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.
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.
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 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 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, I think you can get subscriptions to Encyclopedia Brittanica now? But that costs actual money.
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).
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.
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.
Then anyone following can see what you saw.
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.
With the exception of secondary research, like systematic reviews. Conclusions are good to have.
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.
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)
Anything you write on Wikipedia 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.
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.)
PaulDavisThe1st: you should definitely publish your anecdote(s) and corrections somewhere, and not just for Wikipedia’s benefit.
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.
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.
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.
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.).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_Wikipedia
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, but other times intentional fabrications. In the academic literature you can find false history, faked study data, invented interviews, legends presented as factual, promotion of snake oil, apologies for genocide, and whatever else you might worry about in a source.
What do you consider 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.
When people say not to cite wikipedia, they're telling you to not do this. They're not asking you to plagiarize wikipedia.
Teachers telling students they can’t under any circumstances cite Wikipedia trains this behavior.
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.
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.
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.
Seems like >$235MM in net assets excluding the $100MM in the Wikimedia endowment and growing at a healthy rate YoY.
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...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/e/e4/Wikim...
Latest financial report: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikim...
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...
Why not? Don't you Google answers to questions? It's what they will be doing most of their life.
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.
It worked for most of us, but politics is creeping into everything and budgets are getting cut all over the place.
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.
Can you give an example of something you've been searching for?
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.
> Everyday I hate this website and the people on it more.
Why?
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.
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).
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.
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.