6 ms·

This is something new? When I was in high school back in 2004, we were already told to not use Wikipedia as a source. What most of us would do instead was use t

• JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > in high school back in 2004, we were already told to not use Wikipedia as a source I think we all assumed the situation had evolved.
  • guywithahat 4y ago
    Why would it? Encyclopedias were not regarded as good sources before Wikipedia, and Wikipedia is demonstrably less accurate than encyclopedias and more biased towards their sponsors
    • bananarchist 4y ago
      [citation needed]
    • greiskul 4y ago
      Which sponsors does Wikipedia have?
      • jerf 4y ago
        "Sponsor" may not be the right word, but Wikipedia by its nature ends up privileging the most motivated. Sadly, "the most motivated" are not always the most reliable. Sometimes they are! Lots o' love to the That Guy who is obsessed with the 14th century French poetry, and writes an entry that the most detail-oriented academic could hardly hope for. But in general... it's not a good bet.
        • bawolff 4y ago
          This is such a weird criticism. Before wikipedia you had academics writing things like this. You really think the average wikipedian is more "motivated" then the average academic with a PhD who spent their life studying some topic?
          • jerf 4y ago
            Average, who can say. Modal, by number of contributions/edits, they absolutely are more motivated than a PhD. They may have spent their life studying a topic but Wikipedia isn't where they're generally going to put it.
            • bawolff 4y ago
              If your counting by number of edits that's basically a tautology: People who edit wikipedia make more edits than people who don't edit Wikipedia. Well no shit. If you want to do an apples to apples comparison, compare how many hours people edit wikipedia vs how many hours PhD candidates spend writing their dissertation. i think on average traditional accademia rewards obsessiveness much more than wikipedia does.
    • biofox 4y ago
      If you're talking about something like Encyclopaedia Britannica or the ODNB, they are/were extensively peer-reviewed. I have seen plenty of references to both in scholarly literature. Infact, for some niche or historical topics, I often find my old print edition of EB to be more useful than Wikipedia.
      • PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
        Actual studies (even back in 2005) comparing EB and Wikipedia find Wikipedia to be at least as accurate as EB. The level of "peer review" in EB is generally overstated in the popular conception of that work.
      • bluGill 4y ago
        Yes, and in school (wikipedia didn't exist until after I graduated) I still was not allowed to reference an encyclopedia. We had them in the library and they were considered at best a good introduction before you find real source material.
      • eesmith 4y ago
        As a concrete example, I've come across several papers who cite Claude Shannon's entry on Information Theory, from Encyclopaedia Britannica vol. 12, p. 246b, and recommend it as a good starting point in the field. It's available at https://archive.org/details/encyclopdiabrita12chic/page/n307/mode/2up?q=shannon https://archive.org/details/encyclopdiabrita12chic/page/n307... . I think it's a better intro than the Wikipedia one for someone looking for an intro overview. The Wikipedia has a bunch more cross-references and goes into more depth.
  • wobbly_bush 4y ago
    Not all content there is good. I see the pages on some political content, or in general a lot of content about country X (intentionally omitted) are of pretty poor quality.
    • mananaysiempre 4y ago
      ... And at the same time, the English-language mathematics section is a fairly reliable and—in some cases—very broad reference, covering a range of viewpoints that would usually require trawling through half a dozen books for different subjects and target audiences. (It is rarely a good introduction, but then a single reference for a skilled reader is doable while a single introduction for every taste, background, and motivating problem is nigh-impossible.)
      • bombcar 4y ago
        For factual areas that don't change much Wikipedia can be exceptionally good. You're not likely to have a drawn-out edit war over a mathematical topic (I'm sure there are examples, but the final admin decision is likely to be "show both sides". Same with the census detail pages you find everywhere; they're probably accurate for that point in time, because nobody really cares.
  • MichaelCollins 4y ago
    It's very surprising to me that anybody would assume that, let alone that everybody would be presumed to assume that.
• Snitch-Thursday 4y ago
  I was about to say, wikipedia by citations was a big help to me. I just had to do Words citation feature to make it look right and poof the teachers were happy.
• jermaustin1 4y ago
  Or if we were being cheeky, made up our sources/citations (at least in my high school teacher ever actually verified). I doubt this would have worked in university, but I never attempted it.
  • dfee 4y ago
    I’d wager it’d work just fine in a university setting. 10 references per paper, 10 papers per student, 200 students in a course. I doubt anyone is fetching and fact checking 2000 links a semester.
• elif 4y ago
  I was a junior in high school in 2003 and referenced Wikipedia for a particular element's molar mass. The wiki was actually wrong about this fundamental digital fact by a factor of like 3x, and my teacher got to i-told-you-so me about citations. Ever since then I've not been able to enjoy Wikipedia without scrutinizing the edit history
  • AQuantized 4y ago
    Why not just check the reference? If there isn't one it isn't to be trusted, if there is just cite that.
    • elif 4y ago
      https://web.archive.org/web/20040409083026/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon https://web.archive.org/web/20040409083026/https://en.wikipe... the entire "references" section back then was one link
      • tux3 4y ago
        Hmm, on that 2004 Wikipedia page it lists the atomic weight of carbon as 12.0107, and the one link in the reference section (Los Alamos National Laboratory) lists it as 12.011. That's the correct number for the molar mass of carbon, as far as I know, it doesn't look off by 3x!
        • elif 4y ago
          i don't think you understand whats being said or you are misquoting me intentionally in poor faith
          • tux3 4y ago
            I'm always happy to be corrected if I've misunderstood. I'm not sure what the link demonstrates, though, I opened it and I just don't see anything like you described. About poor faith, these kind of accusations happens so often, there's plenty of existing essays and material on whether you should assume people are posting in bad faith. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:AOBF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:AOBF is a good reference, it's used pretty regularly.
• aidenn0 4y ago
  Since 2004, Wikipedia has gotten better and random pages on the internet have gotten worse. Uncovering useful primary sources on the internet that aren't paywalled has had a steady upwards-trend of difficulty.
  • freedomben 4y ago
    I chase a lot of wikipedia citations, and this is a much bigger problem than I think most people realize. A huge chunk of citations (at least around 19th century history) is paywalled or is a printed source that is impossible to find and verify. To be fair this is a problem for most academic papers and most books as well, so it's not unique to wikipedia. It does however, require a lot of "faith" to be exercised. As a skeptical person, I find that unsatisfactory.
    • bombcar 4y ago
      Wikipedia also requires citations to be secondary sources, so you have to find someone reporting about whatever it was, because Wikipedia isn't for original research. This can make it more difficult for things that nobody ever bothered reporting.
      • calvinmorrison 4y ago
        >This can make it more difficult for things that nobody ever bothered reporting. My dad is wrapping up the first monograph on a not too obscure New Deal artist who had a long career and plenty of notable works (at least in his niche). The entire wikipedia page was written by my dad. If you search the artist there's plenty of hits on art for sale by him, but not much on the man himself. My father who was a journalist and now a researcher has done several projects and he's been the first 'story' written for a lot of these projects. When the Philadelphia Union started a feeder team named after the historical club in Bethlehem - they called him up and asked him if he owned the copyright! In fact, basically all of the pictures and details, later written into a book done by another local soccer journo type, was dug up by him. A lot of this information was either in microfiche or in dusty piles in the Bethlehem area library. Now it's diligently organized and stored online. One of the things he's told me about his work is it's immensely difficult to put a story together that is cohesive. Even for someone who's relatives are still alive, and for the soccer club? He could probably have made up half of the articles and didn't. All of these things to find out that wikipedia will delete your article for non-importance because there's a lack of recent news links online to it.
• sbf501 4y ago
  > When I was in high school back in 2004, I think this is the first sentence I've read about an internet encyclopedia that started with "Back in my day..."
• meej 4y ago
  No, it's old, and an outdated mindset. Since 2004 Wikipedia has greatly matured and most educators have relaxed their stance on it. I'm a librarian and my take on Wikipedia is that it's a great starting point but you'd never want to cite it directly.
  • davidjfelix 4y ago
    I think the issue isn't citing it directly, it's citing it incorrectly. Wikipedia is a snapshot collective understanding of a topic, hopefully in a meaningfully cited manner. It's not that it contains false information or unreviewed information, it's that you're attempting to cite a discussion and collective work that is constantly in flux. I think that if you were inclined to actually do investigative work, you'd find yourself: * Interviewing "experts" (their level of expertise would be something you'd need to establish since no third party has prescribed that) who contribute and discuss the topic. * Referencing cited sources. * Referencing edit history and reverted changes, rejected sources, etc. I think the issue is that academia has a lot of systems in place (I'd argue that they're only partially effective) that help establish credibility of experts and sources through "academic honesty" policies. IMO, part of figuring out how to properly cite wikipedia will come with a reckoning that academic honesty isn't 100% nor are the arguments of authority that come from academia quite enough to establish credibility. I think that's the real issue -- this shorthand is pretty good, but it doesn't mesh with wikipedia's own shorthand.
  • BeetleB 4y ago
    That's exactly what your parent is saying.