Re:School vs. Wikipedia
by Broken_Hippo on Saturday October 08, 2022 @04:55AM
(#33130844)
And encyclopedias can easily not have your subject, be based on wrong information, and so on.
Teachers treated them like fact until high school, though: Only in my senior year (1995-1996) were we told that while we could get basic information from an encyclopedia - to help us search for information - we couldn't use the encyclopedia itself as a source of information.
I don't understand why folks aren't treating wikipedia the same way. In general, a wikipedia article is going to give a fairly good faith overview of a subject. There are going to be more subjects than could fit in an encyclopedia. Many articles will be more in-depth and a good number have references: In other words, you can go off and read the source material if you want and use that for more information.
Teachers treated them like fact until high school, though: Only in my senior year (1995-1996) were we told that while we could get basic information from an encyclopedia - to help us search for information - we couldn't use the encyclopedia itself as a source of information.
I don't understand why folks aren't treating wikipedia the same way. In general, a wikipedia article is going to give a fairly good faith overview of a subject. There are going to be more subjects than could fit in an encyclopedia. Many articles will be more in-depth and a good number have references: In other words, you can go off and read the source material if you want and use that for more information.