OFF-TOPIC: taboo on using Wikipedia (school settings)

[Jeswin]

I was reading the commentary article "We Must Face the Threats" in J
Neuro [1] and noticed that they cite Wikipedia. Now, I realize that this
isn't a regular journal article but teachers and professors seem to
treat Wikipedia as absolutely verboten. If an article in a journal can
cite Wikipedia, then why can't it be used as a source in informal
assignments like homeworks. A research paper would require harder stuff
but in my experience thus far, Wikipedia is shunned by instructors.

Comments?

[1]http://www.jneurosci.org/content/29/37/11417.full.pdf

[vrgopal]

All info in Wikipedia is not reliable and well researched.Subjectivity is high in the contents.

V.Rajagopalan
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[Sebastian Cocioba]

The fact that it can be editable at any point can add some uncertainty
to the statements long term. There are info trolls out there. The idea
is that its better safe than sorry even though there are countless
articles on wiki that are posted by people in the field and they did
put in many verification tools to confirm quantitative metrics and
basic info so its a use at your own risk kind of resource. The school
issue, I think, has to do with wiki being considered a primary source..
Which its not.

Sent from my Windows Phone From: vrgopal
Sent: 7/30/2013 9:01 PM
To: diy...@googlegroups.com
Cc: diy...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [DIYbio] OFF-TOPIC: taboo on using Wikipedia (school
settings)

https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/diybio/697E5E37-70B2-4473-8178-4BC6652F91CB%40gmail.com.

[Avery louie]

Wikipedia is good for big concepts, but for more informed responses I prefer yahoo answers.

More seriously, I think profs might want you to learn how to use other media/searches, or just want to have you suffer through what they had to do.  Not everything is on the wiki...

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[vrgopal]

There is no alternative to first had examination of original papers.Wiki can create awareness not well researched contents.You can take help from wiki to get a crude picture of all contents.many articles hide the truth or written to propagate the glory of individuals.Editing from experts is not free and common statements are biased and promotes one sided view in the world of entropic knowledge.

V.Rajagopalan

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[Cathal Garvey]

There is a false perception that Wikipedia is a random free-for-all and
that it's exclusively written by untrained individuals. Further, that
statements are poorly sourced.

This varies widely between articles, but if you treat Wikipedia like
any other source of information, you'll be fine. That is, if you insist
on seeing reliable citations, observe the background on the article
(check edit history and talk pages for useful debate on content), and
when citing Wikipedia, *cite the current revision, not the wiki page*.
That is, go to "history", and get a permalink to the present revision,
so that your citation doesn't change under your derivative article.

Of course, academics as a rule dislike Wikipedia for the same reason
they dislike most distributed education platforms, so expect heavy bias
against it.

And, of course, bear in mind that even the best cited Wikipedia
articles can be exactly as bad as the best cited research papers:
written and supported by biased industry bodies, riddled with seemingly
reasonable logical fallacies, and drawing false conclusions from sound
data. Wikipedia is an Encyclopaedia. The only difference between it and
other Encyclopaedias is that it grows and amends more rapidly, and has
a long memory for prior state.

[vrgopal]

Wiki is used as an unverified info source of general knowledge by children.But academia has different views because of bias and incompleteness of info.Some topics are written by vested interests of business or some celebrities claiming facts and truth.Many topics and time frame details are twisted and false.Some details are hidden.For general reading with a pinch if salt it is ok.Otherwise no.

V.Rajagopalan
Sent from my iPad

[CodonAUG]

I became a bit jaded with Wikipedia when I tried to update the Wooly Mammoth article.  I revised a section on their relatedness and provided citations.  Someone with a history of edits simply stated that I was wrong and removed it.  The edit was then lost beneath thousands of unrelated bot spam-edits.  I don't intend on spending a couple hours of researching to have some jerk who didn't read the sources delete my work.

I do still love Wikipedia and rely on it for general stuff but I have no respect for its setup.  It would be great if there were a Wikipedia spinoff that would only update articles once and month and during that month there can be discussions about how to revise things.  12 article revisions a year is way easier to handle as a human than the nigh-infinite amount that there are currently.

[Cathal Garvey (Phone)]

There are plenty of Wikipedia forks out there, and thanks to the ShareAlike licensing any high-quality results can be fed back into the commons. The ecosystem is more important than the platform: perhaps wikipedia is faster, and another is more precise, and between them you get high-quality data.

Re: stupid users' edit bots auto reverting things, WP claim to have been reducing that bullshit, I've noticed a lot less of it.

--
Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.

[Cathal Garvey]

> Some topics are written by vested interests of
> business or some celebrities claiming facts and truth.Many topics and
> time frame details are twisted and false.Some details are hidden.

Sounds exactly like academic publishing to me. Without reliable
citations, a clear lack of vested or competing interest, a fully
available dataset for original work (which isn't actually permitted on
Wikipedia in any case), you can't trust anything, whether on a wiki or
not.

So as I said; if you study the article for evidence of bias or
competing interest, and ensure that the citations aren't complete
nonsense and actually back up the written text, then you can by all
means cite *that revision* of a wikipedia article, just as you can cite
any other body of text, ever.

If you don't do that, then your citation is as worthless as if you'd
cited a Seralini "GMO Safety" paper published in an "Academic Journal"
without studying *his* methods, citations, biases and industry
(and journal!) affiliations.