3 ms·

This parent is wrong, and the teacher is also wrong. There is no reason for children to use a source like Wikipedia for anything. Children also should not be p

This parent is wrong, and the teacher is also wrong. There is no reason for children to use a source like Wikipedia for anything. Children also should not be permitted to use services like Google, which is bad for similar reasons, amply recited by the link author. Schools usually have access to excellent library databases. It's never too early to teach children useful research skills. Wikipedia is anti-useful. Searching Wikipedia is an anti-skill that actively misinforms users, training both children and adults into believing that they can do "research" by punching strings into a text box to retrieve often highly inaccurate articles which are also un-citeable for any serious purpose. When the web was young and fresh, Wikipedia was better than many alternatives. In the current era, with so many digitized books and journal articles, there is no reason whatsoever to use Wikipedia for anything but the most casual browsing. >Instead, they’re bad-mouthing Wikipedia specifically, and then having them do a fucking Google search and using whatever pops up as an authoritative source! >Are you kidding me? Google is worse, so it's not like the teacher is offering a better alternative. The teacher instead should be directing the children to print or digitized encyclopedias and towards appropriate databases. The teacher would also be better off directing the children to sources like Archive.org to seek out higher quality primary and secondary sources responsive to whatever questions are being posed.

tablespoon 4y ago
> This parent is wrong, and the teacher is also wrong. There is no reason for children to use a source like Wikipedia for anything. Exactly. To oversimplify, the correct advice has two parts: 1) don't use Wikipedia, 2) use these better sources instead. The teacher is wrong because they're apparently forgetting the second part, but the parent is also wrong because missing that doesn't make Wikipedia a good source. IMHO, a pretty good lesson for schoolchildren is: quality information usually takes some effort to access, and information that's easily accessible is probably bad. That's because quality is usually expensive, so free very often takes shortcuts on quality or injects an agenda.
- mountainb 4y ago
  Correct. If the children are going to get any value from the many, many hours spent in a school, why not use the library resources that the school pays vast fees to maintain access to (public, private, AND parochial all pay for these things), which require actual skills to be developed to use effectively? Why should the teacher earn a salary for telling children to type into a text box? A computer could do the job of telling kids to "search Wikipedia" for less money, but a teacher can be more helpful to train students in the core academic skillset that is formal research. Why do we look at the state of affairs in which undergraduates even at "elite" schools arrive to universities completely unprepared to use any academic-caliber library research tools and consider that acceptable?
mikkergp 4y ago
> The teacher instead should be directing the children to print or digitized encyclopedias Any data source you encounter needs to be validated. Wikipedia is a fine source for lots of types of data, traditional encyclopedias aren’t known to be any more accurate. The reality is you have to think about the importance of the information you’re looking up, but most people shouldn’t be referring to primary sources as they are much harder to validate than secondary sources. “Wikipedia has a similar number of errors to professional and peer-reviewed sources” — https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6889752/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6889752/ Another source: https://www.nature.com/articles/438900a https://www.nature.com/articles/438900a
- mountainb 4y ago
  You just linked to what is effectively a press release written by someone affiliated with the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees, but you presented it as if it were some sort of highfalutin study merely because it links to a handful of articles. It does not even go into any detail on what it is citing. Each cherry picked citation except for the fifth in that press release covers a relatively narrow area of knowledge, but the core question of Wikipedia's suitability for general education is how reliable it is as a general resource. The fifth citation itself cites to another cluster of studies of questionable relevance. Citing encyclopedias is already forbidden by most research manuals. The real question is whether it should be used as a research starter at all. My answer is "no," because minute-for-minute of time spent researching, almost anyone will be better off with other resources, even just browsing by topic for book titles in the Library of Congress. When the internet was shit, Wikipedia was impressive. Now, you can get virtually any digitized book title instantly with academic access. You can retrieve any academic article instantly with academic access. There is no reason apart from lack of academic database access or laziness to use Wikipedia for anything at all.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - mikkergp 4y ago
    I may just be seeing the problem in a different way because our positions seem irreconcilable. fair enough to your position though.
dvdkon 4y ago
The kind of "research" school kids are usually doing, Wikipedia is perfectly suited for. Their work is likely going to be read by the teacher or their peers and that's it. It's basically just used as proof that they're capable of finding information on a practical non-academic level, and Wikipedia is good at that, no matter how citeable it is.
PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
I think this is completely wrong. When I was in school (what the US would call K-12 school), our school library had Encyclopedia Brittanica and a few other large encyclopedias. We frequently used them as launching off points, because they almost always had a lot more information in them than "children's books" about a topic. In later years at school, it would start to make more sense to use the still-non-primary-source-books-but-still-much-more-detailed books in the library. In college university, we used a mixture of textbooks (still not primary sources!) and actual papers. There is a complex web of information sources. Brittanica was fine back in my day as a "someone who knows something about this wrote up a really fine summary that will give you some directions". There's no reason for Wikipedia not to play this role today (it is both at least as accurate and more expansive than EB). There are many years of education before "seek[ing] out higher quality primary and secondary sources" makes much sense, and even then, the introduction you can get from Wikipedia will frequently stand you in good stead before doing that. Yes, it is true that using Wikipedia the way you describe it is a bad habit, but that's precisely why children (and adults!) should be taught how best to use it. I remember being actually taught that EB was pretty much the entire summary of all human knowledge - laughable now. We can do better than that by embracing, not by rejecting, wikipedia.
standardUser 4y ago
Whatever the topic, there is a significant benefit from first browsing some high level Wikipedia articles to get the lay of the land. I don't think you are thinking much about the learning process and how our brains work. You're jumping to step 5 because you seem to have an ax to grind. Steps 1-4 are "what the fuck is going on and why should I care" and Wikipedia is great for setting us up to learn more (and to want to learn more, and to know what there is to learn!).

tablespoon 4y ago

> This parent is wrong, and the teacher is also wrong. There is no reason for children to use a source like Wikipedia for anything. Exactly. To oversimplify, the correct advice has two parts: 1) don't use Wikipedia, 2) use these better sources instead. The teacher is wrong because they're apparently forgetting the second part, but the parent is also wrong because missing that doesn't make Wikipedia a good source. IMHO, a pretty good lesson for schoolchildren is: quality information usually takes some effort to access, and information that's easily accessible is probably bad. That's because quality is usually expensive, so free very often takes shortcuts on quality or injects an agenda.

mountainb 4y ago
Correct. If the children are going to get any value from the many, many hours spent in a school, why not use the library resources that the school pays vast fees to maintain access to (public, private, AND parochial all pay for these things), which require actual skills to be developed to use effectively? Why should the teacher earn a salary for telling children to type into a text box? A computer could do the job of telling kids to "search Wikipedia" for less money, but a teacher can be more helpful to train students in the core academic skillset that is formal research. Why do we look at the state of affairs in which undergraduates even at "elite" schools arrive to universities completely unprepared to use any academic-caliber library research tools and consider that acceptable?

mikkergp 4y ago

> The teacher instead should be directing the children to print or digitized encyclopedias Any data source you encounter needs to be validated. Wikipedia is a fine source for lots of types of data, traditional encyclopedias aren’t known to be any more accurate. The reality is you have to think about the importance of the information you’re looking up, but most people shouldn’t be referring to primary sources as they are much harder to validate than secondary sources. “Wikipedia has a similar number of errors to professional and peer-reviewed sources” — https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6889752/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6889752/ Another source: https://www.nature.com/articles/438900a https://www.nature.com/articles/438900a

mountainb 4y ago
You just linked to what is effectively a press release written by someone affiliated with the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees, but you presented it as if it were some sort of highfalutin study merely because it links to a handful of articles. It does not even go into any detail on what it is citing. Each cherry picked citation except for the fifth in that press release covers a relatively narrow area of knowledge, but the core question of Wikipedia's suitability for general education is how reliable it is as a general resource. The fifth citation itself cites to another cluster of studies of questionable relevance. Citing encyclopedias is already forbidden by most research manuals. The real question is whether it should be used as a research starter at all. My answer is "no," because minute-for-minute of time spent researching, almost anyone will be better off with other resources, even just browsing by topic for book titles in the Library of Congress. When the internet was shit, Wikipedia was impressive. Now, you can get virtually any digitized book title instantly with academic access. You can retrieve any academic article instantly with academic access. There is no reason apart from lack of academic database access or laziness to use Wikipedia for anything at all.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- mikkergp 4y ago
  I may just be seeing the problem in a different way because our positions seem irreconcilable. fair enough to your position though.

dvdkon 4y ago

The kind of "research" school kids are usually doing, Wikipedia is perfectly suited for. Their work is likely going to be read by the teacher or their peers and that's it. It's basically just used as proof that they're capable of finding information on a practical non-academic level, and Wikipedia is good at that, no matter how citeable it is.

PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago

I think this is completely wrong. When I was in school (what the US would call K-12 school), our school library had Encyclopedia Brittanica and a few other large encyclopedias. We frequently used them as launching off points, because they almost always had a lot more information in them than "children's books" about a topic. In later years at school, it would start to make more sense to use the still-non-primary-source-books-but-still-much-more-detailed books in the library. In college university, we used a mixture of textbooks (still not primary sources!) and actual papers. There is a complex web of information sources. Brittanica was fine back in my day as a "someone who knows something about this wrote up a really fine summary that will give you some directions". There's no reason for Wikipedia not to play this role today (it is both at least as accurate and more expansive than EB). There are many years of education before "seek[ing] out higher quality primary and secondary sources" makes much sense, and even then, the introduction you can get from Wikipedia will frequently stand you in good stead before doing that. Yes, it is true that using Wikipedia the way you describe it is a bad habit, but that's precisely why children (and adults!) should be taught how best to use it. I remember being actually taught that EB was pretty much the entire summary of all human knowledge - laughable now. We can do better than that by embracing, not by rejecting, wikipedia.

standardUser 4y ago

Whatever the topic, there is a significant benefit from first browsing some high level Wikipedia articles to get the lay of the land. I don't think you are thinking much about the learning process and how our brains work. You're jumping to step 5 because you seem to have an ax to grind. Steps 1-4 are "what the fuck is going on and why should I care" and Wikipedia is great for setting us up to learn more (and to want to learn more, and to know what there is to learn!).