School vs. Wikipedia | Hacker News Reader

School vs. Wikipedia

ratfactor.com

444 pointsingve479 comments

Every now and then I like to read through Wikipedia pages for things I know more than the average person on. It keeps me skeptical of the things I read on there. For people unfamiliar with a subject (students) I think Wikipedia pages are misleading, poorly organized, and sometimes wrong. That doesn't make Wikipedia useless, but the author's best advice is to use Wikipedia as a map to other sources of information.

I don't think Wikipedia has a path forwards for fixing the quality of its articles. In my opinion it requires every page being rewritten by an expert with a single voice, as a traditional encyclopedia would have, which is the exact opposite of Wikipedia's core. Though I did check, and they have more than enough cash to write a traditional encyclopedia.

The biggest problem is students don't care. It's why encyclopedias had to be "banned" from reports when I was a student; the teacher wanted us to actually do some modicum of research beyond rewriting an encyclopedia article.

Both were still a decent place to start, but they're both often only "right" from a certain point of view.

I agree about pages being poorly organized. It's what happens when dozens if not hundreds of people edit a page. Some pages probably have orders of magnitude more edits/editors making changes. It destroys the flow between sentences when people fixate on small edits. That's generally not the case though, I have seen many high quality pages which tend to have a few, knowledgeable editors who watch it.

I stopped using Wikipedia a while ago.

Its math and science content is too nonsensical to be useful.

I occasionally read a history article, maybe once every 6 months. But history from things happening hundreds to thousands of years ago, predating modern media... sorry historians, it might as well be fiction.

I'm sure someone has thought long and hard about why the content is losing quality.

"Its math and science content is too nonsensical to be useful."

Can you name a example?

I found them to be generally of higher quality than controversial topics. So maybe not always with the best didactic approach, but usually a good start. And then I follow the links, if I want to dive in deep.

Wikipedia is useful for me, for quickly checking something. Not scientifically dive into a deep topic.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_differential_equatio...

Repetitive content, written at several levels simultaneously, weird fixations on tangential topics.

>written at several levels simultaneously,

I don't understand why this bothers people. If something on Wikipedia is above or below my level, I just skip it. It takes all of three seconds to recognize. I've consistently found it to be a great starting point for self-study in all sorts of math.

A novice isn’t always going to know the difference between something they could understand with effort and something they don’t have the context to understand.

It’s an incredibly common cause of anxiety in math education, and even if you’re not personally affected by it others may be.

For sure, but Wikipedia aims to be a Encyclopedia and not a math course.

Now it surely would be nice, if it could work more like it.

That wikipedia knows my skill set and automatically hides or show additional paragraphs in certain topics etc. or even the paragraph in a simpler language etc.

But this a bit more ambitious - and not really achievable with the current approach. So if I want a math course, I search for a math course.

>It’s an incredibly common cause of anxiety in math education

I question whether this can be a root cause of anxiety. Simply not understanding stuff does not normally cause anxiety. Most people don't get anxious looking at, for example, Chinese characters.

On the other hand, imputing that something should be frightening can actually cause a fear response:

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1993-20380-001

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030105110...

https://www.nature.com/articles/nn1968

Teaching students that incomprehensible math should frighten them doesn't seem like a good approach. There are no grades or critical teachers when you're passively reading a Wikipedia article.

Not only that, 4 paragraphs until the first citation, 16 paragraphs until the next one. All that information might be correct, but there's no easy way to confirm it.

PDEs are a significant enough thing that the article is probably correct. But once you get into more niche math articles, a lot of the writing is incorrect.

Once again, any articles with incorrect content that you can cite?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-integer_base_of_numerati...

I know enough to know the examples for Base sqrt(2) are not correct, but I don't know enough to write a proper example.

For example if this is true "Base √2 behaves in a very similar way to base 2 as all one has to do to convert a number from binary into base √2 is put a zero digit in between every binary digit"

Then Base(10) 3 aka Base(2) 11 converted to Base(sqrt2) would be 101. But it is actually 1000.000001

As RDBury on the Talk page mentions, "bases that are not Pisot–Vijayaraghavan numbers are not guaranteed to terminate or even be periodic". Whomever wrote that example just happened to pick an integer where the Base(sqrt2) version terminates and has such a pattern, and treated it as if it applies to all integers.

> Once again,

This is your first comment to me

> Then Base(10) 3 aka Base(2) 11 converted to Base(sqrt2) would be 101. But it is actually 1000.000001

I don't see how. As per the expansion definition in the article 101 = 2+0+1 = 3

1000.000001 = sqrt(8) + epsilon.

Would you be so kind as to mention the issues in the talk page of said article?

Nope. Been burned by Wikipedia editors being territorial and deletionist way too many times.

A problem in mathematics is that mathematicians do not always agree on the definitions of things -- even very fundamental concepts [1] [2] -- and so Wikipedia in the interest of neutrality presents all definitions in use. In a given textbook, an author will choose one set of definitions and stick with them, which makes things manageable for the reader. In Wikipedia, the number of alternative interpretations of a sentence grows geometrically with the number of ambiguous terms.

[1] What is a "natural number" (do they start at 0 or 1?)

[2] What is a "function"? Does it carry along a "co-domain"?

My personal annoyance with Wikipedia articles on advanced math is that often it's "monoid in the category of endofunctors" on steroids.

A lot of those articles seem to follow a pattern of: "An A is a B that also does C".

If you click on the link to understand what a B is, you get "B is a D in the space of Es with properties F and G".

and so on...

I can understand that this appears logically consistent and very satisfying for people who have already understood the concepts, but it doesn't help at all if you're trying to gain an understanding.

A good textbook has a sense of order in which dependent concepts are introduced. With Wikipedia, the task of discovering that order is outsourced to the reader. Maybe you could develop some kind of path finding algorithm to figure out the optimal reading order for understanding a given concept, but to my knowledge, that doesn't exist yet.

The other problem is that no shortcuts are offered. Even if you figure out the order yourself, Wikipedia gives you no hints how much of B, C, D, E and F you have to understand to get the idea of A. The expectation seems to be to read the entire articles on the dependent concepts, which can be long, rambling and full of obscure special cases.

Wikipedia is by definition a reference. If you want to learn something use different material. Trying to make wikipedia articles tutorials is out of scope (not that it isn't nice to get practical examples for concepts, which ime there often are!)

But I think that this is a core difference between an encyclopaedia and a textbook. If you need the topics presented in an order that takes you from a certain level of understanding to the next, you need a textbook.

Well that's the problem. An encyclopedia should neither provide nor need such an ordering. But Wikipedia often does need it, while also not providing it, the worst of both worlds.

Wikipedia math has competition and they are generally much harsher than Wikipedia, which indicates the direction which communities of volunteers wish to go when they disagree with Wikipedia's execution.

https://ncatlab.org/

https://kerodon.net/

https://stacks.math.columbia.edu/

The people who are looking up references to advanced math concepts are likely students who are already on a mainstream pedagogical pathway and are looking to fill in holes to a concept map they're already building.

The use case of someone who (1) does not wish to consult the vast and well-discussed pedagogy of math and (2) is not an advanced math student and thus wishes to have stand-alone math definitions is a Very special case.

> Wikipedia math has competition and they are generally much harsher than Wikipedia, which indicates the direction which communities of volunteers wish to go when they disagree with Wikipedia's execution.

Okay, but I don't think those communities are relevant to this conversation.

> The use case of someone who (1) does not wish to consult the vast and well-discussed pedagogy of math and (2) is not an advanced math student and thus wishes to have stand-alone math definitions is a Very special case.

Number 1 is a weird assumption! Unless by "consult" you mean spend weeks studying a textbook, the problem is that consulting is too difficult! And if I understand "harsher" correctly you just said the other sites are harder to use, didn't you?

So then it's just "not an advanced math student", which may or may not be a majority of people on these pages but it's a very significant amount and it's the more important target for a general encyclopedia.

There are alternative wikis for math and they’re way harsher.¹² Wikipedia is the middle ground between math wikis written by current students and professionals vs pedagogues.³ But I’d argue that if you want pedagogy or step by step proofs, then why not simply buy a well vetted textbook, of which math has many?

Also, Wikipedia tried a wiki textbook project and no doubt people were very unsatisfied because they couldn’t compete with textbooks, which often have a singular pedagogical vision behind it. It’s hard to compete with famous well discussed texts.

I’m happy with Wikipedia as a reference which supplements those students who are already studying the material; in other words, those students looking up topics in Linear Algebra are taking or have taken the course already.

[1]: https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/linear+algebra

[2]: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/algebra/#Lin

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_algebra

That's certainly true, buy I think it also makes it quite unsuited as a reference (except for people who are already familiar with the concepts and just need a quick reminder).

Wikipedia math articles are not useful to get a shallow understanding of a topic. On the contrary, it pulls you into a rabbit hole of dependent concepts just for you just to be able to understand the words in the article's summary.

From an actual reference, I'd expect that it gives a brief, self-contained description of the basic idea of a concept, without going too deep into specifics, possibly with a "see also". That's not what Wikipedia does.

Have you tried Simple wikipedia? Also, wikipedia is a reference, not a textbook.

The problem with math and science content is that there are many possible audiences with many possible backgrounds, and such content tends to require substantial prerequisite knowledge. So when you have a source edited by anyone, you end up with a hodgepodge of different material aimed at different audiences with different expectations of background. It takes a lot of effort and expertise to rewrite this mishmash into a clear and coherent narrative.

This is a much harder problem for an encyclopedia than for a textbook chapter or a journal paper, because each article is supposed to (somewhat) stand alone and be both broadly accessible and somewhat comprehensive. For a textbook chapter you can systematically build up prerequisite knowledge from earlier chapters and you can assume that students will spend significant time and effort working problems and will have some expert guidance and support if they get stuck. For a journal article you can assume readers have deep subject-matter expertise, e.g. have a PhD in the field. In both of those cases you can leave out most information about the topic as clearly out of scope.

Traditional encyclopedias typically punt by just not including much technical detail at all. (Some Wikipedia articles also do this.)

* * *

As a basic example, let’s think about what might be included in an article about “circle”. You can look at this from a kindergartener’s point of view, or a high school geometry student’s, or an ancient astronomer’s, or a physicist’s, or a signal processing engineer’s, or a 19th century projective geometer’s, or a complex analyst’s, or a group theorist’s, or an algebraic geometer’s, or a topologist’s, or a number theorist’s, or an ergodic theorist’s, etc. Some of these audiences are easy enough to satisfy, but to provide deep comprehensive coverage of the way a fundamental concept like the circle is related to every mathematical field is going to take careers worth of background. Which parts to attempt, which parts to skip, and how to organize them is a very challenging set of editorial choices.

"But history from things happening hundreds to thousands of years ago, predating modern media... sorry historians, it might as well be fiction."

What? I'm confused on what you're saying here. Are you stating there are no primary sources on history from more than a few hundred years ago? All history is made up? I'm sure there are poor quality historical articles, but I wouldn't go so far to call all history "fiction".

Some people actually think this way.

I once worked with someone in an important position in a major media organization who believed nothing was recorded before the printing press, and was quite vocal about it. He quite strongly believed that everything else was made up.

I always wanted to ask him what he thought about Egyptian hieroglyphs, but he was too far above my pay grade to approach or challenge.

History is very much an interpretive science. You can infer a lot of things from a site that predates written history. One of the salient examples were some severely deformed bodies found ritually positioned with assumed valuables. And that's all the context you get, and now you have to frame it with anthropologically modern references polluted with ideologies like Hobbes/Rousseau while conjointly projecting Holmberg's mistake into the past when the concept of "marginal" people didn't exist. There's a lot of errors that can arise and a lot of features that can metamorphose into only a distant conception of what once was.

And even then, records are questioned. Sometimes period historians really had to stick their necks out to speak the truth (and in the most literal sense) so direct impressions we have of certain elements of history may be reasonably called into question. And there are numerous historians that are known to have fabricated elements.

As someone who reads a lot of history, please head over to r/AskHistorians

It has very strong moderation, and low quality answers are deleted. Their papers cite methods and hypothesis which removes a lot of "fiction" from the equation.

Also, they get quoted in mainstream media too. The content quality is out of this world.

Ignoring the very controversial topics, like Israel and Palestine or the current war in Ukraine, Wikipedia can be a very good starting point when it comes to history.

The entries are not exhaustive nor are all of them very scientific-sounding, but at least the basic facts which we sort of know of are there.

Books are still where the good stuff's at. Even some periodicals.

Not sure what went wrong with the Internet but it's not living up to the early hype, and doesn't really even seem to be heading the right direction.

I'm confused by what you think the internet is, and this hype you feel it's failing?

Are you not familiar with the hype that it'd become the end-all-be-all repository of human knowledge? It's been talked about that way since at least the 90s. It's not uncommon to see people on this site post sentiments that it has achieved that—in some fields, kinda, in many others you can barely scratch the surface before you have to hit a library (probably a university library, and you may need ILL) to keep going, or if you're very lucky the book you need exists in digital form and you can buy or pirate a copy, but the "open Web" simply does not have the info you want, and even if it does have it, it's a crap-shoot whether it's presented and organized at least as well as some print version you could get instead.

at least most of new research article is online, although we still have problems with publish company, but everything is towards to better way. e.g., Germany government and now maybe White House are standing at side support open every article.

But real books on real topics have been getting purged from libraries (especially school libraries) for well over a decade now. In many school districts, older books containing actual truths, are destroyed rather than marked as removed from circulation and re-sold. Some libraries I know of locally purged almost all of their books on "old, white" history, and replaced them with "more modern" bullshit works by "CRT" writers.

To the point of this article, much of this is driven by the teachers, who say they will not accept sources that might have "social biases" (as if it were possible for any book to not have those!) The library then purges those books because "no one has checked them out in a couple of years".

The sad thing is that almost 100% of books being added to the libraries fall into just a few categories: Books promoting or "celebrating" perverted sex of any and all kinds (including pretty much all "youth fiction"), Manga, or "Graphic Novels" (let's face it, some have good artwork, but are really just nicely bound and printed comic books, usually with little to no redeeming educational value.)

Sadly, I don't know a single person under 30 who has a clue how to actually use a library to find real sources - they all just default to Googling. The web is amazing, but what's NOT on it is staggering, and of amazing quality and scholarship (which is itself a lost art...)

More worryingly, I've seen a LOT of valuable content vanish from the search engines, which just shoves that content right down the memory hole, using the same flawed logic as those high school librarians - no one's asked for it recently.

We lose access to and context for valuable information when our search engines (it's all about the money from hits and eyeballs) only keep what is "popular". Alas, we've replaced Carnegie Libraries with Kardashian libraries, to our great loss...

So you stopped using it, but now use it less, and you read history articles that are fiction because they're so old, but the quality had declined recently? Pick a lane.

Also maths and science is "too nonsensical".

I have found the opposite… there is hardly a consistsntly more organized and accurate source that is accessible to the public, but I would be glad to hear what it is if you have one in mind.

Wikipedia is far more trustworthy than local news channels even about recent events, and everything is sources (casualty count: who said it etc.)

I think Wikipedia is a great start to finding content at a general level.

Though, vertical specific niches often have better sources of information. For e.g. Examine.com currently seems better for nutrition and supplement information. Or even an old school reference book like The Art of Computer Programming by Donald Knuth is better for algorithms.

I disagree that the old school books are better. It is like saying MacOS 7 is better than today’s Linux that has many people fixing bugs and expanding its features over the years

> Or even an old school reference book like The Art of Computer Programming by Donald Knuth is better for algorithms.

It is rediculous to compare an encyclopedia like wikipedia to an advanced text like Knuth. They aren't trying to do the same thing.

Wikipedia is how you find a reference like The Art of Computer Programming for a given subject.

> Wikipedia is far more trustworthy than local news channels even about recent events, and everything is sources (casualty count: who said it etc.)

That's more due to the very low quality of news.

What is CONSISTENTLY higher quality that wikipedia?

We are all watching user-generated content destroy the very concept of truth, and Wikipedia is example A1.

There is no solution. Perhaps truth was always an illusion, but the illusion has been destroyed and it is unravelling society.

A consensus of reputation used to govern these things, but now reputation means almost nothing and there are no mechanisms for consensus on the web. Attempts at consensus are all based in censorship and what remains of reputation is a perverted proxy for "ability to get attention".

"Consensus of experts" and "consensus of internet users" can also be two entirely different things.

I don't see any particular reason to think that Wikipedia is worse than what existed prior. What exemplar from, say, 1980, do you think was better in terms of information quality?

I'm thinking back to going in to a library, where a given topic would generally have 0-3 books. Books often put together by a single person, a person often chosen because of personal relationships with a publisher, plus that publisher's intent to turn a profit. Or opening up a daily newspaper, where I might get a few paragraphs on a topic, written by one person and edited by a couple more, all paid for by an ad-supported company run by people who often had local political connections.

There may be no mechanism for consensus on the web, but Wikipedia certainly has one, one that has worked reasonably well for 20 years at this point.

It worked for a time and now it is dying at the hands of bad-faith actors who have worked within their mechanism.

That's an interesting claim. Where's your evidence?

I'll also note you must have missed my question, as I don't think you have answered it.

disclaimer: Yes the grayzone hires RT reporters and has a strongly anti-us take on pretty much everything. Please don't spout "russian propagandist" takes. They've been heard plenty. This is the lack of truth I'm talking about. These are investigative journalists--a dying breed that western propagandists are attempting to make extinct.

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/10/wikipedia-formally-censor...

That's not evidence, that's a series of disconnected vague complaints from a publisher who is salty that they're not considered a reliable source. They complain about conflicts of interest, but I didn't see them even acknowledging their own. I also couldn't find any financial transparency, so it's not clear to me who is funding this or their other writing.

And I'll point out for the last time that you still haven't answered my initial question. If you're just going to keep dodging, I think I'm done here.

I thought the article answered your question pretty well and they clearly state on their about page that they are not backed by any government and rely on donations.

The entire internet points to wikipedia and its consensus mechanism is inherently vulnerable to editors for hire, as clearly demonstrated with scores of links.

So my answer is "pick any publication from 1980 and it is better because its bias can be audited and it is not polluting every search query I make"

They claim they are not backed by any governments, but decline to say who is backing them. Just as an example I came across yesterday, the San Francisco Standard is "not backed by any government and rely on donations", but their funding comes from a billionaire venture capitalist. The same claim could be truthfully made by a site backed by a Russian oligarch just as well. And regardless, there's no evidence.

I agree that Wikipedia's mechanism has its challenges; anybody who knows the site does. But it's vastly better than "any publication from 1980" because every edit is tracked, the citations should be available for all to see, and people can object to and/or edit bad content.

Just as an example of how a book from the olden tymes could go wrong, consider Trump's "The Art of the Deal". It sold more than a million copies, but its ghostwriter took 20 years to admit that it was a lot of horseshit: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-...

Wikipedia is way more auditable than that book or most books from that era. And way more auditable than The Gray Zone that you've chosen to cite.

The former Wikimedia CEO (she left in 2021) is now on the Atlantic Council and currently serves on the US Department of State’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board:

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/expert/katherine-maher/

Then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sent Richard Boly as a representative of the Office of eDiplomacy to the 2012 Wikimania conference. At the time, Boly was "leading an ambitious State Department initiative that uses social media and online platforms to change the way employees communicate and reach outside their boundaries to advance U.S. foreign policy interests" according to the Washington Post:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-politics/federal-fac...

Boly's Wikimania speech is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0NsY48OQdc&t=457s

A few years later, the person put in charge of facilitating the Wikimedia Strategy 2030 process was Hillary Clinton's former Trips Director, Whitney Williams:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/...

The PR company that has looked after Wikimedia for the past decade or so is Minassian Media, run by the chief communications and marketing officer of the Clinton Foundation, who formerly was assistant press secretary and director of television news in the White House for President Bill Clinton:

https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/wikipedias-d...

The Chief Advancement Officer at Wikimedia is the politically very well connected lady here:

https://sfgov.org/civilservice/sites/default/files/Documents...

The current CEO is Maryana Iskander; she has been a speaker at the Clinton Global Initiative and presented her work to Bill Clinton when he visited South Africa:

https://www.itnewsafrica.com/2018/11/harambees-exceeds-youth...

Wikimedia also partners extensively with the Tides Foundation and Tides Advocacy ... So there are very significant political connections in the US.

Since I can't post the Pepe Silva/Red String Guy meme here directly, I'd be much obliged if you'd just imagine it for me. Thanks!

Each of the above is true and verifiable by the links posted.

You can make of it what you will.

Yes and what I make of it in relation to information quality on Wikipedia is the red string meme. Classic conspiracy-theory boogeyman nonsense, all allusion and vaguery.

The Wikimedia Foundation does not edit Wikipedia. So what I said above has got little to do with the information quality on the level of an individual article.

I still find it interesting though that the organisation attracts so many politicos. And as far as the Wikimedia Foundation's Strategy 2030 is concerned, it's absolutely relevant. A lot of people in the volunteer community felt that the result of the strategy discussions was kind of preordained, rather than a reflection of the community's will. ("By 2030, Wikimedia will become the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge, and anyone who shares our vision will be able to join us ..." etc.)

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/...

There is more indirect influence on content by the Wikimedia Foundation nowadays, where they fund community organizers to increase coverage in a particular topic area.

An early example that taught them how not to do this (as well as a clear example of undue donor influence) was the Belfer Center scandal:

https://thewikipedian.net/2014/04/02/bats-in-the-belfer-a-be...

That was a scandal only because the Wikipedia volunteer community paid attention.

https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikipedia-paid-editing-scanda...

A more recent example that seems unobjectionable is this one:

https://diff.wikimedia.org/2022/09/22/join-the-organizer-lab...

> what I said above has got little to do with the information quality

In that case I wish you luck in finding the right place to discuss it.

It was you who introduced the topic of government backing above ... that just triggered my memory. Never mind.

> There is no solution.

How an an explicit web of trust not a solution?

Imagine a system where you can keep a local database of people/sites/pages you know and how much you trust them, selectively expose parts of that database to your immediate friends and/or the web as a whole, and lookup/query the databases exposed by contacts.

"My friend F1 assigns a trust score of 0.9 to website W1, and I assign a trust score of 0.9 to F1, so I trust this site 0.81 and I'm willing to make financial transactions on it without further research (but not give it my SSN)."

"My friend F2 trusts random R1 0.7, who trusts random R2 0.5, who trusts random R3 0.4, who is pushing this new cryptocurrency - maybe I should talk with F2 about R1 and R2 before doing anything with this..."

"My friend F3 distrusts site W2 with a score of -0.7, I'm not going to shop there."

"My friend F4 is a history expert and distrusts this Wikipedia page on history with a score of -0.5, so it's probably not reliable."

What would be wrong with this system?

You're described a system that tells you what your friends think, not a system that necessarily comes to any objective truth. The internet is already full of echo chambers of misplaced trust -- that's much of the problem.

Linking echo chambers to mutually trusted echo chambers isn't going to lead people to objective truth. It's going to introduce flat-earthers to ghost hunters.

You're solving for trust rather than "truth". Of course, there may be no truth, hence GP's:

> > Perhaps truth was always an illusion

But my interpretation of what they meant by "very concept of truth" is something like "consensus reality;" where the vast majority of people trust something is true. A network of trust is fragmented bubbles of distinct truths.

> What would be wrong with this system?

For starters, I don't know that it's a priori better than the current fragmented bubbles of distinct truths we have. Are more fragmented bubbles better? For some populations or people, maybe; for society? It's less clear.

But I think the real thing wrong with web of trust systems is that the value is tied up in network effects and you have to solve for adoption.

---

I say that as someone who generally thinks this is a useful way of approaching the problem of trust. I've brainstormed building this too many times to count. :)

I won't argue the trust system presented here other than to say it sounds exhausting.

I want everyone to get as close a proximity to the truth as is possible and for us as a society to achieve consensus around what are the facts and what should be done about them.

What you describe, at scale, is a social credit system. It does feel like an inevitability and one that will produce unprecedented collateral damage, but may save civilization.

My ability to evaluate people's ability to evaluate people's ability to evaluate people's ability to evaluate article truth is very low.

In other words, a web of trust trying to replace Wikipedia is useless to me after a couple hops, so next to zero material will be covered by it.

Wikipedia is all about the citations. 90% of my Wikipedia edits are either adding citations or [Citation Needed] if I couldn't find a source for an uncited claim.

There are some math and physics articles that can go 10 paragraphs without a single citation. They'd be great blog posts or chapters in a book. But they're poor quality Wikipedia articles.

I've definitely read some Wikipedia pages on niche technical topics in my field that were clearly written by someone with _some_ degree of expertise (maybe a grad student) but with no understanding of the purpose, standards, and style of Wikipedia. The voice is often all over the place.

I've seen this too. Sometimes they seem like they are copied and pasted from whatever the person already happened to be writing when they came across the Wikipedia page.

A large number of my larger edits are fixing up voice / tone to make an article read more like an encyclopedia and less like an excited blog post.

Yeah absolutely. I've seen non-wiki-savvy experts do these kind of edits, get reverted, and stop editing wikipedia forever because the whole experience left a sour taste in their mouth. I recently found the essay below targeted to exactly that audience, it's super useful to helping experts who want to contribute.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Expert_editors

I tried to upload an image that I took (as part of my graduate studies) but was previously published by media outlets and the whole situation really turned me off wikipedia. I think the image is still there though!

What stops me editing more (usually it's a grammatical/formatting error I want to fix, or where I think a link to another page is warranted) is IP blocks. I'm logged in! Why do you care what my IP is! I have a (small) track record but most importantly it's all going against my name and if I'm doing bad things you can just block me!

I understand anon IP blocks, of course. But not logged-in ones. Especially when (afaict) all of Mullvad's (London at least) IPs are blocked.

Why would a math article need citations? A proof is a proof.

Only for experts capable of following the proof. For everyone else, it's a magical formula.

Not to mention, I very very much doubt that those articles prove every property they present (since I've never seen a math text of any kind do that, essentially).

You’ll always need some axioms to build on.

If you allow that, proofs made using proof assistants prove every property they present.

And of course, Principia Mathematica (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principia_Mathematica) is a non-computer example.

Both get tedious fast if you try to understand a proof from the axioms up. That’s why you’ll rarely find a publication starting from almost zero.

Because that's essentially original research. If it's a known proof, it should exist in written form somewhere else, which you can cite. if it's novel, it belongs somewhere other than Wikipedia.

Because wikipedia is not trying to report the capital-T Truth. Its goal is to summarize human knowledge found by others.

You could cite all of the notations that you introduce because that tends to be a mess.

Aside from the fact that proofs are often difficult to verify, one cannot prove what a monoid or a vector space is. They are definitions, and to make sure the ones in the article match what is used in the mathematical community, you need citations.

And yes, sometimes there are conflicts. In France, we have two competing definition of a limit (relating to wether you include the point in its neighbourhood), one being the traditional one, taught in schools, and one being the one that's become the world standard and used from university onwards.

How do you arbiter that on wikipedia without sources ?

I always chuckle when I see some like basic logical steps slapped with "citation needed".

I similarly chuckle in cases where there's a citation covering the whole sentence but someone felt the need to slap a "citation needed" on a specific clause despite that clause being supported in the existing citation.

Wikipedia's math articles are so bad that I can't even follow the ones about things I already know.

Math is one of the main categories--although there are other especially adjacent ones--where I often think that 1.) You either already know this stuff or you're going to emerge no more enlightened and probably click elsewhere after the first few sentences, and 2.) Some people really love to play with their equation editors.

Wikipedia's math articles can be dense and assume you're an expert, but I've never known them to be wrong.

There's other types of bad than wrongness.

Unfortunately I think 10 page expositions/derivations are the highest quality math and physics pages. I think the wikipedia style is fundamentally incompatible with communicating this kind of information unfortunately.

Well said. It's especially frustrating to come across what I'll call "Mudslide Pages" for prominent entities. These consist of a decade or more of minor news items, piled atop one another. No effort to distill key elements of these entities' impact -- let alone the how and why of what they do. It's just endless what and when.

So on top-tier companies, the pages are cluttered with details of brief moves in and out of old headquarters buildings -- plus long-ago product rollouts and cancellations -- plus stock-market zigzags in 2013, 2015, etc. For authors/artists, each work is treated in isolation, without an effort to define their style and how it evolved.

There's no natural entry path for a subject expert to step in and make it all coherent. Instead, the mudslides just keep coming.

This is different, because I think often those pages are written by the individuals themselves, or representatives for the companies.

I think it's more that's it's super-easy to add some factoid whether or not it really adds to the article in question. See what happens whenever a "notable" section gets started in some article in a community of any size.

I've noticed a similar phenomenon on pages about machine learning. There are entire sections about now-obsolete ideas that people only talked about for a few months before moving on.

Are those pages inaccurate? Any examples?

I wouldn't say they're inaccurate; Just unfocused.

Can't think of an example off the top of my head, but it's super weird seeing a whole paragraph about something that's only relevant to historians followed by 1 sentence about something that revolutionized the field a few years ago and is now widely deployed in production.

It is really frustrating that there are dozens of complaints about inaccuracies and awfulness of articles in wikipedia with none of the complainers able to provide a single example, there are 100s of comments with zero example articles at all.

I work in ML and have found wikipedia to be a very important reference when I do any research. Which is what an encyclopedia is supposed to be.

Fair question -- here are a few examples:

On Wikipedia's entry for Facebook, there's no discussion in the 2006-12 section about Facebook's steps to monetize the site around targeted ads. That has had gigantic global impact and was the impetus for Meta/Facebook's emergence as one of the world's most profitable companies. But Facebook never "announced" that it was doing this. So the entry is clogged with a string of quite minor "announcements" that it did make -- touching on short-lived headquarters moves, feature tweaks, obscure awards, etc. instead.

Wikipedia's entry on Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins is an achingly long list of votes she's taken over the years, or one-line quotes about her positions at various moments in time, without any effort to write coherently about what's been consistent or evolving in her political views. Also absent is any nuanced sense of how Collins's journey interacted with changing political tides. We end up with a 20,000-word string of factoids that goes on forever, with scant insight about her enduring impact, core principles, etc.

I am unfamiliar with Collins. However, looking at

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Collins

There is a whole section and separate article on her political positions.

As an encyclopedic reference it looks like a pretty good reference. Obviously a strong narrative like a new Yorker profile can't be expected of an encyclopedia.

Actually, back in the day, that's exactly what the top encyclopedias aspired to do. It's worth looking up who wrote the main entries in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica. Future Nobel laureate Ernest Rutherford did the entry on radioactivity. British medical researcher Joseph Lister (the inspiration for Listerine), wrote the entry on slime molds. Environmentalist John Muir weighed in.

And, in my absolute favorite, Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin wrote the article about anarchy.

> No effort to distill key elements of these entities' impact -- let alone the how and why of what they do. It's just endless what and when.

This is tricky, because some editors on Wikipedia would interpret that as "original research" and remove it. The rule of thumb is that the citation needs to contain the information added, not just allude to it.

Exactly so. It's a rule meant to prevent one type of problem (people injecting unvetted nonsense or personal vanity/grudges into articles) that ends up creating a different and rather over-arching problem. On the longer articles, Wikipedia becomes an almanac of disjointed facts, not an encyclopedia of coherent knowledge.

What if the Wikipedia can be received in the raw and taste tested cooked? The latter captures the reflection from a subject expert aided by a panel of four judges who happen to be interested learners getting the sealegs to become experts in their own right eventually and the project is funded by a grant and prestige for the expert. There is a timeline of expert review recorded and commentary.

Every now and then I like to read through Wikipedia pages for things I know more than the average person on. It keeps me skeptical of the things I read on there.

It's always frustrating for me to see things in Wikipedia I know are wrong because I was in the room when a particular decision was made, or because I personally made the decision.

I gave up making corrections because they would always get reverted by someone in another country who wasn't even born when the event happened. Simply because there wasn't a random blogger live streaming it, and nobody's written a book about it, my knowledge remains my own.

Wikipedia is the ultimate example of deleting the world's history because it can't be linked to.

Write a blog post or website with your knowledge, then you can reference that from Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is explicitly not meant to be a primary source (indeed, no encyclopedia is).

How do we know you're not just making stuff up?

If you've got a good answer to that question I'm sure they'd love to hear it and to update their policy.

For what it's worth, you can write the information you know in a blog that can be linked back to you personally, and that's an acceptable source to cite.

Well, blogs generally aren't acceptable sources to cite in Wikipedia. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:Blog

Press sources do often have minor or major inaccuracies which can then get perpetuated in Wikipedia.

"What people outside do not appreciate is that a newspaper is like a soufflé, prepared in a hurry for immediate consumption. This of course is why whenever you read a newspaper account of some event of which you have personal knowledge it is nearly always inadequate or inaccurate. Journalists are as aware as anyone of this defect; it is simply that if the information is to reach as many readers as possible, something less than perfection has often to be accepted." —David E. H. Jones, in New Scientist, Vol. 26

Wikipedians, for that matter, are aware of this defect too (or ought to be), because a great many press articles about Wikipedia contain absolute clangers.

Interesting--looks like I came across an older policy document. But in this case, it sounds like the author is an established and published expert on this topic, so their blog would be acceptable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_and_usin...

> The author is an established expert on the topic of the article whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable third-party publications, except for exceptional claims.[4] Take care when using such sources: if the information in question is really worth reporting, someone else will probably have done so.[5]

Well, on the same page (which is an essay, not a policy) you have:

"Never use self-published sources as third-party sources about any living people, except for claims by the author about themself. This holds even if the author of the source is an expert, well-known professional researcher, or writer."

That limits things quite severely. The relevant policy is here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_livin...

(Just to explain: in Wikipedia, "policies" are "widely accepted standards that all editors should normally follow"; a "guideline" is "a generally accepted set of best practices that editors should follow, though it is best treated with common sense, and occasional exceptions may apply", and an "essay" can be just one editor's opinion; it is "not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community.")

I see, thank you for pointing out the classifications of policy-like writings.

I still disagree in the narrow bounds of this conversation, which is articles about technical topics. The prohibition there seems to be on accepting someone's claims about themselves, which is different from an expert on a subject making specific fact-based claims in their field.

Wouldn't this make something published in Playboy an acceptable source, but someone's YouTube video of an actual event unacceptable?

Time to write it down yourself somewhere?

If there is no decent reference available, IMHO the knowledge is useless anyways and might as well be deleted. Can anybody prove me wrong?

You're getting downvoted, but I think for Wikipedia you're correct. Wikipedia's purpose is not to be a cutting-edge repository of all truth. It's to conveniently organize all the knowledge that can be looked up. That's because every bit of it needs to be verifiable by non-expert editors. If there's some knowledge that can't be looked up, then that's not Wikipedia's problem to solve.

Indeed. And even more in general, "truth" is a realtive term. More often than not, it is hardly verifiable, the best thing available is "consensus", which is the aim of Wikipedia content.

one simple mechanism would be to freeze the article editing for a bit when it becomes a hot topic in US media

That is frequently done. A recent example is the article on "recession", which was frozen around the time that the US had two consecutive quarters of negative growth (often used as a definition for a recession).

https://www.npr.org/2022/07/29/1114599942/wikipedia-recessio...

There are differing levels of "frozen", which require differing levels of editor seniority to be allowed to edit.

nice, I had no idea, I just remember seeing the edit wars on some hot topics a while ago

When was the last time you read through a copy of Encyclopedia Britannica? Have you done an apples to apples comparison? No encyclopedia is perfect, but as far as I can tell the "standard" encyclopedias are a lot worse.

My grandparents had bought a copy of Britannica decades ago and they had something like 50 years of its yearbooks. I would cite it sometimes and no one at school batted an eye. I remember reading through it and cross-referencing articles against Wikipedia and Wikipedia's accuracy was far superior.

The thing to keep in mind is that not only are all encyclopedias fraught with errors, primary sources are often wrong too! The goal isn't perfection, it's transparency -- and Wikipedia in this department is enormously better than any private encyclopedia you'll ever find.

Maybe traditional encyclopedia might give wikipedia a run for the money on subjects, say toilet paper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_paper

But wikipedia is far ahead on more practical articles like which way the toilet paper goes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_paper_orientation

Something I recently became aware of is that in some cases toilet paper orientation preference may be due to left handedness vs right handedness.

I am right handed and prefer to have the paper oriented over itself.

A member of my family is left handed and prefers to have the paper under itself. She once said that for her, with left handedness, having the paper under itself makes it easier to grab.

Wouldn't this completely depend on which side the toilet paper holder is mounted?

That doesn't make sense to me, surely it's always easier (by whatever little amount) if it's away from the wall ('over itself' as you say I think), whichever side it is, and whichever hand you use dominantly?

I don't think handness has anything to do with it. I'm left handed and I prefer the paper oriented over itself.

Me too.

My partner is left handed and prefers the same. (I do, too, but I'm right handed)

I think it depends mostly on whether you enjoy hitting your hand on the wall or not ;-)

I’m team “over” as far as toilet paper goes :), but the best argument I ever heard for TP rolled “under” was that in this configuration your cat couldn’t unspool the entire roll onto the floor.

From personal experience, that assumption is false. One of my parents thought they were clever, and Frostbite speed unrolled it by using the cabinet as a backing. I do miss that monster.

Today, we learn about the toilegami.

Whoa! I just learned a good reason for the under position! (Thanks.)

This makes me hate Wikipedia deletionists all the more.

Related: what do you do if the paper has 3 layers, and you are holding 2 layers of one turn and 1 layer from the next/previous turn, and the holder has a cover so you can't access the roll directly?

Wiki is transparent in a self-referential sense only. History started in 1992. If there’s no hyperlink, it’s lost. Pick any wiki page and see all the dead, rotting citations.

I’d bet any mining of actually working citations would average closer to 2015. It used to be people citing something from the 70’s or 80’s would get strange looks from people who lived then, now I see Millenials looking at Gen-Z kids that way.

History is written not by the victor, but by the last wiki editor.

Maybe, but with the extensive number of books, journals, magazines and newspapers scanned and available to view on the Internet Archive, it's never been easier to add or verify a printed source citation.

Also various other newspaper archives have mind-numbing amounts of scanned material dating back well over 100 years, and the Wikipedia Library provides free access to these resources for editors.

> If there’s no hyperlink, it’s lost

This just isn't true. Most wikipedia references have a hyperlink and a proper citation which can be looked up using traditional means. For example, a cite might look like this:

"Intel Pentium Processor G6950 (3M Cache, 2.80 GHz) with SPEC Code(s) SLBMS". Ark.intel.com. 2010-07-13. Archived from the original on 2011-03-09. Retrieved 2010-07-29.

The link to intel.com has rotted, but:

1) There's an archive of the page so the information hasn't been lost

2) There's also a full citation, with which you can write a letter to Intel asking them for the document in question ("Intel Pentium Processor G6950 (3M Cache, 2.80 GHz) with SPEC Code(s) SLBMS"). This is a lot more detail than you'd have in a traditional encyclopedia. If you're a researcher, the encyclopedia has given what you need to seek more detail from the primary source - and that's the whole point!

archive.org and wikipedia.org working together is really powerful.

with history begins 1992 they are referencing books, content which is not in the web. you talk about the link quality. other problem.

No, OP specifically referenced "dead, rotting citations" which is a link quality problem.

In terms of book references Wikipedia simply wins, hands down. Those don't rot.

The owner of the site can remove content even from the web archive. It's far harder to remove books with isbns from national libraries.

Wikipedia has book citations, and more and better book citations than traditional encyclopedias.

It's unclear what your point is. Are you suggesting wikipedia shouldn't also have citations to content published online, simply because it might be removed?

Most wikipedia citations are linked to some news articles (this is not too bad, still newspapers are being archived) and some random internet blog articles of some random people which show up and disappear. Source creditworthness analysis? Good joke Wikipedia says :-) At best you can get some people's opinion about something.

That's a very silly take and is easily disproven. For example, pick any science topic at random. Let's look at Quantum Mechanics:

There are 81 citations. Of these, only 9 are not citing published books with an ISBN, or articles published in journals.

4 are citations to papers or articles published by physics professors on their university websites (Berkeley, Riverside, CUNY, Caltech)

Three are links to magazines: Quanta Magazine, Scientific American, Physics World

The remaining two are a link to the Nobel Foundation (regarding a nobel prize award) and a link to Merriam-Webster for a definition of "Quantum."

> At best you can get some people's opinion about something.

Nah, not even close.

And this is cherry picking. As studies show the quality varies strongly for historical, politically controversial and highly scientifical topics ( only few wikipedia editors ). Link https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3178876.3186132#BibP... So nothing "easily disproven"

No, it's a counter-example which unequivocally disproves your inaccurate generalization.

Cherry picking can only occur if I'm generalizing, and I am not. Counter-examples aren't cherry-picking.

Your statement "At best you can get some people's opinion about something" has been disproven.

My thesis was "you can't take Wikipedia quality for granted" it fails to be objective on many topics. And your thesis is? Your counter thesis?

Pedantry alert, but it drives me crazy:

"Wiki" is a type of software, like "editor" or "web browser". It is not the name of wikipedia.

Yes yes, language evolves, but this is like someone deleting the Internet Explorer link from their Windows desktop and saying "I deleted the internet from this computer, I don't have the internet any more".

See also “crypto” and “text”.

Good god, yes.

Last time our family had an encyclopedia set was back in the 70s. And yes, nerd that I was (am, and will forever be) I read it. When we moved overseas, we had to put a lot of stuff in storage, and this was one of the things stolen from storage.

I'm not convinced either of you have read enough of either encyclopedia to have anything like a representative sample.

Heh...Reminds me when I was in school doing a report using the leather bound Encyclopedia Britannica from 1911 that we still had in the book shelves. I still wonder how accurate it was. It was a history report so maybe more so than later editions as it was closer to the event? Who knows...

It's transparent and unfortunately that's exactly why we know we can't trust it.

If you want an eye opening experience pick something in the news that might be scientific. Say, COVID. Then run a correlation between the release of news articles and the frequency of edits to Wikipedia.

In theory, this provides the most up to date information. In reality, Wikipedia is a disinformation farm. Contributors may think they are updating the "latest" version of "truth" (like a "fact" checker) but in reality they are making knee jerk decisions to sometimes literally change the definition of something.

Still not convinced a paper encyclopedia is better? Still worried a scary private corporation controls Encyclopedias? Steven Pruitt is a legendary "editor" (what an appropriate name) of wikipedia. Holding the record for the most Wikipedia edits of anyone by a large margin, he is a veritable gatekeeper of what Wikipedia defines as truth. Whereas in a corporation you might have this divided among dozens of experts in their field, one man with no known expertise in anything and a dramatically one-sided and well-known political leaning is in control of a LOT of information.

In summary, I refuse to donate to Wikipedia and actively promote other sources of information (such as scholarly articles, meta-analyses, expert blog posts, etc) as better secondary or primary sources of information. Parents, teachers, and schools are absolutely right to be suspect of Wikipedia. Aside from relatively niche, infrequently edited articles, Wikipedia is no better than asking your neighbor what he thinks about a subject. At least you might get a beer out of doing that, though.

Leaving aside your other points, it's beyond ludicrous to claim that Steven Pruitt controls anything on Wikipedia. Please take more care that you yourself don't repeat random misinformation about Wikipedia.

> it's beyond ludicrous to claim that Steven Pruitt

Someone with millions of edits does not de-facto have the systems in place, the time, and the power to influence any article he puts his mind to? What I posted is inference, not misinformation, and worth considering despite the downvote parade happening on it right now by pro-wiki shills.

To call what I posted misinformation is a sign of times. Inference is not misinformation and while I have no "fact checked" articles proving he manipulates wiki articles he is a defacto central power of Wikipedia whose contributions are vast. So vast, in fact, they shadow every other contributor by orders of magnitude. If this doesn't concern you I guess by all means, cite wikipedia in all your scholarly works. Isn't my problem, anyway. I don't use it and I don't donate to it. I have no dog in this race.

Ignoring Pruitt my point stands in general. Wikipedia edits spike during times of political strife, elections, major news, etc. They are edited so frequently that it's impossible to tell what is real and fake. This is the principle failing of any truly open system that does no KYC. It inevitably collapses under the weight of idiots (which have more density than smart people). If Wikipedia expects to be trusted authors should be credential-locked to fields and vetted by the community. Except that can't happen because then you'd have to pay for it, and then it's not wikipedia.

I'd rather have vetted experts writing articles on their fields (e.g. an actual encyclopedia) than any random shmuck off the street being able to contribute to an alleged body of "knowledge". Right now I can go contribute to the article on theoretical physics. Something I know nothing about. That should not be possible on any system alleging to be a source of truth.

Why do you need 100% iron-fist control to steer an outcome (which doesn't have to be conscious)? You just need enough influence. A little nudge here, a little nudge there. Especially when you are making millions of nudges. And he's not the only one doing it. Some nation-states and NGOs also hire people to do favorable Wikipedia edits as well.

That's like saying billionaires, corporations, media etc don't have a lot of influence (or control) over elections because everyone can theoretically donate money, outvote them etc. too.

Surely someone with millions of edits factually does control a lot on Wikipedia, by definition

Yes, but good authors are routinely removed from Wikipedia by a mob of less than great editors. Happens all the time. Happened to me.

For a sample of my work, see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kate_Baker

What if you happen to have a minority view that happens to be the correct one?.

No amount of wiki editors can protect you from “mob” changes on their platform.

You are -ah- not a big fish!

I always thought you were a bit eccentric, but you seemed to be fairly sane otherwise, and managed to always keep yourself out of trouble. How did you manage to get yourself sitebanned of all things? %-(

I mean, arbcom reviewed it too, so it's not just a mob. Did you get tempted into saying or doing something unwise?

I hope you're doing ok now at least.

ArbCom took over the block, I believe they did this so they could review it at a later date if I ever wanted to ask to come back. Could be wrong about that. Unlikely this will ever happen. My mental health is not always the best.

I'm sad to hear that. I wish you all the best!

Back in the late '50s, my dad had just gotten his first significant paycheck. That evening, Mom and he were admiring the cash on the kitchen table, when the Encyclopedia Brittanica salesman knocked. And that's all she wrote.

By the time I was able to read, we had two separate complete editions of the Brittanica, and he'd read both through, A-Z.

I think Encyclopedia Britannica should not be the benchmark, but "real" scientific/scholarly encyclopedias and dictionaries.

I was waiting for my comment to be flagged. Here it is again:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33124973

> Give a single example of how the Encyclopedia Britannica be worse than random idiots, foreign agents, and shills on Wikipedia.

I received no answer, which is what I expected. It was easier to flag the comment, because this forum is pathetic.

"The apparent accuracy of a Wikipedia article is inversely proportional to the depth of the reader's knowledge of the topic." – Kozierok's First Law

Could you give examples of these topics?

Most math and physics pages I have seen on wikipedia are about as good as an average textbook. The French wikipedia is way better for math, but the English one is not bad.

This is literally the worst idea I've ever heard here on HN. Completely guts the core of what makes Wikipedia great. It's not a classic "encyclopedia" and that's GOOD.

I'd love to hear the perspective on this from some people (there must be dozens reading Hacker News) who actually have a Wikipedia page about themselves.

Most people are biased about themselves. In particular famous people often want to hide controversy.

Yeah, but things I wonder: Do people learn surprising things about themselves from their own Wikipedia page, like a connection to some event or other person that they previously weren't aware of? Do they find their pages laughably incomplete or inaccurate?

If there were a Wikipedia page about me, I can imagine that it would probably highlight some insignificant thing (from my perspective) that got my name into a small town newspaper or school / employer public relations piece while omitting several of the facts from my personal top-5 list (in importance) about my own life.

I suppose if I ever get my own Wikipedia page the first thing I should do is publish an autobiography.

Wikipedia is often okay for science articles.

I find many of the mathematics articles to be difficult to read. I'll look at a mathematics concept that I think I understand (or even use often), and it will be written in jargon that is completely incomprehensible to me.

However, where Wikipedia really has a problem is in contemporary politics. Anything that is even remotely political is probably controlled by one or another clique of editors. There are opposing cliques that battle over every Israel-Palestine article, or over whether to use the Serbian or Croatian name for village X that existed 200 years ago, or about whether hummus is Lebanese or Syrian or Israeli or Levantine. There are also subjects in which one clique has gained complete dominance and is able to completely control a whole topic area. If you start looking at the edit histories and talk pages of articles on one topic, you'll come to realize how influential relatively small numbers of motivated (and sometimes coordinated, though this is against Wikipedia's rules) editors can be.

That's why I'd take anything that's even remotely politically contentious on Wikipedia with an enormous grain of salt.

> Wikipedia is often okay for science articles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woman (4th paragraph)

I have definitely seen some bad science promoted for trans rights. But I don't really think "science" tells us what a women is, that's a social issue.

It's clearly a scientific issue, but also a social issue. There is a scientific definition of what a woman is, and there is a social definition (which is very close to the scientific definition, but which does depend a bit on culture and which can change over time). A lot of the debate comes from people talking past one another, without acknowledging that they're using the same word to discuss different topics.

One of wikipedias biggest issues is its inability to cope with words that have different but overlapping meanings.

> Trans women have a gender identity that does not align with their male sex assignment at birth, while intersex women may have sex characteristics that do not fit typical notions of female biology.

Even if you don't believe that trans women are women, it seems inarguably correct that they identify as women in spite of having been identified as male when they were born. You could complain about the vocabulary, I guess, but there's no set of vocabulary that won't upset someone.

this 100%. and so many things have been politicized which then causes revisionist/selective history that it's hard to trust a lot of the content... sadly. I used to have so much faith and hope in wikipedia.

If you want to see the mother of all Wikipedia cabals, take a look at the Eastern European mailing list, which was exposed more than 10 years ago.

It was a group of editors who conspired to game Wikipedia's rules (for example, "thou shalt not revert more than three times per day" can be circumvented by calling in a friend to revert for you). What makes the story really crazy is that they were exposed by Wikileaks, which published a giant stack of email threads between the conspirators.

This is a run-down of some of the things the most powerful member of the group, an administrator, said: https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Wikipediametric_mailinglist/Piotr....

> Every now and then I like to read through Wikipedia pages for things I know more than the average person on. It keeps me skeptical of the things I read on there.

I wrote a dissertation on Conlon Nancarrow's Player Piano Study No. 36.

Skimming the facts in the article on Conlon Nancarrow, everything looks to be both true and relevant to Nancarrow's life and musical output. I could make a few small improvements. E.g., the proportions of tempos among the twelve voices in Study No. 37 are taken from a peculiar tuning system that apparently only appears in Cowell's New Musical Resources. Making that connection would tie in nicely to the previous section that mentions the influence of Cowell's book on Nancarrow. (I believe that connection is made in Kyle Gann's book in case anyone wants to go ahead and make that edit.)

> That doesn't make Wikipedia useless, but the author's best advice is to use Wikipedia as a map to other sources of information.

As an expert on Conlon Nancarrow's music, I approve of using the Wikipedia article about him as a useful and accurate starting point for learning about his life and music.

Until I read a citation on a current Wikipedia article in your area of expertise that has factually inaccurate information in it, I can only reserve judgment on your opinion about Wikipedia's veracity.

Wikipedia, in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.org, specifically mentions this exact issue. [1]

  The content of any given article may recently have been
  changed, vandalized, or altered by someone whose opinion
  does not correspond with the state of knowledge in the
  relevant fields.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:General_disclaimer

Yes and any reader citing it would be best advised to check the page history and comments section. Teaching that to children would also be a good way of showing and exposing these vandalisms. They might learn to use it better then.

Outright discarding one of the best sources of information humanity has ever created is IMHO just plain wrong. I would understand it if this were people writing doctorates but anything below university level should definitely use it.

It's always good to tech people to check the history and comments. However, when you cite a Wikipedia article, you're supposed to cite a particular revision. That's what the "Cite" link does.

And encyclopedias can easily not have your subject, be based on wrong information, and so on.

Teachers treated them like fact until high school, though: Only in my senior year (1995-1996) were we told that while we could get basic information from an encyclopedia - to help us search for information - we couldn't use the encyclopedia itself as a source of information.

I don't understand why folks aren't treating wikipedia the same way. In general, a wikipedia article is going to give a fairly good faith overview of a subject. There are going to be more subjects than could fit in an encyclopedia. Many articles will be more in-depth and a good number have references: In other words, you can go off and read the source material if you want and use that for more information.

It depends on the topics. I have some knowledge in hard science topics and IT and like you I sometimes read the relevant pages.

They are usually great and very accurate. They are also usually in "layers" with more basic information first and then more details.

I guess this is because you can hardly argue with an integral, as opposed to who the greatest baseball player was.

I have an opposite experience. I'm a scientist and my research topic is accurately depicted in Wikipedia I would say better than any textbook. Of course Wikipedia has to be reductionist, it is not required to provide a full literature review for any topic. If you are doing a PhD-level research, then Wikipedia will fall short of providing the latest and finest details. Other than that, it's more than enough. I also believe it is the duty of experts to contribute to improving Wikipedia (I know many who do).

Here is a simple idea that AFAIK has not been tried.

Limit "External Links" to only websites found in Google Scholar. More specifically, limit them to only academic sources. (Maybe limiting to .edu or country-specific educational TLDs, e.g., ac.uk, etc. is better. I realise Scholar is hardly a reliable filter for non-commercial sources, given Google's incentives. Remember "Knol".)

This could be an option. Maybe an HTTP header sent to Wikipedia:

   Academic-Only: on

The way to "fix the quality of article" is to fix the quality of sources. As it stands, Wikipedia can use any source it finds on the web. (Not to say they do in practice.) That can be an extremely low bar.

One can use Wikipedia solely as a path to "External Links" and/or "References". To the extent that articles just take their sentences from References or External Links, any verification needs to be done on the source, not the article. I use Wikipedia as the default search engine in Fennec. On desktop, I search Wikipedia from the command line with a custom script. The forward proxy scrubs the "X-Client-IP" header. Before reading an article, in the event I read the article instead of only using External LInks and references, I always skim the Talk: page.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Criticism_of_Google/Archive_1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Knol/Archive_1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Knol/Archive_2

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Knol/Archive_3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Knol/Archive_4

Unfortunately, I don't think that works at all. Not all universities use education specific TLDs, and not all departments/labs in universities with a domain name under an education specific TLD actually keep there website under that TLD.

Completely random example of such a lab (and if you check publications you'll see they host papers under this domain name) https://www.honeylab.org/

Is this domain excluded in Google Scholar searches.

That one in particular? No clue. I'm not sure what google scholar's criteria are.

I know things on utoronto.ca turn up sometimes for a example that does (UofTs non-edu domain name, which is used for most things. Though toronto.edu is also owned by the university and used for some things).

TLD alone would certainly not be enough of a filter. Scholar has to account for scientific publishers that use TLDs like .com and .org and other non-school websites that use ccTLDs.

But Scholar proves it is possible to usefully filter for peer-reviewed papers.

Filtering is never "perfect". The question is whether it is good enough to be useful.

I understand your needs, but where people can find a academic resources to say their basketball team won a game?

Using Wikipedia for sports scores. Never knew about that.

I use it sometimes for historical scores from past championships but beyond that I have plenty of non-Wikipedia sources for real-time or recent scores.

Nor can I say I have ever used Wikipedia to find sites that publish scores, either.

But maybe I just have not discovered how Wikipedia can be used for basketball scores. No doubt there are better sources for basketbal scores.

Anyway, I fail to see how giving someone the option to restrict Wikipedia "Related Links" and "References" to, say, academic ones would interfere with the status quo. It would not stop anyone from getting basketball scores by any manner they choose. Obviously do not enable an option to restrict to academic sources if looking for sports scores.

It's fascinating to see comments like this that try to argue against hypothetical options (I have seen this sort of comment before) because software and "tech" companies have a long history of forcing new "features" on people who never asked for them. People are not even given a choice. "Do you want this new feature?" is not a question that is ever asked.

> Limit "External Links" to only websites found in Google Scholar.

Do we really want Google to have even more authority of what is considered accepted truths in society?

No, and that is why I included a explicit statement regarding Google.

At the same time, it would be silly not to admit Scholar is quite useful. Not everyone has a subscription to a large collection of academic journals and many papers are often published via non-commercial websites, as pre-prints, etc.

Imagine prohibiting Wikipedia editors from using Google Search when researching Wikipedia articles. If they are allowed to use it then that means Google has some control over what is cited in Wikipedia.

But the entire point of Wikipedia is that there is no possible way a traditional gatekeeping expert encyclopedia could be as current or encompassing as a crowd sourced version. Maybe that would be the ideal best solution, but let's not have it stand in the way of progress to a better reality

What a bunch of bull, use specific examples if you’re trying to make claims like that. I also read articles I’m an expert in and I’m always amazed how complete the articles are.

Eh, I don't think Wikipedia is perfect - and the smaller and less frequented the article the more weird it might be. But most of the time it's mostly going to be right about stuff like who was president in 1887, and have citations to elsewhere, which is a lot more than can be said for the average random Google result.

A couple days ago I was kind of annoyed that the article on Greensleeves didn't include lyrics.

There was one student in my classroom who was always correcting the teacher. Except for the fact that the teacher was always right and the student wrong.

Call me skeptical, but can you provide us with examples where Wikipedia is misleading or wrong?

Can you give examples of misleading articles? Are they political or nonpolitical?

Agreed. My background is in math... and I find math wikipedia to be appealingly low quality. Both for reference and for a general audience.

What is an example of an article you think is misleading or wrong?

Not sure what your particular area of expertise is but every time I have browsed Wikipedia for articles related to technical topics including math, programming, AI/ML as well as science, I have found their articles accurate and informative. I also recall a few studies comparing the accuracy of articles on Wikipedia with Encyclopedia Brittanica and journals, which conclude that Wikipedia compares favorably with both (easily found via a google search).

> For people unfamiliar with a subject (students) I think Wikipedia pages are misleading, poorly organized, and sometimes wrong.

This is true even if you're reading works from experts in a field. For instance, Robert Hoyland, Fred Donner, and Patricia Crone (until her death a few years ago) are some of the leading academics in the studies of early historical Islam. However, Donner's review of Hoyland's textbook thought it was misleading[1], Crone's review of Donner's textbook considered it misleading, and Crone's Hagarism is generally not accepted by any current scholar as far as I can tell.

That is to say, one needs to be skeptical no matter the source, as well as humble enough to realize that know more than others doesn't necessarily make your understanding more correct. It's also useful to try to understand the disagreements in the field and how they've developed.

[1] http://www.middleeastmedievalists.com/wp-content/uploads/201... [2] https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articl...

I remember having such an argument with a friend who is vehemently opposed to Wikipedia, because not written by experts, unlike Britannica.

I then opened a random page of Britannica, about an opera. And the phonetic pronunciation of the Italian name was incorrect (I'm a native Italian speaker) and it was how a brit might pronounce it.

In Wikipedia I would have fixed it. In Britannica the error is probably still there.

I presume that since I found an error in the first page I looked at, there probably are many other errors.

Hmm ... there are English pronunciations of foreign words that are considered correct in English, even though they differ from the way the words are pronounced in their original language. In other words, the mispronunciations have become the standard, and the correct pronunciation is considered "wrong" in English. This might have been one of those cases.

If your theory was true, the phonetic pronunciation wouldn't have been there.

I'm intrigued now. :) Was it Turandot?

That's one where the pronunciation is controversial, according to Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turandot#Origin_and_pronunciat...

I said I'm a native italian speaker. -_-'

You want to trick me with a french word? As if an italian would be unable to tell a word in italian from one in a different language?

Turandot is an opera by Puccini; the word is of Persian origin, and the Wikipedia article I linked extensively discusses how Puccini intended for the title to be pronounced in Italian.

Cf. https://medicine-opera.com/2008/12/turandot-without-the-t/

But never mind.

I've read articles which I'm an expert on and found them generally quite good. Some very niche things often have really limited content but usually not wrong. I've fixed the odd thing here and there.

For technical stuffs Wikipedia is great ,and have good resources in further reading sections

True, but still it's way better than most other sources than the general population has casual access to. Reading some of the general public magazines that include some of those topics is... an interesting experience.

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.

As someone who suffered under teachers who like to play god, and thrived under teachers like you, thank you.

> 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

I could see it as a easy example of the "brown M&Ms" theory: https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2012/02/14/146880432/...

Similarly to police unions, teacher unions prevent many of those checks. Public servants do not serve society by having unions.

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.

A lot of organizations actively undermine society by existing, but we generally have to respect freedom of association, even for people we don't like.

> 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.

They also seem to have subtly shifted each time I revisit citation styling rules

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.

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)

> in high school back in 2004, we were already told to not use Wikipedia as a source

I think we all assumed the situation had evolved.

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

[citation needed]

Which sponsors does Wikipedia have?

"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.

This is such a weird criticism.

Before wikipedia you had academics writing things like this. You really think the average wikipedian is more "motivated" then the average academic with a PhD who spent their life studying some topic?

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.

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.

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.

It's very surprising to me that anybody would assume that, let alone that everybody would be presumed to assume that.

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’d wager it’d work just fine in a university setting. 10 references per paper, 10 papers per student, 200 students in a course.

I doubt anyone is fetching and fact checking 2000 links a semester.

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.

I was a junior in high school in 2003 and referenced Wikipedia for a particular element's molar mass.

The wiki was actually wrong about this fundamental digital fact by a factor of like 3x, and my teacher got to i-told-you-so me about citations.

Ever since then I've not been able to enjoy Wikipedia without scrutinizing the edit history

Why not just check the reference? If there isn't one it isn't to be trusted, if there is just cite that.

https://web.archive.org/web/20040409083026/https://en.wikipe...

the entire "references" section back then was one link

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 don't think you understand whats being said or you are misquoting me intentionally in poor faith

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

Are you playing a game here?

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?

I side with elif here.

> 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.

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.

Deleting for non-notoriety is one of the saddest parts of Wikipedia. Flag it as "meh" but deleting it entire, ouch.

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.

But sci hub exists now

> When I was in high school back in 2004,

I think this is the first sentence I've read about an internet encyclopedia that started with "Back in my day..."

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.

That's exactly what your parent is saying.

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

As valued as SciHub and LibGen may be, they are repositories of mostly disjoint materials. They are not seamlessly interconnected.

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?

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.

Many!

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 )

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.

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.

Most schools have off campus proxies you can use now

High schools?

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.

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.

Vandalism is easy to spot though. Wrong but plausible information is difficult to identify.

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:

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.

>Several books have the false info too

Sounds like we shouldn't trust books blindly, either.

Is there a source we can trust blindly?

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.

Well, to be fair, the books in question aren't exactly high-brow material.

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...

Realistically, no. Credibility is often a crapshoot which I think is why you see so many otherwise-intelligent individuals believing nonsense.

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.

> 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.

Controversial pages on Wikipedia (contemporary politics, etc) are typically hard to edit. Others are easy to edit. Vandalism is rare and temporary, and nobody is going fight earnestly over topics such as how a light bulb or an electric engine works, or when a certain building was build or most historical events, etc.

Wikipedia does not absolve you from checking references or the credibility of the text, but it does a damn good job collecting and pre-checking a lot of the content. You still need to be able to recognize hot-button topics and take those with a grain of salt. And as I said usually those pages cannot be edited by everyone.

The school does not seem to understand how Wikipedia works. At all.

Many controversial pages on Wikipedia have a clearly identifiable bias which becomes impossible to edit because, as you mentioned, they are somewhat 'protected.'

For such instances it is always advisable to go directly to genuine source materials, e.g., case records or legal documents. Were I a teacher I would not accept any compiled source as a citation because the skill of digging deep enough to find the closest thing to the truth is too valuable to do otherwise.

Wikipedia is the single greatest tool mankind has ever developed for the internet. Where else can you get a mostly correct and accurate understanding of essentially any topic known to man for free, and then have resources for further research if desired.

Even if Wikipedia isn’t 100% correct on everything, I can’t think of any resource that is (that is also free).

yeah that's rather correct when it comes to the English language Wikipedia

but the Polish language Wikipedia has been hijacked by the right wing nut jobs

it's public knowledge by now not to trust Wikipedia in Poland unless you're one of them

also Polish politicians use Wikipedia to boost their profiles, they treat is as a free self aggrandizement platform

everyone knows they edit their own profiles and wipe out any unflattering info

Polish Wikipedia is a poster child for what could go wrong when you leave editing to the common people

When i was in school, the rule was also "you can't use the encyclopedia as a source". So it feels more like trying to get students to learn to find and use primary sources. Wikipedia actually makes this incredibly simple now, since everything has a citation link.

> learn to find and use primary sources...

Except that Wikipedia policy is only to use secondary sources, otherwise it is considered original research.

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.

My understanding of "don't cite Wikipedia" is the same for "don't cite the Encyclopedia". By failing to use a primary source, you're subjecting yourself to the interpretation and biases of someone who has already ingested the source material and formed an opinion.

It's a great place to orient yourself on a piece of subject matter, though! And I certainly agree that the dreck that makes up 95% of Google results should certainly not be cited academically.

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.

An interesting exercise would be to have students generate the paragraph and then fact-check and edit it.

The workaround is to use Wikipedia and quote the sources you find on the article.

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.

Isn't that exactly what Wikipedia wants you to do? You can put anything on Wikipedia without a source anyway.

What I find obnoxious is that these are the same schools that will hand the kids a ChromeBook without being critical of Google incentive.

That's what TFA says

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.

I learned 10x the world history from Wikipedia than I ever did from history classes writing up non-wiki citations in the proper format.

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.

Seems like the purpose of these research papers in school got lost somewhere. They are an opportunity to develop skills and judgment, not to do important scholarly work. By saying "don't use Wikipedia" they are missing an opportunity to teach kids how to find and vet resources. Wikipedia does have a ton of issues: as do, evidently, some of the top peer-reviewed journals in the world. So, the provenance of a citation is not enough, and focusing on it is beside the point. The skill schools should be teaching is how to sift the wheat from the chaff, since that will be more valuable later on.

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 a good thing to point out (guess what: books are still way better than both, yes, physical books, I know they shouldn't be in this The Year of Our Lord 2022 but they are, the whole "information superhighway" and "making all the world's information accessible at your fingertips" hasn't worked out as well as we thought it would) but I was really hoping this post would be a showdown between lies taught in school and the more-correct versions on characterized-by-teachers-as-unreliable Wikipedia. That would have been funny.

Textbooks are obscenely limited. Interactive feedback is gone, animation is gone. I mean trigonometry is so much easier to understand if you have moving visualizations of what everything means. And because of the obscene costs of textbooks, and the various moats that publishers have, including book-specific curricula, and the very low effort options they have for homework assigning and grading student get tied into a shitty ecosystem at great cost with zero optionality. And how many students have spent how many hours of their lives reinventing the wheel to build mental models to do shit that was done decades ago?

As opposed to the internet, where you can find a variety of options using different modalities and have direct feedback visually, numerically or otherwise through parametric models that can give you instantaneous feedback. Shit even Desmos alone can give you a huge deal of insight by tossing variables in and instantly seeing the results as opposed to taking 3 minutes every time you change a var with the TI-84 CE bullshit academia forces onto students. Oh and it's all free of cost. Shit there are even open source textbooks now, but nobody uses them.

I would agree that the Internet has delivered spectacularly well in a few kinds of instruction. But if you're looking for raw, across-all-disciplines knowledge, books still win and it's not even particularly close. They shouldn't, but somehow they do.

Library Genesis is probably the best free part of the Web by a country mile, as far as raw disseminating-human-knowledge goes, and it's supposed to be illegal. And its utility is based on... giving you free access to books, periodicals, and papers.

What's code red mean in this context?

Likely, an active shooter drill

ah, so training to trigger people's fears from a young age... you know, for safety.

This is correct.

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.

I'm actually really glad that schools are sending the message "don't use Wikipedia as a trusted source". Students and parents naturally being contrarians will ... use Wikipedia, or learn to read primary sources and re-cite them, which is a step towards primary source research and a step in the direction of critical media consumption.

If students and teachers happen to notice that the Wikipedia consensus is close to reality … that's a great side effect. Teaching them that the raw consensus of most Internet users is generally trustworthy is a pro-social exercise (even if you do it in a sneaky way by triggering students' rebellious instincts). And teaching them that their teachers are misguided in the way they talk about Wikipedia is, arguably, also a good critical-thinking exercise.

An alternate exercise that schools or parents could do is to have their kid try to introduce a false fact into Wikipedia and see how long it lasts or whether it can enter reality via citogenesis. It's better that kids are not introduced to this concept. I'm glad that it's not done.

But what about when the Wikipedia consensus is quite far from reality? If your only source for most or all of your information is Wikipedia, you will never know.

Wikipedia is most young peoples go to source for knowledge. The way important entries frame a subject is considered to be a neutral observers take, but they're often anything but when it comes to politics, history and philosophy. Often these important entries are the personal fife of one or more admin who structured things according to personal preference.

An easy way to see this is to look at a topic that is split in the academy along geographical lines - the entry in wiki will often favour whatever region the original cabal sided with and give the other short thrift.

Meeting a wikipedia admin in real life is often eye opening and explains some of these choices.

The old encyclopedias were more transparent; siding with their own cultures scholars in a way that was generally more uniform. Wiki masquerades as the final objective authority but has the same old issues burried and obscured.

Even an undergrad intro course on a given historical subject will often come into violent conflict with a given entry.

The best entries are scientific topics, like botany or physics - and this impression of mine is probbaly based on ignorance.

I am very pro-wikipedia.

If there's a problem with Wikipedia or even just the way that people use Wikipedia then I think it should be discussed, because that improves Wikipedia, and Wikipedia is an amazing human achievement.

I'll repeat my comment the last time this came up, that if you want a basic summary (probably more suitable for school) then the simple English Wikipedia exists.

It is slightly less likely to have a long rambling article.

I personally like the long rambling articles, because the point of a wiki should be to be easily updated, to harness the most intellectual input, and I feel it often better reflects reality than a polished summary.

But there is a place for polished summaries. Probably won't be long before they are done by AI (introducing more fascinating philosophical questions) but for now simple human written pages are available.

There seems to be some concerted movement to not fund Wikipedia, I'd encourage people to both donate money and time. The easiest way to get that money spent is by having lots of people using and improving Wikipedia and its sister projects.

Wikipedia needs some further systems implemented to ensure that the information they host is valid and correct.

For starters it would be nice if established articles had a level of protection by default - e.g. don't immediately publish changes, but await for consensus and/or a known reputable contributor accepting those changes. This would both help avoiding vandalism, and maintaining the quality level of the wiki pages altogether.

Then another thing I'd like to see is recently changed sections being highlighted - e.g. an added sentence/word/reference, a deleted section, etc., would all be useful to see. Combine this highlighting with the previous idea of withheld contributions (i.e. show the new contribution, but mark it with a warning that it's not yet confirmed legitimacy, and even offer the user to vote if it's a legit edit or not).

Basically, Wikipedia needs to transition from a 'raw information first' approach to something that also addresses edit history in an immediately visible way.

> And holy hell, don’t get me started on how they teach math or English, or this new "Code Red" shit.

I'm really interested in this off-handed remark from the author. Not having children of my own, and being many years removed from the US public school system, what exactly are they getting at here? I'm assuming it's related to common core?

School shooting drills.

I feel it is important to teach kids not only to be critical of online content but also give them recommendations/hints/alternatives on where to find good sources of information. Finding content online is surely a good skill but supplying a catalogue of good sources via a mentor / teacher kick-starts people to understand what actual reliable content is.

For example, I recommend anyone interested in math subjects to (also) check the Princeton companions to (applied) math.

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691150390/th...

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691118802/th...

Probably the most simple fact is, that Wikipedia destroyed an industry. While this industry came down they sowed the seed of not trusting a source where everybody could do what they did.

For free.

I’m with the OP on this. There are probably mistakes. Especially on highly contentious articles (politics). But in general it is the best collection of factual information out there.

> If I thought it would be even remotely worth doing, I would fight this shit at the school. Sadly, I do not.

This statement (and the general sense of the author's emotional state) makes me wonder whether the author has actually spoken with teachers or is getting his information from his kids. Kids are just as capable of spinning facts for effect as adults. Or ignoring nuance. Or straight up misinterpretation.

Before "fighting" the school, the first step should be to understand the school's position. Then the teacher's position. Only after the actual facts are on the table should a decision about action be taken.

The author appears to be doing the same thing he rails against the school for doing: treating a single source as the beginning and end of the story.

Is this guy me? He could be me. Literally had this same conversation with my kids this week.

I would expect wikipedias to be more accurate than teachers.

I am a software engineer who spends his life showing people the origional sources of information to help them unpick collective repeated misunderstandings. That takes me, with more experience that my team combined to do that.

teachers have experience of teaching - not possessing knowledge or the practises of sifting, applying and validating their hypothesis aroudn the veracity of information.

Most curriculums are out of date in ways that don't matter all that much. But i still rekon wikipedia is still more up to date than them.

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?

This is Wikipedia's fault.

- Wikipedia know people mistakenly cite Wikipedia itself

- Wikipedia agree that people should not do this

- Wikipedia had the opportunity to educate Wikipedia's audience not to do this.

- Wikipedia has not educated Wikipedia's audience not to cite Wikipedia itself.

What they should have done:

> We hope you find Wikipedia useful. Remember to never cite Wikipedia itself! Instead cite the websites and research papers Wikipedia cites. If information isn't cited by Wikipedia, don't use it! It can be added by anyone and can even be removed from Wikipedia at any time!

That's all they needed to do.

To be fair, they did and do. Every page contains a link at the bottom to a "Disclaimer", the first two paragraphs of which read as follows:

"Wikipedia is an online open-content collaborative encyclopedia; that is, a voluntary association of individuals and groups working to develop a common resource of human knowledge. The structure of the project allows anyone with an Internet connection to alter its content. Please be advised that nothing found here has necessarily been reviewed by people with the expertise required to provide you with complete, accurate or reliable information.

"That is not to say that you will not find valuable and accurate information in Wikipedia; much of the time you will. However, Wikipedia cannot guarantee the validity of the information found here. The content of any given article may recently have been changed, vandalized, or altered by someone whose opinion does not correspond with the state of knowledge in the relevant fields. Note that most other encyclopedias and reference works also have disclaimers."

Moreover, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_not_a_r...

It's just that people don't take any notice.

I’ve think people aren’t seeing the disclaimer, rather than ignoring it. An on screen notification that appears for first time users or when text is selected are possible user interfaces that would ensure people understand.

That's a completely unreasonable idea. Are you also suggesting that Google should also have a prominent disclaimer that appears before they give results that their search results may not be accurate, or might be misleading?

Why and no.

So why is Google any different to Wikipedia?

People don’t cite Google.

Kids don’t cite Wikipedia either, because they know they will be marked down. Just because you don’t cite something doesn’t mean you don’t regularly use it.

I get where you're coming from but it's not really practical. (For a start, how to decide which user is a first-time user, if there even is such a thing today?)

What I will say is that for a while the Wikimedia Foundation was trumpeting things like that somewhat flawed Britannica study and gave out PR messages along the lines of "See, we are reliable and as good as Britannica. Even doctors trust us." (Some journalists are still promoting that sentiment, and I think they are doing everyone a disservice. Example: https://twitter.com/Wikiland/status/1569781042764222464 Nobody should trust Wikipedia.)

Around 2016 though the Wikimedia Foundation shifted emphasis and its CEO would say things like "We don't guarantee accuracy, do check the references cited in the article". That was the right thing to do.

The rest is up to users now. I am all in favour of sharing stories of how things can go wrong when people trust Wikipedia blindly. Here are a few:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-37523772

https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/amelia-bedelia-wikipedia-ho...

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/how-a-ra...

https://www.theregister.com/2017/01/16/wikipedia_16_birthday...

Cookies indexeddb and localstorage are all good proxies for the first time a user has used Wikipedia on a device.

In my experience the wikipedia articles themselves are good, but the references unfortunately less so. Way too many newspaper-style sources, the academic papers range from 'the actual original paper on the topic' to 'obscure'.

I wish articles had a section similar to the literature review in academic papers, that could raise the quality a lot. I think it'd need some nudging/template to get that somewhat consistent (like the boxes they have on many articles that are connected via a common theme, those are great).

One of the most useful parts of a wikipedia article are the table of references on every article, glad the author mentioned that. Maybe they've dealt with some uninterested teachers, but I only remember mine telling me to not CITE wikipedia, not that it was untouchable. For any topic, you have a starter kit of references to go and check out, with a light synopsis of why it's relevant so you can filter out the junk ones, that's a pretty valuable tool on it's own!

Three years? I was a highschool student 10+ years ago and back then they already didn't allow us to use Wikipedia, luckily at least we were explained that we could read thing in Wikipedia and then use the sources as our own sources.

I remember spending waay too many hours reading bout "exotic" physic topics there and then asking my teacher, who was luckily not annoyed! (or at least didn't show so)

I dont understand thr current trend on Wikipedia to add long quotes by various people to the articles. This makes fhr articles less concise. It also feels like reading material for 5th grade.

I tried deleting those few times but often this led to edit wars. It feels as if in some cases some D tier people want to be quoted on wikipedia for stuff, so they add own quotes and "guard" them from taking them down.

I used to read a LOT of random Wikipedia articles in English when I was in late primary school and middle school. Might be the main activity I did that allowed me to start learning proper, academic English.

I've been doing the same now in Japanese and Interlingua (or Latin directly). And while I don't know if the truth is there, at least for daily level comprehension it's a very useful method.

That's funny, I literally have this discussion at the beginning of every semester of my college "Technology for Information Professionals" class.

It's such a good icebreaker. Always starts with a timid "Oh, I can see reasons for both" and ends with "What were my teachers thinking? Anyway we would just cite the articles that Wikipedia cited to lol"

I would think just taking everything at face value on the main wikipedia article might not be a good idea but if after reading the article, doing some verification by following the citation links or using the article and citation links as a jumping off point for further research would work as well as anything from the card catalog library days of my education.

I had a fight with my 9th grade daughter on the exact same topic. She was arguing anything other than wikipedia is more accurate !

I am not sure at which level his kids are.

It’s more than fine for elementary school, not fine for university… and there is spectrum in between.

When I was in school, long before Wikipedia, encyclopedias weren't accepted as references. That's why you had to go to the library. I don't have a problem with that part.

On the other hand, if I were a teacher, citations of random internet stuff would result in a bit of a lecture and points off the second time.

If we’re thinking about sources:

Teacher primary source on policy

Student secondary source on citation policy

This blog post is third in line

It could be that the teacher is explaining to students, don’t copy and paste from Wikipedia, go to the source, and use Google Scholar to find your sources. If they’re using Scholar, are they still Googling? Maybe to a child.

Interesting how this mentality haven't changed in many decades now. We weren't "allowed" to cite/use wikipedia as any type of source in high school back in 2006. The easy solution is simply to cite the primary sources directly from the wikipedia's citation.

When I was in high school a little over a decade ago, my school told us to use an academic search engine that they payed for access to. It was actually pretty neat. I'm surprised that hasn't become more ubiquitous.

Somewhat related:

(Most of what you read on the internet is written by insane people) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32897812

Wikipedia certainly has its biases, but I think for school children it is perfectly fine as a source. It's not as if they will read research papers instead, let alone understand the quality of their source.

I hope a student finds this blog post on Google and shows it to the teacher

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.

Google books should be free to peruse for school students. That would be a good use of government money.

If people are against Google books, then the governments should scan and share all of human knowledge.

Teachers are overpaid and mostly pretty stupid. School boards are bureaucracies that prioritize student learning somewhere near the bottom of the list. What do you expect?

Where can I get a job as an overpaid high school teacher?

Go apply I'm sure they're hiring seeing as they'll hire anyone.

Dear god, they’ll overpay just anyone?

Wikipedia is the closest thing the west has to Regime media. It’s usually correct about factual matters, but has high levels of embedded bias towards establishment ideas.

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)"

severely undermines his argument.

Wow - these comments are wackier than anything I have ever read in Wikipedia. 1. Using XKCD as a source for academic malfeasance. 2. Thinking that encyclopedias should be/are written by a single individual. 3. 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. 4. Wikipedia is anti-useful.

I'll add my own.

Wikipedia causes halitosis and ED.

Before Wikipedia people did not have to evaluate their sources.

Wikipedia is causing the culture wars in the US.

Kids should be looking things up in the card catalog because it teaches patience and persistence.

Wikipedia articles don't cover the topics in depth......

This is the kind of FACT based analysis I look for when complaining about computers on a computer forum. Could you possibly assign a "truth score" to this for me so that I can ask a scholarly journal (which has never been accused of publishing falsified data) to publish it!?

Sorry for the sarcasm. I've been rolling my eyes at the comments too. Where do these lunatics come from?

Arguing about the relative strengths of Wikipedia versus Brittanica highlights the core issue that very few things are irrefutable fact that can be proven and expressed concisely with natural language, and that most things are beliefs, and interpretations of biased or limited observations.

Both sources are "mostly accurate", it's just that some teachers think that using the internet for research is too easy; "carrying books back and forth across the library builds character".

It's all part of the scam. What are we gonna do about it? Legitimately asking.. Have a 7yo and I'm afraid for their future.

I teach college and I still get college students straight out of high school who think that a web site is credible if it is a .org.

I've always used Wikipedia as a starting point to lead me to other sources.

Everyone knows that you just use wikipedia's own sources instead.

Just out of curiosity; has anyone here contributed to Wikipedia?

Yes, back before I lost faith in the project. I actually initiated some somewhat-notable articles such as those on Tank Man (the Tiananmen Square protester) and traditional ("hand-drawn") animation.

Most of my more recent contributions have been fixing typos/grammar or removing obvious spam, but I've given up on doing even that little as of late.

Why have you given up? Is there too much spam-bashing?

I did. I invented the [citation needed] template. I have written countless articles and done more maintenance work than most. I was recently banned indefinitely by a mob.

What was the cause of the ban?

google search with site:edu

Here here!

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.

This is very true.

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.

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.

Yep, if you cite Wikipedia (and you should if you're using it as a source) you can use the fixed URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Y_Combinator&oldi...

Then anyone following can see what you saw.

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.

> You shouldn't ever be citing sources who only claim to be communicating the work of others

With the exception of secondary research, like systematic reviews. Conclusions are good to have.

> 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 ]

Originally it was permitted, but too many people abused this and wasted a lot of volunteer time. :-(

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)

It's outsourcing verification, and it mostly works, but "small tidbits" like you find in Hacker News comments now and then will likely never make it.

That's a good rule.

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.

Except encyclopedias don't have _actual sources_. They are based on source but don't include references as far as I remember.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_Wikipedia

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.

> because it is not a static resource

What do you consider a “static resource”?

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.

If you date your citation, you can easily find it in the page history. Revisions are immutable.

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.

> If scholars find some claim on Wikipedia and repeat it in their published work

When people say not to cite wikipedia, they're telling you to not do this. They're not asking you to plagiarize wikipedia.

You would be amazed at the frequency with which “real” academics, journalists, lawyers, judges’ clerks, etc. plagiarize Wikipedia.

Teachers telling students they can’t under any circumstances cite Wikipedia trains this behavior.

> They should not, under any circumstance, have children "Googling" the answer to questions.

Why not? Don't you Google answers to questions? It's what they will be doing most of their life.

Yes, and depending on topic, I discard 10% to 90% of the results out of hand.

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.

> Don't you Google answers to questions?

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.

What do you use? Or you don't search the internet at all?

> Everyday I hate this website and the people on it more.

Why?

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.

Was wondering about the money thing and found this on ... Wikipedia :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation

Seems like >$235MM in net assets excluding the $100MM in the Wikimedia endowment and growing at a healthy rate YoY.

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.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

And on the Wikimedia Endowment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

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!)

Quite. Note rising executive salaries at the Wikimedia Foundation:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/e/e4/Wikim...

Latest financial report: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikim...

Yeah the Tides Foundation manages their funding, probably the most politically biased foundation in the US.

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:

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...

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).

Searching for and finding relevant information is a skill all unto itself.

Telling people outright to not use the two most common starting tools (Google and Wikipedia) is probably a bad idea.

Telling people that they can definitely do better than JUST using the starter tools definitely seems like the right path.

What is most interesting about this article is that this doctrine seems not to have changed for 20 years. I was told the exact same thing back in the early 00's: "Wikipedia is the devil".

It's a well known fact to anybody that has passed through them that public schools are a fucking joke. It's not the teachers fault, it's the budget's fault.

Another point with regard to this article is that the notion of single-source citation is absolutely stupid. At CERN, do you think scientists see a single event that confirms the existence of the Higgs boson, and then declare victory? Absolutely not. So why would you rely on one article saying that "X" is true. Use Wikipedia, and Google, and synthesize an averaged perspective, or at least a perspective that takes into account incongruencies between sources if nothing less. The irony then of me assuming that public schools are still peddling "Wikipedia=bad" based on a single article is not lost on me.

why would it be the budget's fault ?

I disagree. The private high school were I attended also said this about wikipedia. Yet it recommended using Google search and Google scholar for getting the primary sources.

But you know what I've found ? It's hard to read primary sources. I tried reading up on e.g. the cell. The parts of a cell. But I've barely found any primary sources for it. Everything is in ad-filled webpages or cool academic webpages with images but no references!

Also, I think recommending Google search is bad because it tries to guess what you're searching for based on the profile they have about you! That's just so bad for getting objective information.

> But you know what I’ve found ?

That you can stick a space between the last word and the question mark to annoying effect, I suppose.

> The rest of what you said

Is mostly disheveled in its organization to the point where I can’t really respond effectively. Glad to know private schools are failing people as well, I guess.

Nevertheless

> I disagree.

Seriously, with what. From context it seems to be that you disagree with using online searches other than Wikipedia (or maybe Jstor) for research purposes but you put “I disagree” right in the vicinity of (a) question about budget relation to public school being a shitshow (b) the fact that you went to private school and (c) that your private school lamented the use of Wikipedia, something I also disagreed with. Based on all I’ve said and what you’ve said, what you disagree with remains unclear, and vaguely discernible from contextual clues.

> Why is it the budget’s fault (that public school is bad)

Have you watched the news lately, there’s like a weekly or monthly school shooting. Have you ever had free lunch? How many teachers do you know in the public school system that retire financially secure? What is the national average for college attendance out of public schools, then compared to that of other nation’s numbers? How effectively do public schools campaign for and encourage students to pursue higher education? Public school budgets could benefit from federal spending increases (as one option but literally any source would make a difference) to increase mental health resources, acquiring better teachers, encouraging better educators to work in public schools, improving resources available for education, I mean do I really have to exhaust this laundry list?

> But you know what I’ve found? It’s hard to read primary sources.

Respectfully what does that have to do with anything. This sounds like a reading disability, not a condemnation of… what, online articles? Are you a bot? I swear you must be a bot. This makes no sense.

> Ad-filled webpages

Get an ad-blocker? Scroll past Google’s search suggestions?

> Google search is bad because it tries to guess…

Then use DuckDuckGo, or alternative du jour. “Googling” is a widely-accepted synonym for “web search”.

I'm not a bot. I may just have been tired when writing this comment and not at all objective. I didn't mean that budget in public schools is an issue. What I meant to say is that the budget in public schools is not the cause of teachers saying that wikipedia is bad, it's more like a general mindset that people have.

There definitely isn't a solution in my comment. I certainly just critiqued. I did not mean that adblockers don't exist but that the solutions that my teachers seem to give me are also bad.

> That you can stick a space between the last word and the question mark to annoying effect, I suppose.

I didn't mean to make it annoying. I used to put it right besides the last letter but I've found that the French language uses an extra space. I think it looks better. I see you have a different opinion. I did not mean to be overly annoying with it.

They could learn about SNES emulator Near (RIP) or, say, the Scots language.

In a lot of things historical, Wikipedia is overrun by, let's not mince words, neonazis. If you want to be more polite, people with a very strong yearning of their nations past to be really great, science be damned. The thing is, everything needs to be sourced but the veracity of the source, especially if it is not in English is not verified. That's because of the "no credentials are recognized" policy of Wikipedia which makes every historian stay far away from this cesspool of trolls. And since it's a clique, it's impossible to fix anything, edits will be reverted and there's nowhere to turn. I gave up, too, long ago.

I was adding the proper spelling of an ancient Persian vizier and scholar and my edit was reverted with "The other names in the lead are not supposed to have custom alphabets or whatever they're called". It's a Persian article and you refuse "custom alphabets or whatever they're called"?? I am out of here.

I don't know why this is being downvoted. This is happening in lots of ways, small and large.

To be successful on Wikipedia, you need to know how to game the system.

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”

— https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6889752/

Another source: https://www.nature.com/articles/438900a

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.

I may just be seeing the problem in a different way because our positions seem irreconcilable. fair enough to your position though.

What? I'd be interested to see which digitized book provided a curated list of js exploits in a .txt ready to be fed into a parser...

Google certainly can help solve problems.

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.

I think this is completely wrong.

When I was in school (what the US would call K-12 school), our school library had Encyclopedia Brittanica and a few other large encyclopedias. We frequently used them as launching off points, because they almost always had a lot more information in them than "children's books" about a topic. In later years at school, it would start to make more sense to use the still-non-primary-source-books-but-still-much-more-detailed books in the library. In college university, we used a mixture of textbooks (still not primary sources!) and actual papers.

There is a complex web of information sources. Brittanica was fine back in my day as a "someone who knows something about this wrote up a really fine summary that will give you some directions". There's no reason for Wikipedia not to play this role today (it is both at least as accurate and more expansive than EB). There are many years of education before "seek[ing] out higher quality primary and secondary sources" makes much sense, and even then, the introduction you can get from Wikipedia will frequently stand you in good stead before doing that.

Yes, it is true that using Wikipedia the way you describe it is a bad habit, but that's precisely why children (and adults!) should be taught how best to use it. I remember being actually taught that EB was pretty much the entire summary of all human knowledge - laughable now. We can do better than that by embracing, not by rejecting, wikipedia.

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!).

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.

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