FYI Wikipedia is a pretty legit encyclopedia now. I’m not saying you take every entry at face value, but they are sourced and edited, unlike most of the internet these days. It’s often a solid overview and a starter pack of primary sources
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Given the current trend against education, now might be a good time to download a local copy of Wikipedia. It's huge (50GB - 100GB), but there are tools that automate the process.
even back in the before time, enc. were used to give you a basic understanding of the subject. you would then go to the end of the entry to the bibliography for the actual source. wiki does the same thing.
When I tell my students that Wikipedia isn’t an acceptable source for their documents, I explain that it has nothing to do with accuracy. It’s just not primary. I encourage them to use it to get a quick overview of a topic and then use their sources as a jumping off point for further research.
Absolutely this! It’s not a source - it’s a starting point! It gives you places to go and can help you learn to evaluate primary sources and various claims
For some of the people who dunk on Wikipedia, I get "barely smart enough to get through university" vibes - for some reason, it makes them feel smart 🫠
Former English prof here — I have always thought Wikipedia was a great source for primary sources on a topic. Also, the document histories and editing logs are interesting in and of themselves.
Your middle school teacher finding out Wikipedia is one of the more reliable sites to find information nowadays after spending their entire career telling their students not to use it:
The problem with people understanding how to use Wikipedia is they don't know that it actually has a well maintained edit history - a complete history of edits including comments on why they were made.
If you were to cite or quote wikipedia, you could cite down to the specific edit made and why.
No one does that or acknowledges it because "haha community edited haha" - yet they'll throw a link in to a 10 year old wordpress site with no other sources that could go paywalled or offline tomorrow, or an obscure book lost in history that no one can verify
I encourage my students to use it, but I do have to also warn them of the slight Nazi bias. Generally leads to a practical lesson on how to identify bias and keep it in mind as you go. At least it’s (hopefully still?) mostly written by humans, too.
Yeah, Wikipedia is generally a solid source for a quick overview or starting point. I used it today for researching the use of fake ascetics as spies in ancient India. It sent me to a great translation and lots of frankly incredible ideas for doing evil things!
Yes, gone are the days where I blanket tell students not to quote it and demonstrate why by temporarily making one of them the queen of a small British territory or such for a few minutes.
I try not to dunk on folks here, so I didn’t Qskeet, but I suggest folks stop talking about Wikipedia like it’s garbage when it’s decent basic information and a solid stating point. AI, ads, junk algorithms, rightwing media moguls, and fact-averse govts have changed the landscape
Also I gotta tell you, in the age of chatGPT, telling students not to use Wikipedia is a skills issue. You can use it as a teaching tool. It’s a versatile, approachable way to teach about media literacy and primary sources. Crapping on it wholesale is a missed opportunity for engagement and learning
Do people not realize that part of their beloved LLMs are trained on whatever is on the web.. including Wikipedia? (and LLMs are still junk because not only is it not taggable with "citation needed", but because the creators do not have a financial interest in cleaning up the junk it is trained on).
I’m honestly not sure whether the people who use LLMs actually care. Maybe I’m wrong? But I don’t know how you can use those things blithely unless you either don’t care or don’t understand the very facts you just pointed out
I think it's the same kool-aid as crypto and blockchain, which, while all 3 have uses, they are extremely narrow, and a large portion of people bought into the hype and are probably psychologically afraid to let go: because companies like MS, Facebook, and Google "can't be wrong".
LLMs are more commonplace than they should be right now.
Excel is more useful to me than the majority of LLMs out there. I use Google Sheets more than LLMs. I have no desire to waste my time debugging hallucinations, which is a requirement for LLMs in addition to bias from training data.
I've been a postsecondary instructor since the early 1990s, and I think people make some great points. For topics where the knowledge is changing rapidly, the odds are it'll be more up-to-date than conventional published texts. It's a great starting point because you often get a sense
... of different perspectives on an issue, and what directions research may be taking. A lot of my students are still getting used to providing sources, and Wiki sets a good example and helps normalize that. The edit "paper trail" is also helpful.
I'm a physicist and have used Wikipedia as a resource to self-teach a number of very specific little things in electronics that I needed to learn quickly at a relatively shallow level.
Fantastic, broad resource. Donate a little money if you can, as I have.
This makes me so happy to hear! I have a PhD in literature, and I’ve used it as a starting point for particular historical periods that I needed context for, which helped me form deeper research questions, which took me to other resources, etc. And I do donate!
Exactly. Gets you enough of the basics to steer you into the deeper levels with some specificity, and is good at offering side branches you never could have thought of on your own, since you didn't know they existed.
The obscure technical articles are generally useless for the general audience - read just about any math article and see if you have any idea what it's talking about - but seem to be pretty good for specialists.
I’m a blue collar worker (mechanic currently) with an interest in math, and while there is certainly room for improvement, I’ve gotten through a lot of math articles on Wikipedia. I often do have to click some of the links to get more context, but I’ve found it a helpful reference.
That's how I was using it. I'm a specialist in certain things, and it was a great way to consume new things that were just outside my usual realm of knowledge.
I have seen groups constantly policing entries they dislike and removing things. I never take Wikipedia as a source just as a starting point where I verify things myself. I never cite them.
Plus it’s part of Wikimedia and Creative Commons and sometimes their maps and images (i teach art history) are the best on the internet. All free to use, and downloadable in multiple sizes.
1000%, and the people who dump on it almost invariably say "but ANYONE can edit it!" and then trust sources that are a single person with a Twitter account or something along those lines.
Strongly agree, and frankly that's the way any nonprimary source should be used, as a link with the primary, whether online or on a dusty shelf somewhere.
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I haven't used this one, but it seems legit:
https://kiwix.org/en/
no encyclopedia should be used as a source.
even back in the before time, enc. were used to give you a basic understanding of the subject. you would then go to the end of the entry to the bibliography for the actual source. wiki does the same thing.
(Also off-topic but the cat in your pfp is very cute)
A few years from now it may be one of only a few sources left that contain actual knowledge. If it survives that long.
I'd be surprised if it lasts much longer to be honest. If the US goverment doesn't kill it, then A.I. scraping might.
It’s a joke to think old encyclopedias were written with 100% facts and not rife with things that should be corrected
If you were to cite or quote wikipedia, you could cite down to the specific edit made and why.
No other resource is like Wikipedia
please follow
LLMs are more comparable to Excel in just how useful they are (and how far people are pushing them beyond their intended capabilities)
Excel is more useful to me than the majority of LLMs out there. I use Google Sheets more than LLMs. I have no desire to waste my time debugging hallucinations, which is a requirement for LLMs in addition to bias from training data.
This age needs more of our knowledge preserved in a form that can last for centuries.
Shoutouts to this browser extension too: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WWT
Tells you who wrote each piece of the article and when.
Fantastic, broad resource. Donate a little money if you can, as I have.
Really great.
You can explore a small rabbit hole and get everything you need.
What you won't find about traditional encyclopedias are publications on reliability or self reflection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia