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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
> 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.
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 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.
> Wikipedia is an excellent source about many topics, and a mediocre source about many other topics.
Wikipedia is a moving target, so it could be a terrible source on a topic for the hour you're looking at it, and much better at other times. Trouble is, those other times don't do you any good. That inconsistency means it can't ever really be an "excellent" source.
It's not the inconsistency that disqualifies it from academic citation, it's that it's a tertiary source. The Encyclopedia Brittanica isn't a moving target if you cite the edition, but it's also a tertiary source, so it's just as citable as Wikipedia is, that is to say, not (except if you're treating Wikipedia as a primary source, eg you're studying Wikipedia)
It's stupid to ban students from using Wikipedia- sure, Wikipedia isn't of uniformly high quality, but it can be a pretty good encyclopedia. It's just not something you're allowed to cite.
If a school doesn't want students to read Wikipedia at all they really should provide an alternative encyclopedia that the school thinks is high enough quality for students to use (but still not cite), I think you can get subscriptions to Encyclopedia Brittanica now? But that costs actual money.
> It's stupid to ban students from using Wikipedia- sure, Wikipedia isn't of uniformly high quality, but it can be a pretty good encyclopedia. It's just not something you're allowed to cite.
Actually, it's probably pretty smart for schools to "ban" students from using Wikipedia, in order to encourage them to develop habits to use better things. If you let them use Wikipedia for their research, you're putting them in a situation to slouch into using it for most of their research (except for some source laundering at the end).
Sure, if you give them access to a better encyclopedia, that's not a terrible idea, I just think it's silly to have an absolute ban- "read at least two different encyclopedias" instead, maybe? "Cite N secondary sources you didn't find on Wikipedia"? And then they can find out for themselves how good or bad quality wikipedia is.
The thrust of the link here is that they aren't giving them alternatives, and just telling students to throw themselves into Google and hope they find something. Which, yes, isn't a bad skill to learn either- there's stuff to find out there- but it's setting them up for failure.
Have you actually used Wikipedia? Nothing on it is as fast moving as you’re making it out to be.
There are hundreds of unpaid volunteers at all times prowling for and reverting vandalism. The most popular articles are next to impossible to change. And to top it all off, if a large amount of vandalism happens on one article, it just gets reverted and locked for a while so no changes can happen, period.
Yes and books are moving targets as well, we have figured out ways to deal with that, cite the edition. Similar should most definitely cite the access date when you cite wikipedia.
There shouldn't be original research on Wikipedia, so any citation of Wikipedia would be better sourced directly from the reference linked to by Wikipedia.
Circular references aren't only a problem when it involves Wikipedia. You shouldn't ever be citing sources who only claim to be communicating the work of others, outside of being an antiquities scholar when the original works have been lost.
That invented falsehoods “shouldn’t be on Wikipedia” is not much consolation when in practice academics, journalists, and others regularly copy false claims from Wikipedia without independently fact checking them or citing where they got them. Nor does it ultimately much matter whether false or distorted claims were deliberate or just mistakes, and whether they were invented on Wikipedia or invented somewhere else.
> Wikipedia isn't even a valid source for Wikipedia itself,
First-hand direct presence isn't even a valid source for Wikipedia. Part of my account of the founding of amazon.com was removed because it wasn't "backed up by published citable sources". I pointed out that I would be the primary source cited by any such source, and was told that wasn't good enough: the contents had to be published somewhere else and then cited on Wikipedia.
[ EDIT: BTW, the page on the history of Amazon still has some bullshit in the early section (maybe others too, I wouldn't know), mostly because a journalist or book author misunderstood something, and now it's enshrined as the wikipedia version of the truth. The citation requirements are a good idea, but they don't protect against the nature of humanity ]
Anything you write in a Wikipedia article is written in "anonymous worker bee" mode. It doesn't count as written by you, even if you wrote it. Any editor could change what you wrote. This defeats the whole point of first-person testimony, where who said it matters.
If you want to tell the story of something that happened at Amazon, you should write an article on your own website and publish it under your own name. Then anyone can cite it (including Wikipedia) as written by you, and it can't be changed or removed without your consent.
(Some might not think a personal blog is a good enough citation, but that's their problem.)
Personal blogs, facebook posts, self-published papers on arxiv, web forum comments, etc. are not in general credible sources (for Wikipedia’s purposes) but can be in this kind of circumstance.
PaulDavisThe1st: you should definitely publish your anecdote(s) and corrections somewhere, and not just for Wikipedia’s benefit.
> "scholars" citing Wikipedia could very well create a circular reference supporting some falsehood on a Wikipedia article.
Using Wikipedia and citing Wikipedia is perhaps ill advised.
Using Wikipedia and not citing Wikipedia is a real problem and how you create the circle of falsehoods.
This idea of not using Wikipedia introduces students to the academic dishonesty game. Priority one in writing a research paper is that it be a truthful reflection of your research, including limitations, accidents, mistakes, failures, etc, etc.
If scholars find some claim in Wikipedia, they should cite the source of the claim. If the source actually is Wikipedia, it should not be included in an academic paper.
It's clear to me now that there is a divide between people who used physical encyclopedias (And thus know what an encyclopedia is for) and those who have only used Wikipedia. They don't understand that an encyclopedia is a place to get a quick overview of a subject, but then use the actual sources of the information to write their papers.
But only if they actually read the claim. This is the same as for scholars that cite the source of a claim they found in a paper that is, itself, cited from some other paper. Often you see a game of telephone in these citations. Because it's not looked at well to give a factual claim you found in a review paper, researchers often cite the claim as it was cited in the review paper, but they don't always investigate the claim themselves. This leads to a game of telephone.
A lot of high-profile factoids are like this. The claim that 95% of diets fail, for example, is a specious one that developed after a citation chain like this. The original analysis said that 95% of the sample finished the study above the lowest weight they reached. Through motivated rephrasing and citation laundering, this became 95% of diets fail, often paired with the suggestion that dieters always return to a weight higher than where they started.
Yet, you can find this claim being re-issued again and again in the introductions to papers about all sorts of topics related to dieting.
Another thing I have seen is where the source of the claim gets lost. It starts out as something like "Grainger 2003" and then eventually turns into "Grander 2013", a nonexistent paper with a ton of citations.
So, if you read an article and don't read the cited article, please reference only the article you read.
They very much do have citations as I recall. Maybe not the junior encyclopedias they had your grade school, but any proper encyclopedia had citations.
I was going to tell you that you're wrong, but in looking it up I found far more examples of encyclopedias without sources than with, so maybe that was more common.
I got away with this once. I used wikipedia as the source on a table that everyone in the field knows by heart anyway. When questioned about it (I think briefly?) I said I'd personally edited the article and checked that the table was correct (which I had!) . --~~~~
That is actually common for all encyclopaedias, they do generally cite secondary sources. Especially if the primary sources are not easily verifiable. Similarly they should (I haven't actually checked if they do) cite a translation of an ancient Greek text, not the original Greek text.
Horsehockey. Wikipedia cannot be cited because it is not a static resource. Occasionally, its citations can be cited. But generally, if you have ever tried to actually follow those citations, you will frequently discover that the authors and editors of the page are full of shit, and you will see why professionals tend to issue the blanket recommendation to avoid ever using it for anything.
Minute for minute, research time is better spent on a real resource than it is spent trying to sift something useful from the trillion page shit-vault that is Wikipedia.
Newspapers and textbooks aren't serious sources either, which is why academic research manuals usually forbid their usage except in some specific circumstances (such as using them as primary sources, for illustrative purposes, as evidence of what media reported at the time, etc.).
These threads always reveal that different people have had wildly different experiences with Wikipedia. I wish everyone would clarify what those experiences actually were so we could answer questions like "is it only some parts of Wikipedia."
What are you talking about? Wikipedia has a perfectly adequate page on how to cite it [1] and provides tools that account for how dynamic it is in generating citations. Newspapers and textbooks are also regularly cited to demonstrate general facts of knowledge and are usually accepted anywhere other tertiary sources would also be appropriate.
To be fair, you can cite a Wikipedia page along with the last revision date. And the complete revision history is available, I believe. I would expect researchers to include revision dates with any Wikipedia citation.
It's trivial to cite a specific snapshot of a Wikipedia page. A citation isn't an authoritative source in itself, its sole purpose is to point the reader at the source of information, whatever it may be. There are plenty of bona fide academic citations that point at sources of terrible quality.
Okay, you don’t like Wikipedia, newspapers, or textbooks as sources.
What about journal papers and monographs published by academic publishing houses? I read academic works on a daily basis, and they are chock full of nonsense, even from high-impact journals. Sometimes just sloppy scholarship uncritically repeating dubious claims (sometimes even found on Wikipedia then not credited!), but other times intentional fabrications. In the academic literature you can find misattributions of discoveries, serious calculation errors, sources that say the opposite of what they are cited to say, claims from notorious fabulists and mentally ill people credulously repeated, false history, faked study data, nonsensical mathematical models extrapolating trivial numbers of data points far outside their original range, invented interviews, legends presented as factual, speculation presented as factual, promotion of snake oil, amateur psychiatric diagnoses based on fragmentary evidence, apologies for genocide, and whatever other bad thing you might imagine.
Students should be taught to critically examine these sources and look for biases, mistakes, and incongruities.
Those are some incredibly broad and strong statements. What do you mean by professionals? What field? I know plenty academics who often start looking at Wikipedia as a first entry to a topic, and it is not uncommon to cite Wikipedia for example for a common definition. Yes for many things you would not cite Wikipedia because you would rather cite primary sources. That's also why I don't understand your statement about newspapers, there are plenty of fields (e.g. Political science, history) where newspapers magazines are important primary sources. The argument that things change is also week, books change as well so we cite the Edition, similarly you should cite Wikipedia (as well as other online sources) with a retrieval date.
> Wikipedia cannot be cited because it is not a static resource
Regardless of the merits of citing Wikipedia, if you do want to cite it you can reference a specific revision. Or include the date and time you accessed it, from which anyone else can determine the revision. This puts Wikipedia in a much better position than citing URLs in general, which are mostly not version-controlled.
Poppycock. Wikipedia is not a repository of primary sources nor original research. It merely aggregates information from outside sources and should be used as a reference tree.
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)
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.
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?
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.
The same applies to school and teachers. Everyone is taught some bullshit in school. I just think the difference is quantity of bullshit (the internet has more).
True, but one hopes (perhaps foolishly) that there's enough oversight between various parents talking to their kids about what they're learning, other teachers, and standardized testing.
It worked for most of us, but politics is creeping into everything and budgets are getting cut all over the place.
Are you suggesting I'm also a school aged child? Because, that's the only way your point works as an equivalency.
Learning isn't just about solving problems it's about understanding concepts. Teaching concepts is fundamental to understanding methods. Googling is a method to solving a problem. You're suggesting teaching methods in a discussion about corrupting conceptual instruction; which is the exact thing the school is doing.
My daughter's homework included the question "without an atmosphere would there be gravity?". At the time Google's featured snippet for this phrase claimed without an atmosphere we'd all float off into space. Worse, my wife (a primary school teacher) believed this to be true "because Google says".
Regardless of Google's stated desire to organise all the world's information, they appear to be further from this goal than they were in the "10 blue links" era.
Google is a tool
like a knife. If you don't know how to use it, you can cut yourself.
In a world, there children can't avoid knifes, children should be thought how to use them safely.
Google returning nonsense results can be exploited as a teachable moment. That is why non-practical questions such as the one about gravity and atmosphere are useful, they encourage developing more widely applicable skills (healthy skepticism) while stakes are low.
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.
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.
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!)
Tides holds well over $100 million in Wikimedia/Wikipedia donations by now in an Endowment – and they have never once published an audited financial report for the incomings and outgoings of this Endowment fund:
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).
Exactly. Wikipedia is a tool for finding sources. They're already cited at the bottom. Just click the footnote, navigate to the source, and fact check it.
To avoid the wikipedia issue (and also because research papers are a pony show) I wrote grade school research papers that were so obscure (at the time), that I used a geocities page as my source. Myotonic Fainting Goats... some dude who had a farm of them wrote up some web page about them.
Any new media has this problem. I know we think of digital media as being old and well understood at this point, but that's far from the truth.
Media moves too quickly for most people to understand it. By the time you understand it, it changes again. That was true for newspapers, radio, television, digital media, and now ubiquitous computing.
As people who build these media platforms (hackers) we need to do a better job designing the technology for humans and educating people to approach it with a more sophisticated mindset.
Ex; social media has been a disaster.
Remember, it was not that long ago that everyone got their information from the same places. This is going to be a long road.
I actually think this is some not too minor part of the misinformation problem we have today. Sure some of it is willful, but simultaneously almost any common sense notion you have about how to do research these days has a big fucking asterix next to it, and may have been born of a time of different communication patterns.
I wonder what the actual message is compared to what gets back to the parent. Are teachers really saying "Don't use wikipedia" full stop, then turning around and accepting any other webpage as a scholarly source? That seems really unlikely.
At worst, wikipedia is a tertiary source. I'm surprised I had to deal with this in college, but the teacher in one of my classes, after we submitted our first papers, felt the need to break this down and explain how to use wikipedia and properly cite sources in this context. I'm sure some kids turned off their ears after the beginning of that lecture...
It seems entirely apiece with how a rule begins ("Don't cite tertiary sources like encyclopedias, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, so don't cite Wikipedia") and then gets simplified to the point of uselessness ("Don't cite Wikipedia", then finally "Don't use Wikipedia") and then generates its own inverse rule ("If it's not Wikipedia, you can use it").
At each stage the why gets shaved off and then people come up with their own reverse-engineered explanations ("Don't use Wikipedia because it's edited all the time by randos, so it's less reliable than the other stuff you'll find online").
You can see this with, eg, p-values- people learn the rule "A p-value measures the probability of obtaining the observed results, assuming that the null hypothesis is true." which becomes "a low p-value means we should reject the null hypothesis" becomes "a p-value is the probability the null hypothesis is true" (the inverse).
This is probably a relic of what these teachers learned 20+ years ago when the internet had an higher ratio of academically spirited content, and wasn’t yet entirely full of people trying to make a buck with pages that merely look like content to googlebot.
Do schools still have subscriptions to things like LexisNexis? I feel like it would be eye opening to many students to see just how different an academic search engine is compared to public search engines.
Most (all?) of my schools did have a subscription (early 2000's), but it was only accessible at school on the school computers, so I basically never used it, because I did my homework/research at home.
I had teachers like this, some of them smugly defacing Wikipedia to try to prove their point. What they never realized is how quickly their vandalism was detected and removed. They never checked to see how persistent their edits were.
Exactly. That's why the world thinks an "Alan MacMasters" invented the electric toaster. That particular hoax lasted ten years and spread far and wide:
I think pedagogical goal is exactly to prevent the act of blindly trusting any source, regardless of source quality. Trust fails without verification, so the idea of a blindly trusted source is self defeating.
That's more optimistic than my impression. I view it as a mix of a few things:
- What often happens when a person is surprised to learn something: they assume most other people don't know it and become eager to repeat it without further nuance or investigation. Like moon landing conspiracy theorists who learn that there are no stars in the photos.
- The hazing, elitist attitude surrounding knowledge. I suffered, therefore you should suffer. From this perspective, it doesn't make sense for there to be a gargantuan, selfless compilation of knowledge more accessible than any library in history. It must be wrong.
- People are lazy and will paraphrase the Wiki page that appears at the top of a web search for the topic.
It's much easier to say Wikipedia can't be trusted than to instil upon pupils an understanding of epistemology, a distrust of what authority figures tell them, an appreciation of academic honesty, and the knowledge of how to construct a good bibliography.
The thing is, this would have been avoidable. If Wikipedia tells you someone called J. Bloggs invented some kind of gadget 100 years ago, you can do a Google Books search to see if there are any 20th-century sources saying so.
If there aren't, then Wikipedia is having you on. Alan MacMasters is not the only example: exactly the same thing happened with the inventor of the hair-straightener. See Example 16 here:
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.
> 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.
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?
> 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”
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.
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.
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.
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!).
Wikipedia is a terrific resource for an overview - and sometimes in-depth - coverage of a subject.
Where it might fail is - like a calculator (and obviously Google) - make research too easy; I can see that being an argument to at least change the focus of study methods in some cases.
Another way it might fail as a resource is where the "expertise" of the editors contributing is biased (and therefore so is the content) towards the demographics of Wikipedia editors, eg leftist/white/male/middle class, which carries it's own significant risks of misinformation in some areas of knowledge where those biases are potentially harmful.
Complacency towards this last point, which is breezily dismissed by the author with
"No agenda (or damn near no agenda, I mean, come on - show me a more neutral source for this information)"
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 the references section to find resources. (Or if we were being lazy, we'd just go by what Wikipedia said and then copy its relevant citations)
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
"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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
... 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.)
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.
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.
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.
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!
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 is a good reference, it's used pretty regularly.
if you are genuinely interested in your misunderstanding, i would begin by listing the following assumptions you've made:
- the element in my original anecdote was carbon
- the wayback machine in 2004 captured a website exactly as it appeared in 2003
Normally people provide relevant links. Even if this is showing bad sourcing, it still sources the important numbers. "External links" is helping with that too.
And this 2003 vs. 2004 distinction is a waste of time when wikipedia has a perfectly good history feature.
It is relevant. It's pointing out that lots of articles back then were not well referenced. It doesn't have to be his article. I know this quite well as I added a lot of stuff to Wikipedia in those days, and never provided a reference. No one challenged me.
Likely the page he got his information from didn't provide any reference for that number.
But the linked page has a very thorough source for its numbers; it just happens to be in the "external links" section. And looking through those links for a couple minutes they seem to pretty well cover the text.
The lines are not individually cited but that's a stylistic thing, not a failure to have references. I'm sure there's several lines without backing but overall this has reasonable links and I don't think it supports the narrative about having "one" reference and getting a "fundamental digital fact" wrong like that.
So I would like to see the real example. Or one that is equivalently bad. And linking it would be in the best interests of a fruitful discussion; it's not like a particular element is going to be a controversial issue that causes a time-wasting tangent.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
One thing I wanted to add was - the 'story' of any persons life is dependent on biographers creating it.
Someone has to actually collect it all up together. Go talk to original people. Then you write a book and wikipedia will happily take it. They might not be happy to quote your great auntie Margaret who said there was a bastard son, but until some biographer writes that into a book nobody thinks it's real.
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.
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.
Wrong school? Our local schools (Silicon Valley, CA) encourage kids to use Wikipedia. Your school may just be a little behind the times.
The discussion now has moved to NLP models. GPT-3 models at this point can generate extremely high quality answers to complex questions. Is there still a point in asking a student to write a few paragraph on the definition and effect of acid rain if you can get that from OpenAI within seconds?
The point isn't to have the kid write the essay about acid rain. The point is to teach the kid about acid rain and have them demonstrate an understanding of it. If the kid just turns in an AI-written essay that they may not have even read, they have learned nothing.
Smart teachers, be glad that they're still around. It is not the fact that "anyone can edit Wikipedia" which is the problem - as noted elsewhere vandalism is usually quickly dealt with - but more that in many subject areas "only certain edits are allowed to stand". Any topic which is even slightly politically contentious is soon taken over by a bunch of self-proclaimed keepers of The Truth™ who make sure that only their narrative is allowed to be followed. Given this phenomenon those parts of Wikipedia have more in common with political propaganda than encyclopedic articles.
Even just using the references is fraught with error since those references are often just as biased as the articles in which they are referred. The only parts of Wikipedia which can still give some semblance of what is really going on are the edit history and talk pages, the latter in combination with its own edit history. It is there you can see how the narrative is being controlled, especially on the edit history pages.
A teacher who calls wikipedia a bad source is usually a bad teacher. They think their job is to weed out the bad students from the good, and they hate how wikipedia makes this job harder for them, so they forbid the use of wikipedia. Only a bad and lazy teacher would do something like that.
To me this misses what age group of kids are we talking about.
If you're 12 and writing an essay on something as an exercise, go use Wikipedia. You will likely not be able to understand the primary sources, and secondary sources might be mixed bag.
If you're in college, that's a different story. You should prefer primary sources, but Wikipedia is still a great starting point.
I would say the primary problem is that libraries as a public good suck nowadays, but that is caused by copyright, a neoliberal version of enclosures.
If you really have to tell kids not to use Wikipedia, point them to a real alternative - SciHub and LibGen. ;-P
What do you mean by full text search over their contents? I just found a full published article? Do you mean that there's a competing article on libgen? If so, that's fairly normal with science, it changes year to year or month to month, those articles can both be valid in some sense because they are time dependent.
When you find an interesting article, both these tools will allow you to both seach backwards for articles that it cites, and search forwards for articles that cite it in turn. Repeated application can quickly help you expand the pool of potentially relevant articles (especially once you surface review articles in the citation chain, which can help tie things together and/or let you jump across to associated topics) .
Finally, both of these tools yield you a DOI which you can plug into scihub. You can also install the extension "Sci-Hub X Now!" to do this last bit for you. ( https://github.com/gchenfc/sci-hub-now )
Thanks for elaborating in case others don't know... but yes, I know of those :) I'm talking about a seamless tool that connects with SciHub and/or LibGen and provides full text search and so on.
Start with https://scholar.google.com or similar citation indices. When the full paper is not freely available, you can often paste a DOI into sci-hub.
Wikipedia's editorial policies result in the amplification and ossification of (political, academic, medical, etc.) establishment narratives and standards, which are often corrupt for a wide variety of reasons.
I'm not suggesting I have a silver bullet solution to this problem, but as a result I tend to disagree that Wikipedia is this holy grail of knowledge. That's only true for uncontroversial topics. For everything else, you have to find all the silenced users on the talk pages to learn about the real scope of a topic.
Some teachers like to play god in the classroom. Source: I'm a teacher. I try not to play god and impose non-sensical rules, but I could if I wanted to and nobody could do anything about it. Parents could complain, my department head could try to talk sense into me, but if I impose a rule saying that citations must be written in Comic Sans size 11 font with every third word italicized, then I'm within my rights to take points off for deviations from the assignment instructions. Society places a lot of trust in teachers, and there are few checks against bad teachers.
In my locality, the union is the last line of defense for teachers who don’t want to teach creationism, abstinence, and the like. Local politicians are far easier for a vocal minority to bully.
Police and teacher unions are terrible not because they are public servants but because our capitalist system provides them with no way to extract additional value.
Teachers don't have qualified immunity or get the privilege of shooting your dog, making it a pretty poor comparison.
> citations must be written in Comic Sans size 11 font with every third word italicized
TBH, after having to follow MLA style guides and various other citation styles over my career, I feel like this isn't as out there as you intended! I hated having to put together citations because the rules always seemed entirely arbitrary and never seemed to capture what I thought was relevant info.
Chicago is so much more sane than MLA. I don't know why we insist on making high schoolers use MLA. They'll only need to use it if they become academics in some fields and if they've learned any other citation style they can pick up MLA just fine later.
Re>> "if I impose a rule saying that citations must be written in Comic Sans size 11 font with every third word italicized." You would not be "playing God"; that would be the opposite. [Que Church Lady] Satan!
Snark aside, thank you for your contributions. Re >> "there are few checks against bad teachers" -- do you think there should be more checks or do you think well intentioned checks could be weaponized against good teachers?
I played God in the opposite direction. That way you teach the lesson without having to ban Wikipedia. (I should state that the purpose of this particular module is to illustrate the dangers of scientific misinformation. And this is only one of the exercises in that module. But all are illustrative in a way that students in the age of social media can readily relate to.)
1st Exercise serves as an intro to the subject
1 - Find articles on Wikipedia, or information on social media sources, with factually incorrect information in them. Science articles are a good source of these. Molecular weights are wrong. Physics formulas off. That sort of thing.
2 - Assign a short essay on a subject that these wikipedia pages claim to expound on.
3 - Kids will ask if they can use Wikipedia. Tell them yes, but emphasize that you wouldn't advise it as a person should be skeptical of anything they read on the internet. Let them know that lot of the information out there is false.
4 - Vast majority of the kids will ignore your advice and the same incorrect information will make an appearance in each of their essays. Grade them normally. So most will earn D or F.
5 - Since everyone did so poorly, agree to drop the D or F grades and just assign another short essay. This one on the use of internet information sources to disseminate misinformation. (In my case, scientific misinformation. But the same exercise works for whatever subject you are teaching.)
Use the entire exercise to inform the discussion of scientific misinformation. (Or, again, misinformation in whatever subject you are teaching.) This discussion is the real launch of the module.
Further exercises in the module go into the dangers of medical misinformation. Importance of factual information in decision making. etc etc. It's the most fun module because by the end, the students don't trust me. (In fact, they trust no one.) It has become a game, and they're all listening extremely carefully to every word I say expecting another gotcha. In a very real way, they've learned to be skeptical even of teachers. They've begun to trust only what they can verify. And you realize your work is done.
Having bad teachers (or dealing with bad/pointless systems generally) can also be instructive. Esp. prior to high school, if I had any control, I'm not sure I'd choose for my kids to not have any bad teachers.
So a wrapper with a random legitimate-lloking URL, a custom CSS styling which would serve wikipedia content with some random wacky headers and footers would do as a source in your kid's school?
I was in primary school before the web, and we were either discouraged or forbidden from citing encyclopedias. Tertiary sources, in general, have been discouraged for papers for a long time.
School rarely helps with learning and almost always harms learning. If you're still sending your kids to school, be mindful that you're doing that for reasons other than to help them learn.
That is a bold claim. In my experience school gave me exposure to subjects I would not have thought or been interested to explore on my own, and put structure around dedicated learning time.
I have kids. I send them to school. They are learning!
You might have a leg to stand on if your argument weren't so incredibly absolutist. I could certainly concede that American schools may be a less than optimal way to learn with some outmoded practices. There are certainly variances in educational quality.
But school rarely helps with learning? School almost always harms learning? I reject those claims as false on their face.
It rarely helps with learning vs. natural counterfactuals. It harms by socializing kids to not believe that their own curiosity is hopeworthy.
See John Taylor Gatto's work.
Instead of inefficient spending for large, programmed classes, you should have daycare/day supervision with lots of resources (books, internet, age-appropriate tinker equipment like electronics and tools and so on, microscopes, telescopes, a few adults on hand who are experts in whatever topic to help kids get traction / navigate), more free-rangness, less authoritarianness, more mastery learning, more apprenticeship.
The flaw in the policy isn't don't use Wikipedia. It's don't use Wikipedia but then do use Google and trust whatever comes up as top search result. That's bad policy.
Policy when I was in high school was don't quote Wikipedia, but feel free to chase sources cited by it, read those, and analyze and quote those. This still has the potential for bias, of course (the editors on Wikipedia will have pruned the set of sources cited by the article), but the meta-goal was to teach students how to search primary sources (read: "Actually get up and go to a library and open a book,") so it achieved that goal even if the books were biased.
500 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 320 ms ] threadThey 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wikipedia is a moving target, so it could be a terrible source on a topic for the hour you're looking at it, and much better at other times. Trouble is, those other times don't do you any good. That inconsistency means it can't ever really be an "excellent" source.
It's stupid to ban students from using Wikipedia- sure, Wikipedia isn't of uniformly high quality, but it can be a pretty good encyclopedia. It's just not something you're allowed to cite.
If a school doesn't want students to read Wikipedia at all they really should provide an alternative encyclopedia that the school thinks is high enough quality for students to use (but still not cite), I think you can get subscriptions to Encyclopedia Brittanica now? But that costs actual money.
Actually, it's probably pretty smart for schools to "ban" students from using Wikipedia, in order to encourage them to develop habits to use better things. If you let them use Wikipedia for their research, you're putting them in a situation to slouch into using it for most of their research (except for some source laundering at the end).
The thrust of the link here is that they aren't giving them alternatives, and just telling students to throw themselves into Google and hope they find something. Which, yes, isn't a bad skill to learn either- there's stuff to find out there- but it's setting them up for failure.
There are hundreds of unpaid volunteers at all times prowling for and reverting vandalism. The most popular articles are next to impossible to change. And to top it all off, if a large amount of vandalism happens on one article, it just gets reverted and locked for a while so no changes can happen, period.
Then anyone following can see what you saw.
Circular references aren't only a problem when it involves Wikipedia. You shouldn't ever be citing sources who only claim to be communicating the work of others, outside of being an antiquities scholar when the original works have been lost.
With the exception of secondary research, like systematic reviews. Conclusions are good to have.
First-hand direct presence isn't even a valid source for Wikipedia. Part of my account of the founding of amazon.com was removed because it wasn't "backed up by published citable sources". I pointed out that I would be the primary source cited by any such source, and was told that wasn't good enough: the contents had to be published somewhere else and then cited on Wikipedia.
[ EDIT: BTW, the page on the history of Amazon still has some bullshit in the early section (maybe others too, I wouldn't know), mostly because a journalist or book author misunderstood something, and now it's enshrined as the wikipedia version of the truth. The citation requirements are a good idea, but they don't protect against the nature of humanity ]
Now you need to get cited by someone else before wikipedia will accept it. (and preferably someone else needs to be cited too of course)
Anything you write in a Wikipedia article is written in "anonymous worker bee" mode. It doesn't count as written by you, even if you wrote it. Any editor could change what you wrote. This defeats the whole point of first-person testimony, where who said it matters.
If you want to tell the story of something that happened at Amazon, you should write an article on your own website and publish it under your own name. Then anyone can cite it (including Wikipedia) as written by you, and it can't be changed or removed without your consent.
(Some might not think a personal blog is a good enough citation, but that's their problem.)
PaulDavisThe1st: you should definitely publish your anecdote(s) and corrections somewhere, and not just for Wikipedia’s benefit.
Using Wikipedia and citing Wikipedia is perhaps ill advised.
Using Wikipedia and not citing Wikipedia is a real problem and how you create the circle of falsehoods.
This idea of not using Wikipedia introduces students to the academic dishonesty game. Priority one in writing a research paper is that it be a truthful reflection of your research, including limitations, accidents, mistakes, failures, etc, etc.
It's clear to me now that there is a divide between people who used physical encyclopedias (And thus know what an encyclopedia is for) and those who have only used Wikipedia. They don't understand that an encyclopedia is a place to get a quick overview of a subject, but then use the actual sources of the information to write their papers.
A lot of high-profile factoids are like this. The claim that 95% of diets fail, for example, is a specious one that developed after a citation chain like this. The original analysis said that 95% of the sample finished the study above the lowest weight they reached. Through motivated rephrasing and citation laundering, this became 95% of diets fail, often paired with the suggestion that dieters always return to a weight higher than where they started.
Yet, you can find this claim being re-issued again and again in the introductions to papers about all sorts of topics related to dieting.
Another thing I have seen is where the source of the claim gets lost. It starts out as something like "Grainger 2003" and then eventually turns into "Grander 2013", a nonexistent paper with a ton of citations.
So, if you read an article and don't read the cited article, please reference only the article you read.
Minute for minute, research time is better spent on a real resource than it is spent trying to sift something useful from the trillion page shit-vault that is Wikipedia.
Newspapers and textbooks aren't serious sources either, which is why academic research manuals usually forbid their usage except in some specific circumstances (such as using them as primary sources, for illustrative purposes, as evidence of what media reported at the time, etc.).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_Wikipedia
What do you consider a “static resource”?
What about journal papers and monographs published by academic publishing houses? I read academic works on a daily basis, and they are chock full of nonsense, even from high-impact journals. Sometimes just sloppy scholarship uncritically repeating dubious claims (sometimes even found on Wikipedia then not credited!), but other times intentional fabrications. In the academic literature you can find misattributions of discoveries, serious calculation errors, sources that say the opposite of what they are cited to say, claims from notorious fabulists and mentally ill people credulously repeated, false history, faked study data, nonsensical mathematical models extrapolating trivial numbers of data points far outside their original range, invented interviews, legends presented as factual, speculation presented as factual, promotion of snake oil, amateur psychiatric diagnoses based on fragmentary evidence, apologies for genocide, and whatever other bad thing you might imagine.
Students should be taught to critically examine these sources and look for biases, mistakes, and incongruities.
Regardless of the merits of citing Wikipedia, if you do want to cite it you can reference a specific revision. Or include the date and time you accessed it, from which anyone else can determine the revision. This puts Wikipedia in a much better position than citing URLs in general, which are mostly not version-controlled.
When people say not to cite wikipedia, they're telling you to not do this. They're not asking you to plagiarize wikipedia.
Teachers telling students they can’t under any circumstances cite Wikipedia trains this behavior.
Why not? Don't you Google answers to questions? It's what they will be doing most of their life.
Can you give an example of something you've been searching for?
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.
It worked for most of us, but politics is creeping into everything and budgets are getting cut all over the place.
Learning isn't just about solving problems it's about understanding concepts. Teaching concepts is fundamental to understanding methods. Googling is a method to solving a problem. You're suggesting teaching methods in a discussion about corrupting conceptual instruction; which is the exact thing the school is doing.
No. I don't use it at all.
> It's what they will be doing most of their life.
Everyday I hate this website and the people on it more.
> Everyday I hate this website and the people on it more.
Why?
In a world, there children can't avoid knifes, children should be thought how to use them safely.
Google returning nonsense results can be exploited as a teachable moment. That is why non-practical questions such as the one about gravity and atmosphere are useful, they encourage developing more widely applicable skills (healthy skepticism) while stakes are low.
Seems like >$235MM in net assets excluding the $100MM in the Wikimedia endowment and growing at a healthy rate YoY.
Start donating to Wikipedia again when they are honest about their financial situation.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
And on the Wikimedia Endowment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/e/e4/Wikim...
Latest financial report: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikim...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
This is in addition to something like $280 million held by the Wikimedia Foundation as of end of March 2022 (the most recent data available).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
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).
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.
What I find obnoxious is that these are the same schools that will hand the kids a ChromeBook without being critical of Google incentive.
Media moves too quickly for most people to understand it. By the time you understand it, it changes again. That was true for newspapers, radio, television, digital media, and now ubiquitous computing.
As people who build these media platforms (hackers) we need to do a better job designing the technology for humans and educating people to approach it with a more sophisticated mindset.
Ex; social media has been a disaster.
Remember, it was not that long ago that everyone got their information from the same places. This is going to be a long road.
At worst, wikipedia is a tertiary source. I'm surprised I had to deal with this in college, but the teacher in one of my classes, after we submitted our first papers, felt the need to break this down and explain how to use wikipedia and properly cite sources in this context. I'm sure some kids turned off their ears after the beginning of that lecture...
At each stage the why gets shaved off and then people come up with their own reverse-engineered explanations ("Don't use Wikipedia because it's edited all the time by randos, so it's less reliable than the other stuff you'll find online").
You can see this with, eg, p-values- people learn the rule "A p-value measures the probability of obtaining the observed results, assuming that the null hypothesis is true." which becomes "a low p-value means we should reject the null hypothesis" becomes "a p-value is the probability the null hypothesis is true" (the inverse).
Do schools still have subscriptions to things like LexisNexis? I feel like it would be eye opening to many students to see just how different an academic search engine is compared to public search engines.
https://wikipediocracy.com/2022/08/11/wikipedias-credibility...
Example from the BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/1D0xzxYf9ykH9gcYp9...
Several books have the false info too. Wikipedia is useful, but it is never a good idea to rely on Wikipedia blindly.
Sounds like we shouldn't trust books blindly, either.
Is there a source we can trust blindly?
- What often happens when a person is surprised to learn something: they assume most other people don't know it and become eager to repeat it without further nuance or investigation. Like moon landing conspiracy theorists who learn that there are no stars in the photos.
- The hazing, elitist attitude surrounding knowledge. I suffered, therefore you should suffer. From this perspective, it doesn't make sense for there to be a gargantuan, selfless compilation of knowledge more accessible than any library in history. It must be wrong.
- People are lazy and will paraphrase the Wiki page that appears at the top of a web search for the topic.
It's much easier to say Wikipedia can't be trusted than to instil upon pupils an understanding of epistemology, a distrust of what authority figures tell them, an appreciation of academic honesty, and the knowledge of how to construct a good bibliography.
But I've even seen University Press books get tripped up by Wikipedia. See the "Coati" example on this page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenesis_...
The thing is, this would have been avoidable. If Wikipedia tells you someone called J. Bloggs invented some kind of gadget 100 years ago, you can do a Google Books search to see if there are any 20th-century sources saying so.
If there aren't, then Wikipedia is having you on. Alan MacMasters is not the only example: exactly the same thing happened with the inventor of the hair-straightener. See Example 16 here:
https://www.theregister.com/2017/01/16/wikipedia_16_birthday...
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.
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.
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?
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/
Another source: https://www.nature.com/articles/438900a
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.
Google certainly can help solve problems.
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.
Where it might fail is - like a calculator (and obviously Google) - make research too easy; I can see that being an argument to at least change the focus of study methods in some cases.
Another way it might fail as a resource is where the "expertise" of the editors contributing is biased (and therefore so is the content) towards the demographics of Wikipedia editors, eg leftist/white/male/middle class, which carries it's own significant risks of misinformation in some areas of knowledge where those biases are potentially harmful.
Complacency towards this last point, which is breezily dismissed by the author with
"No agenda (or damn near no agenda, I mean, come on - show me a more neutral source for this information)"
severely undermines his argument.
I think we all assumed the situation had evolved.
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?
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.
It's available at 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.
Same with the census detail pages you find everywhere; they're probably accurate for that point in time, because nobody really cares.
I doubt anyone is fetching and fact checking 2000 links a semester.
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
the entire "references" section back then was one link
That's the correct number for the molar mass of carbon, as far as I know, it doesn't look off by 3x!
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 is a good reference, it's used pretty regularly.
Normally people provide relevant links. Even if this is showing bad sourcing, it still sources the important numbers. "External links" is helping with that too.
And this 2003 vs. 2004 distinction is a waste of time when wikipedia has a perfectly good history feature.
If I ask pretty please will you name the element?
> Normally people provide relevant links
It is relevant. It's pointing out that lots of articles back then were not well referenced. It doesn't have to be his article. I know this quite well as I added a lot of stuff to Wikipedia in those days, and never provided a reference. No one challenged me.
Likely the page he got his information from didn't provide any reference for that number.
The lines are not individually cited but that's a stylistic thing, not a failure to have references. I'm sure there's several lines without backing but overall this has reasonable links and I don't think it supports the narrative about having "one" reference and getting a "fundamental digital fact" wrong like that.
So I would like to see the real example. Or one that is equivalently bad. And linking it would be in the best interests of a fruitful discussion; it's not like a particular element is going to be a controversial issue that causes a time-wasting tangent.
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.
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.
Someone has to actually collect it all up together. Go talk to original people. Then you write a book and wikipedia will happily take it. They might not be happy to quote your great auntie Margaret who said there was a bastard son, but until some biographer writes that into a book nobody thinks it's real.
I think this is the first sentence I've read about an internet encyclopedia that started with "Back in my day..."
* 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.
The discussion now has moved to NLP models. GPT-3 models at this point can generate extremely high quality answers to complex questions. Is there still a point in asking a student to write a few paragraph on the definition and effect of acid rain if you can get that from OpenAI within seconds?
It’s more than fine for elementary school, not fine for university… and there is spectrum in between.
(Most of what you read on the internet is written by insane people) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32897812
If you're 12 and writing an essay on something as an exercise, go use Wikipedia. You will likely not be able to understand the primary sources, and secondary sources might be mixed bag.
If you're in college, that's a different story. You should prefer primary sources, but Wikipedia is still a great starting point.
I would say the primary problem is that libraries as a public good suck nowadays, but that is caused by copyright, a neoliberal version of enclosures.
If you really have to tell kids not to use Wikipedia, point them to a real alternative - SciHub and LibGen. ;-P
As a very basic bar to strive for, I don't think either offer full text search over their contents.
Any recommendedation for third party tools that might help?
In biology and medicine, pubmed is the most common ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ ) .
For general purpose you can use google scholar ( https://scholar.google.com/ ).
When you find an interesting article, both these tools will allow you to both seach backwards for articles that it cites, and search forwards for articles that cite it in turn. Repeated application can quickly help you expand the pool of potentially relevant articles (especially once you surface review articles in the citation chain, which can help tie things together and/or let you jump across to associated topics) .
Finally, both of these tools yield you a DOI which you can plug into scihub. You can also install the extension "Sci-Hub X Now!" to do this last bit for you. ( https://github.com/gchenfc/sci-hub-now )
I'm not suggesting I have a silver bullet solution to this problem, but as a result I tend to disagree that Wikipedia is this holy grail of knowledge. That's only true for uncontroversial topics. For everything else, you have to find all the silenced users on the talk pages to learn about the real scope of a topic.
You definitely need to read the talk page.
> citations must be written in Comic Sans size 11 font with every third word italicized
you would become a legend if you did this :-D
Teachers don't have qualified immunity or get the privilege of shooting your dog, making it a pretty poor comparison.
TBH, after having to follow MLA style guides and various other citation styles over my career, I feel like this isn't as out there as you intended! I hated having to put together citations because the rules always seemed entirely arbitrary and never seemed to capture what I thought was relevant info.
Snark aside, thank you for your contributions. Re >> "there are few checks against bad teachers" -- do you think there should be more checks or do you think well intentioned checks could be weaponized against good teachers?
1st Exercise serves as an intro to the subject
1 - Find articles on Wikipedia, or information on social media sources, with factually incorrect information in them. Science articles are a good source of these. Molecular weights are wrong. Physics formulas off. That sort of thing.
2 - Assign a short essay on a subject that these wikipedia pages claim to expound on.
3 - Kids will ask if they can use Wikipedia. Tell them yes, but emphasize that you wouldn't advise it as a person should be skeptical of anything they read on the internet. Let them know that lot of the information out there is false.
4 - Vast majority of the kids will ignore your advice and the same incorrect information will make an appearance in each of their essays. Grade them normally. So most will earn D or F.
5 - Since everyone did so poorly, agree to drop the D or F grades and just assign another short essay. This one on the use of internet information sources to disseminate misinformation. (In my case, scientific misinformation. But the same exercise works for whatever subject you are teaching.)
Use the entire exercise to inform the discussion of scientific misinformation. (Or, again, misinformation in whatever subject you are teaching.) This discussion is the real launch of the module.
Further exercises in the module go into the dangers of medical misinformation. Importance of factual information in decision making. etc etc. It's the most fun module because by the end, the students don't trust me. (In fact, they trust no one.) It has become a game, and they're all listening extremely carefully to every word I say expecting another gotcha. In a very real way, they've learned to be skeptical even of teachers. They've begun to trust only what they can verify. And you realize your work is done.
If people are against Google books, then the governments should scan and share all of human knowledge.
I have kids. I send them to school. They are learning!
You might have a leg to stand on if your argument weren't so incredibly absolutist. I could certainly concede that American schools may be a less than optimal way to learn with some outmoded practices. There are certainly variances in educational quality.
But school rarely helps with learning? School almost always harms learning? I reject those claims as false on their face.
See John Taylor Gatto's work.
Instead of inefficient spending for large, programmed classes, you should have daycare/day supervision with lots of resources (books, internet, age-appropriate tinker equipment like electronics and tools and so on, microscopes, telescopes, a few adults on hand who are experts in whatever topic to help kids get traction / navigate), more free-rangness, less authoritarianness, more mastery learning, more apprenticeship.
Policy when I was in high school was don't quote Wikipedia, but feel free to chase sources cited by it, read those, and analyze and quote those. This still has the potential for bias, of course (the editors on Wikipedia will have pruned the set of sources cited by the article), but the meta-goal was to teach students how to search primary sources (read: "Actually get up and go to a library and open a book,") so it achieved that goal even if the books were biased.