Jimmy Wales Says Students 'Should Use' Wikipedia 345
An anonymous reader writes "The BBC has up an article chatting with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. Wales views the Wikipedia site as an educational resource, and apparently thinks teachers who downplay the site are 'bad educators'. '[A] perceived lack of authority ... has drawn criticism from other information sources. Ian Allgar of Encyclopedia Britannica maintains that, with 239 years of history and rigorous fact-checking procedures, Britannica should remain a leader in authoritative, politically-neutral information. Mr Allgar pointed out the trustworthy nature of paid-for, thoroughly-reviewed content, and noted that Wikipedia is still prone to vandalism.'"
How far along is wikipedia into it's corruption? (Score:2, Interesting)
It used to be Free and open.
Now it has secret overlords and secret mailing lists.
Anyone notice lately less and less pages can be edited?
How long until the same people who puppet the US mainstream media have total control?
Without TOTAL transparency wikipedia is nothing but a half-rotten corpse.
This is interesting... (Score:3, Interesting)
That's a new tack! This has basically been the same thing that the WMF has been saying for years now [wikimedia.org] ("Wikipedia, and all Wikimedia Foundation projects, are not in competition to EBI or other companies in the business of reference works. Our goals differ significantly from other reference publishers, and only overlap in that we are all striving to create accurate and useful knowledge tools.")
Is this a turning point in relations between the two projects? Are we going to see an end to the stupidity of Robert McHenry style "toilet" comparisons?
Re:Sure they should, sorta (Score:5, Interesting)
It also depends on your point of view if you think that some information is correct or not.
And don't forget - Wikipedia may actually contain original information from time to time and that's worth to consider. Just because some abuses the tool doesn't mean that the tool is useless. On the contrary - it means that the tool is actually useful enough to draw the interest of abusers. The only catch is to identify the abusers.
Re:Institutions (Score:5, Interesting)
And, yes, while the Feynman Lectures were intended for undergrads, a whole lot of people use them to study for PhD quals.
Quantum physics makes a great deal of sense in the only way that physical theories can: it explains our observations, to an uncanny level. *Why* it should be this way we don't really know. Quantum mechanics really isn't terribly counterintuitive; it's just *different* than the rules that govern large collections of matter. Those rules -- macroscopic mechanics, classical electromagnetism, and so on -- are just what happens when you look at the limit of quantum mechanics when a great many particles act together.
Re:They are bad teachers (Score:5, Interesting)
Have you ever actually read Wikipedia? Is there a different one I'm not aware of? That statement is wrong in two major ways:
1) Many things do NOT have links. You can find whole articles full of nothing but [citation needed] or ones without even that. Many things have links to sources, however many don't. As such while it can potentially be useful for background research, it isn't like a scholarly paper where you are guaranteed a list of works cited. Maybe you get that, maybe you don't.
2) Equally important many of the sources are not primary and often no good. I can link to a page saying anything I wanted. If I wanted I could just make some shit up, post it on my own website, and link to it. Bam, there's a source. However that doesn't mean the source is any good or that the information is true. A reference to a source is only good if the source is accurate, and really to be useful it needs to be to a primary source (meaning for statistics from research you don't link to an article discussing someone's research, you link to the research itself).
Wikipedia really isn't a good starting point for a scholarly paper unless you know nothing about the topic and are looking for general background. A search through a good library collection is going to get you far more useful starting points, and the works cited from those will continue it. With Wikipedia it's a crap shoot. Maybe you get a good article, edited by experts, with proper citations that will lead you to material you can use. Maybe you get a page written by an idiot, that links to misinformation.
Re:Wikipedia and pulp culture... (Score:4, Interesting)
"Reliability" of Encyclopedia Brittanica (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:They are bad teachers (Score:0, Interesting)
Wikipedia vandalism by the elite assessors with their secret mailing lists now comprises cutting out all reference to anything they don't approve of. So this advice will leave you (in some cases) with a biased and one-sided view of a subject.
Luckilly, the Illuminatii who control access to this knowledge all seem to be American. So if you look at a non-American topic it will probably be undefiled. Anything the Americans have an interest in, however, will be presented in a biased way.
So what the teachers should be saying is:
- Don't use it for American politics.
- When you use it for technical issues, ignore references to the long list of Americans who are claimed to have invented whatever it is.
- Don't use it for American history.
- It's probably ok for Geography and Maths, but don't expect decent coverage of any non-American place
- Don't use it for any reference to records or extreme human endeavor - non-American instances will be ignored
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Peer review (Score:4, Interesting)
You're kidding... right?
Just in case you're not, you might want to read about peer review [wikipedia.org] (at Wikipedia, of all places) as you don't seem to have a clue what it is...
Wikipedia can misappropriate the term "peer review" for itself all it wants, but that doesn't make it peer reviewed.
Re:They are bad teachers (Score:2, Interesting)
What Wiki lacks is refinement. An imposed authoritarian review of all contributions would kill the encyclopaedia, but there is no reason not to create a second "college level" crew of Wikipedians whose role would be verifying the factual accuracy/objectivity/style of their articles.
Personal experience... (Score:4, Interesting)
I found it and added some references to information that others might see past the usenet troll and flamer bias that was indirectly referenced in the article.
I then started up another article to further clarify the subject matter for which the bias in the article on myself was centered around.
It went up for deletion and realizing the negativity bias of Wikipedia I called upon the usenet trolls and flamers against me to contribute to the discussion with the bias of removing both articles.
Both articles were deleted. I'd decided I'd rather not be mentioned, nor do I need such unfairly biased publicity by being listed in Wikipedia.
I recently discovered even more unfair bias towards someone who is no longer alive to defend themselves. The article contains half truths and outright lies.
This persons certainly has more public status than I, but I will not mention who they are but rather collect up references not found on the internet that expose the unfair bias of wikipedia and share it with real people in real time, so that they can see how cleverly corrupt wikipedia really is.
Wikipedia is built upon hearsay, upon what they call as "references". That's its rules and done so in order to remove RESPONSIBILITY. Put the blame on the reference,
and we all know how much crap is on the internet. This is where the references must be found and be kinda be accessible, as wikipedia does not verify all references regularly and many become broken.
They pick and chose which things they reference off the internet and tend to bias on the negative by the weakness of facts the nature of the machine the internet is and likewise wikipedia is.
So they find the opinions of others written somewhere on the internet and they have their references. Hearsay is not allowed in court, facts are.
Wikipedia is not based on facts, its based on hearsay and THEY DO NOT HAVE THE PROPER RESOURCES TO DO UNBIASED RESEARCH and they never will.
I expect Wikipedia to be very capable of writing the next bible.
Wikipedia needs a "in your face" disclaimer on every article and every page.
I think you're missing my point. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:rubish... (Score:5, Interesting)
Inappropriate content in "safe" articles. (Score:3, Interesting)
I can fully understand the use of "questionable" content in articles ABOUT the "questionable" thing. (For example, the use of the f-word in articles about rappers as direct quotations from the rapper, or the use of a photo of a topless woman in the article on "breasts"; although there do seem to be so many in that article as to be gratuitous.) But in an article on stereoscopy? The picture belonged in an article on "turn of the 19-20-th century erotica", and if it was a prevalent use of stereoscopy, then maybe a MENTION in the stereoscopy article, but not an example. For example, the article on the VHS/Beta video format war mentions porn, but it doesn't have any screenshots of said porn.