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I can't understand why anyone would argue for being allowed to cite Wikipedia. It's not uncommon to find claims there that have no citation at all, so it'd hav

by crtasm 2y ago

I can't understand why anyone would argue for being allowed to cite Wikipedia. It's not uncommon to find claims there that have no citation at all, so it'd have to be required to note if the part you're using is cited... and if you can do that what's preventing you from just using the actual source?

dvdkon 2y ago
There's various levels of rigour. For casual conversation any source is usually enough, even Wikipedia or a Reddit comment. And sometimes anything short of independently verifying is not enough. The question is, where on this spectrum do elementary/high school essays fall?
- crtasm 2y ago
  That's a different question to what I was replying to, but if they do require citations then it seems like a poor idea to teach anyone to rely on this slight shortcut.
mike_hearn 2y ago
Why wouldn't you be able to cite Wikipedia, as long as you specify the date on which you read it? The assumption that it's unreliable doesn't seem to be rooted in any genuine data, especially as I remember teachers and lecturers asserting that immediately the moment it appeared, based on nothing more than "but anyone can edit it!". One might think that was a bit early to leap to conclusions about quality. It looks a lot like an attempt to preserve the academic culture of all claims being attached to names for reputation and career building reasons. > It's not uncommon to find claims there that have no citation at all Obviously. Any claim eventually has to bottom out at either personal experience, or citation of someone else's words. If you just follow the citations to the end you'll end up at a paper that just asserts something without a citation, and that's fine. Academics assume such statements must be reliable because of the institutional affiliation of the authors, but that's hardly a strong basis. Wikipedia does at least have a working system for fixing mistakes that isn't "spend two years arguing with a journal editor to get nothing more than an expression of concern at the top".

by crtasm 2y ago

dvdkon 2y ago

There's various levels of rigour. For casual conversation any source is usually enough, even Wikipedia or a Reddit comment. And sometimes anything short of independently verifying is not enough. The question is, where on this spectrum do elementary/high school essays fall?

crtasm 2y ago
That's a different question to what I was replying to, but if they do require citations then it seems like a poor idea to teach anyone to rely on this slight shortcut.

mike_hearn 2y ago

Why wouldn't you be able to cite Wikipedia, as long as you specify the date on which you read it? The assumption that it's unreliable doesn't seem to be rooted in any genuine data, especially as I remember teachers and lecturers asserting that immediately the moment it appeared, based on nothing more than "but anyone can edit it!". One might think that was a bit early to leap to conclusions about quality. It looks a lot like an attempt to preserve the academic culture of all claims being attached to names for reputation and career building reasons. > It's not uncommon to find claims there that have no citation at all Obviously. Any claim eventually has to bottom out at either personal experience, or citation of someone else's words. If you just follow the citations to the end you'll end up at a paper that just asserts something without a citation, and that's fine. Academics assume such statements must be reliable because of the institutional affiliation of the authors, but that's hardly a strong basis. Wikipedia does at least have a working system for fixing mistakes that isn't "spend two years arguing with a journal editor to get nothing more than an expression of concern at the top".