Students should be encouraged to cite Wikipedia when they found information in Wikipedia, so that when they grow up and start writing real research papers they will continue citing Wikipedia when they find information there.
Finding information somewhere and then not citing it (or citing some random other source that actually says something different) erodes the whole academic project. Any teacher who tells their students not to cite Wikipedia should be ashamed.
It's worth noting that Wikipedia is not special in this regard — those same departments probably also consider it bad style to cite Britannica (and, if they don't, they should).
Encyclopaedias are meant to be starting points for research, not the ultimate destination. Editors, both of Wikipedia and otherwise, are not expected to be subject matter experts, which is why the guidance on Wikipedia is that you're not even supposed to use primary sources as reference, but rather secondary sources[0].
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research...
But what happens instead (in people’s published journal papers! not to mention news articles, etc.) is authors lazily crib material from Wikipedia and then either cite nothing or randomly pick works from among Wikipedia’s sources to cite without ever looking at them.
If you are writing a paper you should cite where you got the information. If the only place you looked was Wikipedia, that’s not great research practice but you should still cite Wikipedia. Honesty is an even more important part of scholarship than diligence.
I guess it's fine to be idealistic here but most reviewers would look down upon your work if you do this. And that impression can be the difference between acceptance and rejection. I'm sure ideally this shouldn't happen, but it is what it is for now.
Of course, dishonesty often works, but it undermines the whole endeavor.
(Although, the original author still deserves credit for their work. Perhaps the citation should be to the original work "via Wikipedia".)
When people don’t cite their actual sources it becomes orders of magnitude more difficult to figure out how they came up with their claims and trace the origin and transmission of those claims through the literature.
But this takes significant effort (like, a half-day of research to sort out one claim), and then sometimes back and forth with other Wikipedians to convince people that you actually chased down the real story.
The problem is that for every mistake someone is willing to put effort into fixing, there are another 100 that nobody ever notices.
So much criticism of wikipedia seems to come down to: wikipedia did X. I think X is wrong. Other people don't see it that way. I don't want to spend the time proving my point. How dare wikipedia not just take me, a random internet stranger, at my word.
All i want to know is how do y'all think it could possibly work differently? Everybody thinks they are right. Nobody intentionally is wrong. Obviously if you just show up, unwilling to explain why you are right or unwilling to accept compelling counter arguments to your point, its not going to go your way. Why would anybody think it would?
Activists are willing to invest orders of magnitude more time, energy, and discomfort into winning. They are willing to break most social norms to have their narrative become the default. They're willing to suppress facts that would support alternate narratives. They're willing to put their thumb on the scale when inconvenient facts are unavoidable. Et cetera.
Non-activists are not willing to do any of those things.
It's not about right or wrong, it's about activism: who engages in it and how much.
But sure, let's let the activists win—or force everyone to become activists to "compete". I'm sure that'll make the world a better place.
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Or we could ban activism since it is fundamentally anti-social bullying behavior. Maybe make a "code of conduct" that prohibits it. Just spitballing here…
It's pretty simple to identify activists mechanically (and at scale): they are in the fat part of the power law for contributions. Simply limit people's ability to contribute and et voilà !, the activism problem has been vastly reduced, if not eliminated. Non-activists now have a chance.
Most people at the top of the power law are not evil people. Its difficult to be both prominent and evil. The real pov pushers tend to keep a lower peofile to avoid discovery. That doesn't mean prominent people dont have beliefs, everyone does, but most people can have beliefs and behave appropriately.
I think your real objection is its more difficult to argue with an experienced person who is willing to devote more time. Which is true. It is after all why in the real world expensive lawyers are worth the money.
But why is that a bad thing. If another person simply has researched the topic more than you, they should win the argument. That is life, the more effort you put in, the more likely you get a positive outcome.
If you really believe power users are more likely to behave in bad faith or maliciously, i'd like to see some proof, because i highly doubt its true.
For example, in Australia there is a body that does sport participation statistics, Ausplay. They do this every year. It's a great source for sport statistics on Australia.
Two wikipedians decided that these statistics were not permissible in the sport in Australia article. They won :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Sport_in_Australia#RFC_on...
This is sport in Australia, which is not that controversial. Now things that are controversial like IQ or the role of heritability in ability are surely going to be problematic.
And an end result of No Consensus.
Framing this as if 2 Wikipedians exercising outsized power to produce this ruling seems disingenuous at best. And their basic objection (I only bothered skimming) of bias and ambiguity in the source/data/methodology seems fairly reasonable on its face; whether it’s correct I have no idea but it’d be a reasonable objection
As a policy, this whole thing seems like good behavior; the only gap is in the lack of voting participants. I suppose it is a real problem if the vote can’t be recast when more people are willing, but otherwise
The nature of any large project is that people will disagree and not everyone will get precisely what they want.
What was interesting is just how unobjectionable this addition is and how hard it was to go through all the processes.
I've added stats in a few wikipedia articles which have all gone in just fine. With this one part of it was OMG, really, you can just object and object and keep something out if you're determined enough.
(Disclaimer: I didn’t investigate this carefully enough to have a well formed opinion about the outcome.)
Also, there are stats in the article that are completely biased that are self-reported stats from sports organisations.
The people objecting to new stats had no problem with these ones.
FYI this kind of "wrong think" is already being removed in many articles. The way it's removed is applying the existing deep and numerous rules more strictly to information which cuts against the current dominant cultural narratives. For one of the best examples I can provide, have a look at how the "Feminism" and "Men's Rights" pages are written. Completely different standards for evidence, commentary, style, and even sections. Criticism of men's rights is evident in the heading, while of course, there is no criticism of feminism in Feminism's heading.
Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger has described Wikipedia as "badly biased." He's 100% correct.
Larry Sanger is involved with several competitors, including some for-profit examples, so he has a financial incentive to bash wikipedia
Not to say that he is neccesarily wrong. I wouldn't say "badly biased", but nobody is going to claim wikipedia is perfect.
I was curious and I looked it up:
Sometimes the discussion will have the same correction listed but overruled by partisan Wikipedians.
You could equally well say “I find obvious errors in textbooks / lecture videos / journal articles / paper encyclopedias / ... all the time but it’s too hard to contact the author so I don’t do anything about it”.
The main difference is that in Wikipedia you can do something about it with some extra effort. So it’s actually a much better situation than most kinds of resources.
The pages that are “locked” are usually locked because they are spam magnets. Not allowing IP edits is unfortunate (and does discourage simple corrections to articles), but in the highest traffic parts of the site the work saved from not having to revert dozens of low-effort vandal posts is (at least arguably) worth the downside.
> overruled by partisan
You wouldn’t believe the amount of abject nonsense and spam that gets cleaned up by those “partisans”. But Wikipedia is an open project, the “partisans” here are just other (slightly more experienced) volunteers not in any way fundamentally different from yourself, and if you can convincingly prove your case via polite conversation you will win the argument (if there is a local dispute it’s generally possible to get more eyeballs on it by escalating to a broader group of volunteers).
* * *
P.S. someone named Slartibartfast turning down a chance to work on the real-life Hitchhiker’s Guide?
For former encourages the behaviour of finding other sources that are reliable. The latter encourages quoting Wikipedia without citing it.
However! It's also important to teach students how sources differ in quality or "authoritativeness". The problem with citing Wikipedia is not the citing per se but relying on that source. A peer reviewed academic journal is considered more reliable, although no source should be taken as gospel and definitive truth, especially on controversial topics.
You can even cite blog posts, personal letters, and even personal oral communication! The point is to let the reader know where your info comes from. Making students memorize rules like "don't cite Wikipedia" just results in a cargo cult, not actual understanding of critical thinking related to sources.
References themselves are gameable. They argue references mentioned in Wikipedia are more likely to be cited by a judge!
This is not about the quality of Wikipedia, but about its undue influence and how easy it is to game it, references included!
The difference is that a crowdsourced resource like Wikipedia is easier to manipulate by people who understand the system. There are plenty of PR specialists who get client articles pushed into Wikipedia or updated to their liking.
Wikipedia is a treasure, but it’s also vulnerable to a bunch of different attacks.
False ideas can be spread simply by overemphasizing biased true statements and disregarding true statements that don't fit the narrative.
The effect can be multiplied by controlling the discussion through selecting the right 'questions' that are discussed.
Snopes is the exemplar.
If you're looking for major/important sources to read on a topic, not just a quick way to halfway-fake a works-cited section, I've found it valuable to locate some representative, recent academic book in the field and read the author's introduction and other pre-chapter-1 material. These will often include a lot of name-dropping of what are considered major works in the field. There may also be a list of abbreviations the book will use, and those often include several major works in the field that'll come up often in the body text.
That's your list of books and papers to find and read. Repeat that technique with each of those books and papers, too, if you want to keep going deeper.
Often you can get enough off an Amazon or Google preview of a book for this to work. Plus, libraries exist, and you pull that kind of information out of several books (which can be handy—anything that appears more than once deserves special attention) in less than an hour, without checking anything out. And there's always Library Genesis, which may not have every book but probably has at least one in your interest area that can be mined in this way.
Wikipedia's sort of useful for this, at least for tracking down a first work to attack with this approach, but the problem is that many articles don't cite highly-regarded or authoritative or landmark works on the topic, so much as whatever the author(s) happened to have handy or what was easiest to find online (a whole hell of a lot of great information is still not available on the Web, even in 2022, including material in very recent books, not just pre-Web ones, or is available on the Web but only in poorly- or not-indexed-by-web-search-engines under-copyright ebooks).
Start with a couple keywords. Click through the "cited by n" links on the top few papers. For papers that don’t have PDFs freely available, find DOIs and put them into Sci-hub. Books can often be found at the Internet Archive, Google Books, or libgen. At the start, skim skim skim.
Look at what links forward and backward from the papers you see. Hunt for new keywords to try. Go a few hops all around the graph. It often doesn’t take too long to get a rough lay of the land.
There is a huge body of knowledge that lies (dare I say) in a Google search. You just need to know how to evaluate the search results with a reasonable criteria of notability, relevance, accuracy, etc.
No shade intended, if anything I need to work on this style. I'm too nervous of making it sound like other people's ideas are my own, but then I end up writing a block of defensive-sounding citation & qualification, and nobody wants to read that...
Anyways, well said.
https://aacrjournals.org/cancerdiscovery/article/12/1/31/675...
Ed. competently replaced usefully
EDIT: I hear complaints from students all the time that they are not allowed to cite Wikipedia. I tell them no you should instead cite the Wikipedia citations. They invariably tell me how much better they do academically because of that.