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Wikipedia and You
Polity
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Hi everybody; I'm relatively new to this forum (personal first, though yes I've been lurking). I attended a lecture last week at the university I attend that I think would go over well here. A history professor of some repute (Marshall Poe, if you're interested) gave a decent lecture about whether Wikipedia was the new up-and-coming brilliant tool for furthering education in a more democratic and fun way than The Educational System is doing, or a "Triumph of Amateurs," destroying accountability, research, and integrity. Being a college-aged Internet addict, I found it particularly interesting and dragged my girlfriend along to see the show. I left pretty excited about the whole project and way more knowledgeable than I had been, which I guess was the whole point of the lecture.
Anyway.
My question to you is this: Is it worth all the hulabaloo? Are standards being lowered/demolished/affected? What role, if any, should Wikipedia play in an academic environment? Schools are starting to disallow Wikipedia citations in papers and publications, which to my mind is rather silly and misses the point entirely - as somebody (I don't remember who) said, you're in college now - you shouldn't be citing the encyclopedia anyway. I'm not ashamed to admit that I use the hell out of it in the academic work I do - it works as a phenomenal starting point to guide research or whatever, and provides the added benefit of endless side-linking and cross-referencing as well as a robust set of citations (usually) for whatever topics I care to peruse. But am I cheating the system? Should we be using this tool or frowning on its inaccuracies, its biases (both presumably being worked on on a consistent basis), the fact that any wonko can log on and alter the article I'm reading about ancient Greece or whatever? It's an interesting topic, for your consideration.
~Paul~
Anyway.
My question to you is this: Is it worth all the hulabaloo? Are standards being lowered/demolished/affected? What role, if any, should Wikipedia play in an academic environment? Schools are starting to disallow Wikipedia citations in papers and publications, which to my mind is rather silly and misses the point entirely - as somebody (I don't remember who) said, you're in college now - you shouldn't be citing the encyclopedia anyway. I'm not ashamed to admit that I use the hell out of it in the academic work I do - it works as a phenomenal starting point to guide research or whatever, and provides the added benefit of endless side-linking and cross-referencing as well as a robust set of citations (usually) for whatever topics I care to peruse. But am I cheating the system? Should we be using this tool or frowning on its inaccuracies, its biases (both presumably being worked on on a consistent basis), the fact that any wonko can log on and alter the article I'm reading about ancient Greece or whatever? It's an interesting topic, for your consideration.
~Paul~
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Most of my time there is looking up things like Firefly or random character references I see in posts. I don't really care if the information about Wolverine's backstory or Batman's various cars over the years is overly accurate. I'd like to think/assume it is, but I know better than to take it as the gospel truth.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
But to be honest, most of the credibility problems could be fixed by:
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Well, the thing is that the insularity is used as a defense for those who know the system to push their beliefs. What makes it worse is the leadership encourages the bastards.
Anyway, it was my first real experience with a wiki-type page and I became interested with how it was set up. While I do not hold all information to heart, it is still a great source to answer minor questions and to end simple arguments. Also a good time killer at work.
I do get really frustrated at a lot of the math and physics articles, as they're clearly written by doctorates for people only slightly less-educated than they. Only rarely do they have links that clearly lead to more basic requisite concepts or actually explain the concept in layman's terms.
The article on orthogonal matrices is a good example; it's totally useless if you don't already have some college math courses under your belt, and the only link off to the article on matrices doesn't even take you to the top of the article, it takes you straight to the section on square matrices and you have to scroll up to read what a matrix actually is.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
My boyfriend is a computer science grad student and he loves those articles. They are exactly what he needs to understand a topic quickly, and don't beat around the bush with trying to explain advanced concepts to a naive audience.
No, Wikipedia isn't a replacement for all other forms of education, but then, how many people are going to say, "I know, I want to learn about Eigenvectors today despite not knowing what a matrix is?"
Doesn't he have access to a more scholarly resource that can do the same thing, like a textbook?
The common pro-Wikipedia argument is that it's not a replacement for scholarly resources; it's a place where the unwashed masses can rapidly familiarize themselves with a topic and find links going off to more in-depth and reputable sources. This is true for most articles, until you start looking at math and physics (and sometimes computer science) articles where the focus suddenly turns 180 degrees, and Wikipedia apparently becomes a resource for grad students to catch up on topics they missed when they slept in past lecture time.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
The advantage of having articles beyond the comprehension of the "unwashed masses" is that the unwashed mashes then tend to stay away from editing them as well, and any mistakes or vandalism is easily caught. The math and physics articles are shielded enough from the normal weaknesses of Wikipedia that they might as well be from a more private wiki, and they keep the advantages of cross-referencing with the more popular content.
edit: Yeah, what McDermott said.
It is an amazing starting point. Truly fantastic.
LoL: failboattootoot
The article was actually about evolution—and in particular, people's difficulty in accepting evolution, regardless of religion. The author claimed that many people have a conceptual difficulty in understanding how order can seem to emerge from a system based on nothing outside the system itself (hence the need for an intelligent designer). It's almost as if they instinctually can't wrap their heads around it.
He then brings up people's instinctual reaction to Wikipedia—how can this be accurate when it's written by a bunch of random amateurs arguing with each other on the internet? Again, there's the same kind of instinctual confusion/revulsion to the idea.
If you think about Wikipedia, it's actually pretty amazing in its scope and its accuracy, compared to other encyclopedias, and it all arose in a fraction of the time, seemingly out of nothing. Like opponents of evolution, people tend to ignore the effect that selection has on Wikipedia as a self-organizing system. Just like natural selection, Wikipedia's standard of selection (factual claims that are not cited with an appropriate source are deleted) is not arbitrary or random at all—it is highly directive.
Emergence theory, etc.
Though this is probably going to improve over time.
The sections of Wikipedia I most often use are actually those about difficult math and physics topics, as I've had nearly the exact opposite experience some of you apparently have. I've found that while a professor may give an obtuse or complicated explanation of a concept in class that I nod through, barely grasping the maths behind it while completely missing the maid idea, Wikipedia can give a phenomenal, concise, layman's-term definition that completely clears up why I'm doing the processes I'm grinding out, as opposed to simply how. I remember distinctly the first time this happened, when I was looking up cross products as they are used in relation to set theory. The first paragraph contains the precise mathematical definition as found in any textbook on the subject, an explanation of said definition, and a really good example using a playing card deck to give a more grounded example. I thought that was pretty impressive. I also just looked up eigenvalues despite the fact that I haven't used them in over three years and don't really remember how to, and got a decent crash course in their meaning and use. I suppose that could just be my college-math-educated predisposition speaking, but I found these to be fantastic sources for very clear, real-world explanations of difficult topics.
I totally accept that it's beneficial to the students who use it.
But as jothki said, the math/science articles are more like a private wiki. It's that there seems to be, at times, two different Wikipedias, with two different sets of authorships and readerships. There's the popular Wikipedia, for laypeople, and the semi-scholarly Wikipedia for students and scientists, and you only know where one ends and the other begins when you hit an article that lacks an explanation section.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I repeat though, I'm not talking about the discussion in this thread, which is valid and good. I'm just venting. Carry on.
Edit:
Also, re: the elitism of math/science Wiki articles, I'm proud to have been the originator of one such article, even if my initial rendition was fairly sparse.
However, when I see it in a first year undergraduate essay I
*I study Classics and most of the Wiki entries are so wrong I couldn't even begin to think about suggesting corrections.
Out of genuine curiosity, any example articles you can mention that are this completely wrong?
I don't mean to be a pretentious dick, but really I don't think that the orthogonality of matrices is really a meaningful concept without a fair degree of prior knowledge and education and understanding of matrix math. I mean, it's not the sort of thing that is really explainable or even meaningful outside of its context.
This one, where many of the "ideas" are at least 10 years out of date. It concentrates on the "clean" aspects of Martial and completely ignores the fact that most poems about women are obscenely critical and that over 30% of the 12 books are extremely obscene. Also, the way it tries to cover up the fact that the persona within the poems muchly enjoys the boy sex is laughable! The references include no mention of any of the current, or in fact past, reputable scholarship on Martial including Sullivan (1991) which was the first book length work written on Martial in English. Also, it has been shown that Martial was copying/heavily influenced by Greek Epigram (and I could go on for quite a while with other problems).
And that's just one author. It is true that some pages are better. For example, while the Juvenal page is badly laid out and explained, the reference section does include some of the important scholarship of the last thirty years. The page of Virgil is ok, though horrifically short and concentrating more on later reception of Virgil's works rather the works themselves, and again the references are inadequate.
I have a friend who is a graduate student and as such teaches classes and grades papers. Some of his students have cited Wikipedia on their papers. So, I think that smacking these students with the academic equivalent of a newspaper and sternly saying, "NO!" is a good thing.
Wikipedia is a good place to go to get a general idea of something, or to START one's research. It is a good source of general information. But if one *really* wants to know something then they need to find the information in an actual academic text which has been reviewed and edited by scholars. Anyone engaged in genuine academic persuits needs to shy away from it as anything more than a collection of general, yet unverified and possibly incorrect, information.
Fundamentally, though, I hate it. The idea that information can exist and be collected in the wikipedian manner completely goes against what we know to be the case given human history.
That's not pretentious or dickish at all.
I'm just saying that it should be relatively easy to step backwards to preliminary concepts. The orthogonal matrix article at least as a link back to square matrices, but many of the articles I've seen (I wish I had a good example off the top of my head but I don't) don't link back to simpler concepts at all.
I also have to wonder why some articles are deleted for being "unencyclopedic" while articles that only have value to people already well-versed in a subject are kept. It seems to be an inconsistent application of the Wikipedia standards. I'd argue that an article that requires higher education in a relevant field is itself unencyclopedic (even though it's obviously valuable to keep that article in Wikipedia where it can be easily found and referenced) and betrays a lack of focus. It's almost like the people who maintain Wikipedia can't quite decide what Wikipedia is meant to be.
And it's not a glaring fault. I'm not saying it's a nail in Wikipedia's proverbial coffin or anything like that. Such articles are better off being left alone than deleted; at least people who have said education could use them. But I do think they could benefit from a small amount of cleanup.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
So (speaking as a scientist woefully ignorant of anything vaguely arty) it's basically scolarly lit-crit stuff that's wrong/missing, rather than actual objective fact? Also, seems like some of the stuff you're mentioning is discussed on the talk page (which it seems to me should be considered part of the article if you're looking in this kind of depth). Not meaning to pick fights here, I'm just interested to know where people feel the major inaccuracies lie.
No, I'm talking fact as well. For example, at the end of the day all you can say about this person who seems to be called 'Martial' is that he might be Spanish...all that stuff about country house, etc? no other historical evidence at all. That his parents were called Fronto and Flacillia - also unattested, and could in fact have been the names of two of his slaves. While there is the caveat , it then goes on to claim 'facts' which cannot be verrified. When the only source of infomation is a satirical work, most likely with a persona as the narrator, things like this cannot be said (and it's annoying when they come up in essays with none of the counterpoints also in place).
Also, one of the decent things on the discussion page I presume you are referring to under the title "General"? That was me one night when I just got so narked at how wrong it is. And a lot of students don't look at that, just the front page (as it were).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia
Fourth paragraph down has the citations.
And here is a whole article on it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia
I think it is delightful that you cited wikipedia rather than the sources used by wikipedia for this particular bit of information.
That's what I would point to as the problem.
Well, for one thing I specifically pointed out where the citations were. For second, if you can find an error in one of these articles, then feel free to post it here.
Its not part of the problem, its part of why wikipedia is so useful.