Wikipedia facts
 

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This is one of the big problems with the internet, is that research is not really done anymore, people assume "facts" from online as 'facts' and wikipedia is assumed to be a bible.

Wikipedia as a Bible? Hardly. It's more like the inside of a public bathroom stall scrawled with trivia.

I'd imagine most professionals look at Wikipedia the way a classically-trained musician looks at Nirvana.

I beg to differ on the Nirvana analogy...but your bathroom wall idea is right on the money. I think that's one of its "endearing" traits: you can read while taking a shit, or leaving one if you prefer.

I didn't wanna get into crap talk, but I'm glad you got the picture. :thumbsup:

Wikipedia as a research tool is little more or less useful as encyclopedias as a research tool. They are virtually the same thing when it comes to information/knowledge.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

They are starting points for knowledge, not the be-all and end-all.

every single class I teach I tell students that they should not quote wikipedia in their final papers. Every semester, at least 5 do.

personally, i don't have a problem with wikipedia. i don't buy the line that Named Authorities make infotainment more reliable, particularly not at the level of encyclopedia entries. which are problematic in themselves, particularly at the pop level (there are some good ones, though, but you may or may not read them...) wikipedia has to be read critically, but so does everything else.

wikipedia is relatively transparent when it comes to disputed information.

of course it changes quicker than paper-forms and so is open to getting pranked, but so what?

sometimes it seems that folk want Authorities so they can read something, pretend they know all there is to be known, and not think any more about it. but that has nothing to do with quality of information, and everything to do with passivity in the face of it.

The illustrious peer review process must be maintained. High and mighty "authoritative sources." Integrity'd!

...

I like Wikipedia.

It's full of all sorts of random stuff and the references section of a Wikipedia page is often a great place to start when researching any given topic.

Oh, I like wikipedia. But to use as a source when a source needs to be used in an academic (or otherwise) paper is unacceptable. Not because wikipedia is unreliable (though it often is, but that is not exclusive to it), but because wikipedia is not a real source for anything. There is no wikipedia research division. Any finding or statement of fact is not originated by wikipedia itself, so the original source used by whoever edited the wikipedia entry should be checked and then used as a source.

You're my kinda genius.

Yes indeed.
We need to keep a voluminous supply of petri dishes handy, though;
his appetite is voracious.

But how is that any different from students or journalists or anyone else reading a printed book or magazine article and treating what is written there as gospel? It's what generations of well-trained pupils have been doing for professors and teachers who demand obedience to established doctrine.

If anything, I'd argue that, in many circles, people are questioning things more rather than less, given the prevalence of Internet hoaxes, faulty info, etc.

The challenge in media circles is that there is such an enormous pressure to get articles out right away that journalists and editors may not be fact checking as often or as thoroughly as they should.

Big words are big thoughts?
They have led us into war
and even worse things.

Most books by good publishers and refereed articles have to go through an anonymous review process by other specialists.

I totally agree with you about wikipedia being better info than the talking heads on news shows. The majority of wikipedia is very accurate, and the parts that are contested are usually noted. It's a good place to get a general information about something you have no clue.

Wikipedia is a grand experiment in "collective knowledge".

Wikipedia is great for casual research. I find that if I'm looking into something with any degree of seriousness, the sources cited there are as good a place as any to start.

I consider it more of an aggregator than a resource in and of itself.

That doesn't matter in this case. The way students have traditionally learned has long been reliant on simply learning what has gone before and parroting it back to the teachers. The same people go on to write the high school and college text books, and simply write what they had learned 20 years before (often in very narrow fields of endeavour, without understanding other fields that may impact their work) with only minor tweaks that don't reflect true original ideas or new concepts. Most such texts are actually long out of date by the time they are written and published as most fields are incredibly resistant to new theories and change.

The use of the Internet for research allows for the exploration and consideration of a far greater data set than you'll find in a text book - and even if some of the information on various sites is not always 100% proven, it can open the mind to far greater learning than what is contained a text book.

Unfortunately, Wikipedia is now so mainstream it is falling into the same trap!

As someone who is a student, someone who plans to go into journalism and someone who LOVES just sitting and reading Wikipedia to waste some time, I think that Wikipedia is a great innovation in the distribution of information. However, I would never, ever, ever consider using the information in an academic or professional context on it's own.

I believe Wikipedia is not a source: it's a REsource. It's a place to use as a starting point to learn about a subject and find additional information. That's why the citations are so important to the information that gets placed on the site.

I would consider using Wikipedia as a source to be like going to a city's tourism/visitor's center, reading the pamphlets and saying you went to all of the sites.

~~~~~

The actual SOURCES at the bottom of Wikipedia pages are as good as any other type of information used in a research paper. Professors don't want you to put Cake - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia as a source, but using sources at the bottom of wiki pages is an excellent idea. Some wikipedia pages don't have sources so they shouldn't be used, but the ones that do have sources are perfect.

please ignore the following off the main topic post:

I agree, but more complex seems to, more often than not, stand in the way of simple, raw emotion and energy...except in rare cases of genius composers. The technical challenge of playing something complex on an instrument, even playing it very well, does not always make good music.

Hah!

Read the Article (before and after) here

AS sketchy as the Internet can be with information, the real indictment here is the laziness of some print media writers. Writing is a lot of work (and that's why I decided not to go into it, especially after those 8AM journalism classes on the other side of town. Nobody was meant to write that early unless, you've been up all night.) I've heard that even newspaper writers can get sloppy and just regurgitate press releases and fail to make the effort to break stories and investigate.

Trust the Internet with my information? Pornography? Sure. Research? Use a lot of independent sources and do the best you can.

Isn't wikipedia like the ole Guinness books -- great for when people got drunk and started debating facts? Speaking of the drink furthering humanity: people tend to forget that the encyclopedia, as we know it today, was compiled by communities in the UK a little like what we see on the internet (sans viral videos of Chocolate Rain). Forget the French.

there's something kinda strange about this distinction. of course, how strange it may be is a function of the discipline that you work in, but still...

as a preamble, since others are giving them, i'm trained as a historian and taught for quite a few years and may do it again...

when you start out in this kind of game you are presented with a bunch of assumptions about how academic infotainment operates that get less and less obvious the more you think about/have experience of what they actually entail.

the idea of an "original source"---what exactly does that mean?
what exactly does the presence or absence of footnotes get you? what do you do with the footnotes you encounter? typically, if you are not yourself researching a topic similar to what you're reading about, you won't chase the footnotes: you'll simply see in them some kind of guarantee of some kind of legitimacy...but on what basis? just because you're told that's what footnotes let you see? citations add a certain degree of transparency to a text, but if you think about it, it's actually less transparent than are questions of method and/or procedure, which are generally somewhere in the machinery of the text itself.

you could say, and folk do, that cites are a way to acknowledge what you appropriate--but if you think about it, everything is appropriated (for example, it's not like you're inventing logic when you use it; it's not like you're inventing anything in terms of sequences of words that you make....), so what they amount to is an acknowledgement of particular types of appropriation--what you can remember; what positions your work socially within a particular academic context. and this seems more the function of citations---positioning within a particular discourse or set of discourses---not a guarantee of anything.
it's easy to imagine that someone can develop entirely absurd interpretations littered with citations. it happens *all the time*....
for example, it's not as though the fact that you cite a bunch of sources means that you're not cherrypicking. this too happens *all the time*...

what exactly is original research? in history, the standard mythology involves a heroic Explorer heading into an Archive to wrest a text or image from the Obscurity of a box. the "original research" element consists in the integration of this New Tidbit back into the grid of already available tidbits. if you push at this---or the notion of "original research" in most any field--things start to dissolve.

peer review seems useful as an editorial process, but doesn't guarantee anything about the quality of a piece or the interpretations advanced in them--what it does function to guarantee is that whatever's in a piece conforms to the perceptions particular to the reviewers of what is or is not the state of the field at that moment. in it's detail---in what you get back from a reviewer for example---you can get tremendously helpful (or destructive) information--this is important because typically you do not get a whole lot of feedback about what you publish out there...i'm continually surprised that anyone's read any of my stuff because from what i hear back, it might as well not exist...so the texts might be better edited and maybe better overall for the editorial side of the review process---but as a guarantor of anything, as a process that one points to and says "x is a scholarly journal" because "it is peer reviewed"---i think it's pretty much meaningless.

you aren't off the hook for critical reading. there's no way off of it.

Yup, this point hits it exactly. From Wikipedia you can often find a valuable list of relevant sources when researching some topic.

But yea, if anything, I think this story showcases some striking and disappointing ineptitudes among these journalists.... almost makes my hometown newspaper look half decent.

As a quasi-journalist, Wiki is the first stop to gather preliminary information but never as a final or only stop. And when I'm in a debate with someone and they quote something from there, my head screams "unacceptable!" and I'll try to verify that info elswhere. If I can't, then the opposer to me is less than accurate.
For my side, I try to get 3 different sources away from Wiki before I'll consider using it, which by then makes it kind of moot.
It's like buying wine at Walmart. Might be just as good if cheaper, but just doesn't "feel" right and makes me think "inferior".

~~~~~

Wikipedia is a secondary source, it's that simple. They have an official policy prohibiting original research and the community tends to enforce it well, especially in articles where there is little controversy.

I'd also like to use this platform to promote my proposition that, rather than calling obsessively dedicated Wikipedia editors "Wikipedians," we use the term "Wikipedophiles."