learned that you typically end up discarding up to 99% of sources. (very rough rule of thumb: you get say something like 1000 hits, review the top 100 titles, read the top 10 abstracts, and select the remaining article(s) as a source. Wash rinse repeat)
    - dan_mctree 4y ago
      If your 1000 hits is roughly reasonable to you, mind if I ask how you find so many sources? In something I'm interested in, I rarely find even a dozen hits on things that seem vaguely related. And for more than half of those, I can't even find access.
      - Kim_Bruning 4y ago
        Maybe you're counting differently? If near the end you have a dozen papers that you're sufficiently interested in that you're actively trying to access them already, that sounds pretty decent really. Can you give an example of something you've been searching for?
- ajford 4y ago
  Because early school-age children haven't honed their bullshit detectors yet. Seriously though, I'm currently fighting that with my two kids. They're now old enough that they're becoming netizens of their own and searching for things and learning on their own, but after having to correct a few misconceptions, I've had to sit down with them and explain how they can't trust everything they find in a search and how to perform their own research and validate. However, getting them to really grasp that while young isn't super easy.
localhost 4y ago
Was wondering about the money thing and found this on ... Wikipedia :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation Seems like >$235MM in net assets excluding the $100MM in the Wikimedia endowment and growing at a healthy rate YoY.
- twobitshifter 4y ago
  I still donate when asked, it’s one of the biggest achievements of free software. I wish I had more time to contribute to the pages, as I imagine that would be worth more to them than my 20 bucks.
  - akolbe 4y ago
    Donate to the Internet Archive instead. Performs a vital service for Wikipedia, archiving sources before they disappear off the internet, so you can still verify Wikipedia content when the cited source is gone. Start donating to Wikipedia again when they are honest about their financial situation. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2022-06-26/Special_report https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2... And on the Wikimedia Endowment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2022-05-29/Opinion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
    - localhost 4y ago
      Thanks for the insider baseball on Wikipedia; I didn't know any of this. Will make sure I continue to support Internet Archive and take any money that I might have earmarked for Wikipedia and send it their way (along with employer match!)
- akolbe 4y ago
  Quite. Note rising executive salaries at the Wikimedia Foundation: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/e/e4/Wikimedia_Foundation_2020_Form_990.pdf#page=48 https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/e/e4/Wikim... Latest financial report: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikimedia_Foundation_FY2020-2021_Audit_Report.pdf#page=5 https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikim...
SoftTalker 4y ago
That's what I told my kids. They weren't allowed to use Wikipedia either, so I told them to use it for the sources referenced there. Google Search content farm results should not be allowed, but good searching might turn up some decent material so I think it should be taught but with those caveats. Is it too much to ask that the teachers at least give a cursory review of the source links students submit, and give feedback to the students who are not choosing good ones? Back in my day we were allowed to use popular magazine articles as sources (Time, Newsweek, etc) and honestly those probably weren't that great either (see Gell-Mann amnesia effect).
- Kim_Bruning 4y ago
  Searching for and finding relevant information is a skill all unto itself. Telling people outright to not use the two most common starting tools (Google and Wikipedia) is probably a bad idea. Telling people that they can definitely do better than JUST using the starter tools definitely seems like the right path.

jefftk 4y ago

> Wikipedia should not be used as a source for academic purposes It's not a primary source, or a secondary source, but it's a great tertiary source for getting an overview of an area, and as a tertiary source (like other encyclopedias historically) it has a major role in academic work.

ravenstine 4y ago
The nice thing about Wikipedia is that it is free of distraction, often very detailed, and has lots of citations that make it a great jumping-off point for finding other sources of information and verifying statements. Wikipedia, in my opinion, fails in that there is a bias with anything that remotely involves politics or health science. Students need to be taught that Wikipedia is NOT an objective source, and that basically no source of information is truly objective.
- coding123 4y ago
  This is very true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidentified_flying_object https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidentified_flying_object If you read that, you will walk away thinking aliens have not visited this planet. Probably definitively believe it. The reality is, we have no fing clue if they have or not. You can feel the skeptics just edit all day long denying anything. I'm sure by 2050 the article on god's existence will be less discussion on both sides and just say that people that believe are crazy. If anything remotely falls under "pseudoscience" even if there is science backing parts of it up, wikipedia just completely bombs the crap out of believers.

jacobolus 4y ago

If scholars find some claim on Wikipedia and repeat it in their published work, they should unquestionably cite Wikipedia. When scholars fail to cite Wikipedia, a few years later other Wikipedia editors come back and cite that work as evidence for the original claim, sometimes for claims that turn out to be nonsense, and people trying to figure out what happened won’t notice that the citation chain is a circle. Cf. https://xkcd.com/978/ https://xkcd.com/978/ Teaching students not to cite the sources they use is a horrible teaching practice which does harm to academia. Better is to teach students to critically examine every source they use and consider its limitations (in Wikipedia’s case, being a volunteer project by a wide range of pseudonymous strangers), follow up on claims made there, check other sources for contrary claims and analyses, etc. Every source has biases and limitations. You can find plenty of fabrications and distortions snuck into e.g. New York Times stories, undergraduate history textbooks, or Supreme Court decisions. These sources should also be examined critically.

tablespoon 4y ago
> If scholars find something on Wikipedia and put it in their papers, they should absolutely cite Wikipedia. Yeah, but scholars shouldn't be putting things from Wikipedia in their paper at all (except, perhaps, in the very narrow case were Wikipedia is the object of their study). Wikipedia isn't even a valid source for Wikipedia itself, and "scholars" citing Wikipedia could very well create a circular reference supporting some falsehood on a Wikipedia article.
- jacobolus 4y ago
  Wikipedia is an excellent source about many topics, and a mediocre source about many other topics. For example, the article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodesics_on_an_ellipsoid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodesics_on_an_ellipsoid was mostly written by the world’s foremost expert about geodesics on an ellipsoid, and would be a fine source. Edit to add an aside: In my opinion it is worth teaching students to look at Wikipedia’s talk pages and history pages to help them critically examine articles.
  - 4y ago

scifibestfi 4y ago

> They should not, under any circumstance, have children "Googling" the answer to questions. Why not? Don't you Google answers to questions? It's what they will be doing most of their life.

FeepingCreature 4y ago
Yes, and depending on topic, I discard 10% to 90% of the results out of hand.
- Kim_Bruning 4y ago
  This is par for the course. When doing a library course in university, I learned that you typically end up discarding up to 99% of sources. (very rough rule of thumb: you get say something like 1000 hits, review the top 100 titles, read the top 10 abstracts, and select the remaining article(s) as a source. Wash rinse repeat)
  - dan_mctree 4y ago
    If your 1000 hits is roughly reasonable to you, mind if I ask how you find so many sources? In something I'm interested in, I rarely find even a dozen hits on things that seem vaguely related. And for more than half of those, I can't even find access.
    - Kim_Bruning 4y ago
      Maybe you're counting differently? If near the end you have a dozen papers that you're sufficiently interested in that you're actively trying to access them already, that sounds pretty decent really. Can you give an example of something you've been searching for?
ajford 4y ago
Because early school-age children haven't honed their bullshit detectors yet. Seriously though, I'm currently fighting that with my two kids. They're now old enough that they're becoming netizens of their own and searching for things and learning on their own, but after having to correct a few misconceptions, I've had to sit down with them and explain how they can't trust everything they find in a search and how to perform their own research and validate. However, getting them to really grasp that while young isn't super easy.

localhost 4y ago

Was wondering about the money thing and found this on ... Wikipedia :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation Seems like >$235MM in net assets excluding the $100MM in the Wikimedia endowment and growing at a healthy rate YoY.

twobitshifter 4y ago
I still donate when asked, it’s one of the biggest achievements of free software. I wish I had more time to contribute to the pages, as I imagine that would be worth more to them than my 20 bucks.
- akolbe 4y ago
  Donate to the Internet Archive instead. Performs a vital service for Wikipedia, archiving sources before they disappear off the internet, so you can still verify Wikipedia content when the cited source is gone. Start donating to Wikipedia again when they are honest about their financial situation. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2022-06-26/Special_report https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2... And on the Wikimedia Endowment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2022-05-29/Opinion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
  - localhost 4y ago
    Thanks for the insider baseball on Wikipedia; I didn't know any of this. Will make sure I continue to support Internet Archive and take any money that I might have earmarked for Wikipedia and send it their way (along with employer match!)
akolbe 4y ago
Quite. Note rising executive salaries at the Wikimedia Foundation: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/e/e4/Wikimedia_Foundation_2020_Form_990.pdf#page=48 https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/e/e4/Wikim... Latest financial report: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikimedia_Foundation_FY2020-2021_Audit_Report.pdf#page=5 https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikim...

SoftTalker 4y ago

That's what I told my kids. They weren't allowed to use Wikipedia either, so I told them to use it for the sources referenced there. Google Search content farm results should not be allowed, but good searching might turn up some decent material so I think it should be taught but with those caveats. Is it too much to ask that the teachers at least give a cursory review of the source links students submit, and give feedback to the students who are not choosing good ones? Back in my day we were allowed to use popular magazine articles as sources (Time, Newsweek, etc) and honestly those probably weren't that great either (see Gell-Mann amnesia effect).

Kim_Bruning 4y ago
Searching for and finding relevant information is a skill all unto itself. Telling people outright to not use the two most common starting tools (Google and Wikipedia) is probably a bad idea. Telling people that they can definitely do better than JUST using the starter tools definitely seems like the right path.