| ▲ | jl6 5 days ago |
| Wikipedia is fabulous. I wish educators would stop telling people that it’s not reliable, and start using it to teach media literacy - which, for wiki purposes, is essentially to read the talk page to see what viewpoints have been included and excluded and why. |
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| ▲ | GuB-42 5 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| When educators say that Wikipedia is not reliable, what they usually mean is that serious work should be based on primary sources, not secondary sources like Wikipedia or any other encyclopedia. Wikipedia is good for casual research, and in practice, I found the English Wikipedia very reliable, at least for scientific topics, but it is also pretty good on big controversial subjects. Reliability only starts to drop on minor subjects. But educators want you to go beyond that. Here, Wikipedia is just a starting point, with its best feature being citations. |
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| ▲ | Gander5739 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Wikipedia and other encyclopedias are tertiary sources. | |
| ▲ | crazygringo 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | No, they genuinely mean it's unreliable. Obviously popular articles are great -- they have so many eyeballs and editors that they're not just quite accurate, but often more comprehensive than other sources (in terms of describing competing schools of thought, for example). But when you really drill down into more niche articles, there's a tremendous amount of information that is uncited or not found in the citation, has glaring omissions, and/or is just plain wrong. These are the kinds of articles that get 1 edit every six months. It's those latter articles that are the reason Wikipedia is too unreliable to cite. (Also, Wikipedia is a tertiary source, as it is meant to only cite secondary sources, not primary sources.) | | |
| ▲ | nearbuy 5 days ago | parent [-] | | > (Also, Wikipedia is a tertiary source, as it is meant to only cite secondary sources, not primary sources.) Wikipedia absolutely cites primary sources (as well as secondary and tertiary sources), and this is in accordance with their policy. Breaking news stories and scientific papers are some commonly used primary sources. You may be thinking of their "no original research" policy or their warnings against editors adding their own interpretation to primary sources. | | |
| ▲ | crazygringo 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Perhaps I was a bit strict, but Wikipedia is mainly meant to cite secondary sources. When they explain where primary sources are allowed, they emphasize they "should be used carefully": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_and_usin... Also "Wikipedia articles should be based on reliable, published secondary sources, and to a lesser extent, on tertiary sources and primary sources." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research... The general idea is that primary sources have not been judged as notable by anyone. The fact that a secondary source considers it notable to include a primary source is a strong signal that the information has passed a first, minimal bar for inclusion in an encyclopedia. And when primary sources are cited, Wikipedia is exceptionally clear that they must be cited only for verifiable statements of fact, not interpretations or synthesis. That's what secondary sources are for. |
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| ▲ | scandox 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| My daughter's teacher told her class that Wikipedia is unreliable because it's just made up by volunteers. So I asked her where they should find information and she said other sites on the internet that can't just be edited by anyone. Blew my mind. |
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| ▲ | jl6 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I can’t count how many times I’ve heard “Wikipedia is unreliable because it can be edited by anyone”. I tend to think that Wikipedia converges on reliable because it can be edited by anyone. | |
| ▲ | Cthulhu_ 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This is the argument used for almost 25 years (...yes), did the teacher never get updated? I'd love to see your daughter submit something extremely wrong with citations from nonsense on the internet. | |
| ▲ | thefz 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Had a colleague make the same point on open source, "don't trust code everyone can modify". He was a bottom tier programmer at best. | | |
| ▲ | rollcat 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Is there any modern programming environment / IDE / toolchain / etc that doesn't heavily rely on open source work? Even initially-proprietary solutions like .NET are mostly OSS nowadays. | | |
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| ▲ | jajko 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Simple phrases heard elsewhere which make the person feel for 5s like a really smart experienced one in given topic, while being the opposite. A very common trait in large part of population, any population, which usually comes in pair with lack of critical thinking inward & outward. At the end though, most of us are guilty of such behavior from time to time. | |
| ▲ | SoftTalker 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The thing about Wikipedia is that every claim is sourced. And those that aren't are usually noted with a "Citation Needed" disclaimer. So even if Wikipeda isn't permitted as a direct source for students, it's a great place to find other sources for claims and facts about almost any topic. That's how I taught my kids to use it in school. It's a ready-made bibliography on almost anything. | |
| ▲ | jowea 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Did the teacher teach how to recognize a reliable other site? | |
| ▲ | Nition 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I have sometimes thought about firing up my old Encarta 98 CD. A bit outdated now though. | | |
| ▲ | Cthulhu_ 5 days ago | parent [-] | | I think you might be surprised, a lot of information on there is pretty timeless. Before Encarta and the internet, people would buy series of encyclopedias - but they wouldn't buy new ones every year. I'm seeing an ISO for Encarta on the Internet Archive, but I was hoping for a runnable version. | | |
| ▲ | InMice 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Dont use iso. Pick up an original CD for cheap on ebay. It's not the same without disc spinning | | |
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| ▲ | navigate8310 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| As a general site awareness program, Wikipedia, needs to highlight people to go and read the talk page. Many users are not able to appreciate this vibrant section of the website and assume facts of the article at face value. |
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| ▲ | sjapkee 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| >I wish educators would stop telling people that it’s not reliable Why? It's really not reliable. It doesn't have any decent standards for sources. Any controversial topic is a constant edit war. Wikipedia is only good when you're okay if info turn out to be false. |
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| ▲ | makeitdouble 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Aren't they exactly teaching students media literacy by warning them Wikipedia is not reliable ? |
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| ▲ | jl6 5 days ago | parent [-] | | No, because media literacy is not about sorting the world into “reliable” and “unreliable”, it’s about understanding a text in its full context. | | |
| ▲ | tremon 5 days ago | parent [-] | | ...and that includes assessing its accuracy and its reliability. |
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| ▲ | xwkd 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Critical thinking requires that the sources themselves are evaluated for bias. Anecdotally, I've come across several articles for which the bulk of citations all come from one source, and that source is a heavily political "newspaper" article. This is true for topics that are hot on all sides of whatever spectrum or division they tend to land. If Wikipedia is going to be taught to be used as a tool for research, then its governance structure should be taught and critically evaluated. The bias of the board of the Wikimedia Foundation should be taken into account. I suspect that the bulk of readers don't give a second thought to Wikipedia's Magisterium. |
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| ▲ | roflmaostc 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| totally agree. But in best case you check the reference Wikipedia is referencing which is usually the first source of a fact. |
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| ▲ | AdventureMouse 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Compared to an encyclopedia, Wikipedia is unreliable. That doesn’t mean that Wikipedia isn’t useful. But there is a hidden danger with Wikipedia being mostly reliable - people lower their guard and end up consuming misinformation without realizing. |
