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MasterP said:
Nickname said:
MasterP said:
MasterP said:
either prove I’m lying or shut the *edited* up
there is no statement in this thread for us TO disprove, so im not sure why you keep stressing this point…
Their bashing is a continuation from the other thread where Bitey accused me of making most of what I posted up. I asked for proof that I made it up and got “you can’t use Wiki as a source you noob” as a reply. It doesn’t really prove what I posted to be wrong but ok…
Which is more likely to contain accurate information: a wiki page written by 8 people or a journal article written by 2?
**a wiki page written by 8 people writing through hear-say or a journal article written by 2 who have done plenty of research in that field. (im just being facetious lol)
That doesn’t matter. It’s still an Encyclopedia. You can have the most exhaustively researched, unbiased, perfect wiki page that no one in the world disputes, but the fact that it has been summarized from primary and secondary sources mean that the information itself loses value. The more steps from a primary document to the final product, the less the value of the information. Wiki is really only bad because of this.
Citing information of wiki is all and fine for forum debates because posting huge documents is retarded and a good summary is fine. When you start asking for specific entries and page numbers like you did with NuRayz, then wiki becomes an improper source and you should not use it as such.
MasterP is right though, Wiki used to be *edited* with terrible information but in the past 3 years it has become respected for this thoroughness in fact checking. Yes there are better sources out there, but for quick reliable information, there isn’t anything better.
MajorMajorMajor said:
[That doesn’t matter. It’s still an Encyclopedia. You can have the most exhaustively researched, unbiased, perfect wiki page that no one in the world disputes, but the fact that it has been summarized from primary and secondary sources mean that the information itself loses value. The more steps from a primary document to the final product, the less the value of the information. Wiki is really only bad because of this.
Then it suffers no more from this flaw than any other encyclopedia. When you think about it, the people writing the Britanica or Encarta articles didn’t put EVERY fact in there, they couldn’t without making the encyclopedia twice the volumes that it already is. They summarized while maintaining a certain degree of thoroughness, which is exactly what Wikipedia does, only Wikipedia artcles aren’t limited in length based on arbitrary publishing limits and the more thorough topics usually have dozens of cited sources.
MajorMajorMajor said:
Citing information of wiki is all and fine for forum debates because posting huge documents is retarded and a good summary is fine. When you start asking for specific entries and page numbers like you did with NuRayz, then wiki becomes an improper source and you should not use it as such.
That was a rhetorical question because the information I was asking for, IE his figures were in the legislation, wasn’t possible to locate because they weren’t actually in the bill. It’s not really fair to penalize Wiki for not publishing false information lol
MajorMajorMajor said:
MasterP is right though, Wiki used to be *edited* with terrible information but in the past 3 years it has become respected for this thoroughness in fact checking. Yes there are better sources out there, but for quick reliable information, there isn’t anything better.
Wiki is routinely used in journal articles as a primary source, especially in theoretical and cutting-edge research topics. By the time a “scholarly” book on the subjects is written, reviewed, published, and bought, at least 1/3 of the material in it has been proven wrong. Not pulling that number out of my *edited* either, I’ve experienced it first hand in physics of all things.
If my senior research findings get published, which could happen in the next couple months btw
Wiki will be one of the primary sources. We won’t be laughed at for doing it either.MasterP said:
Then it suffers no more from this flaw than any other encyclopedia. When you think about it, the people writing the Britanica or Encarta articles didn’t put EVERY fact in there, they couldn’t without making the encyclopedia twice the volumes that it already is. They summarized while maintaining a certain degree of thoroughness, which is exactly what Wikipedia does, only Wikipedia artcles aren’t limited in length based on arbitrary publishing limits and the more thorough topics usually have dozens of cited sources.
I compleletly agree. I graded a project once where someone used Encarta as their main source. While the information was correct, I still penalized them for not finding the information from 1st/2ndary sources like the assignment asked.
Quote:
If my senior research findings get published, which could happen in the next couple months btw
Wiki will be one of the primary sources. We won’t be laughed at for doing it either.I will laugh, then realize I have no idea what was said in your paper, then I will look to wiki for the basics.
MasterP said:
That was a rhetorical question because the information I was asking for, IE his figures were in the legislation, wasn’t possible to locate because they weren’t actually in the bill. It’s not really fair to penalize Wiki for not publishing false information lol
i thought we eventually found the figures? or am i just retarded?
edit:
yeah see, the figures are right on page 730 a little more than half of the way down:
http://democrats.senate.gov/reform/patient-protection-affordable-care-act-as-passed.pdf
thx nickname!!
You’re not bursting my bubble, I know wiki has been around for a while, 9 years is not that long though… Anyways as I have said like a million times over in this thread, wiki is fine for a checking source, I just don’t think it should be the end all be all when you are researching…. Basically this : “I understand what their concerns are. There’s no question that [on Wikipedia and similar sites] some things are great and some things are questionable. Some of the pages could be by eighth graders,” he said. “But to simply say ‘don’t use that one’ might take students in the wrong direction from the perspective of information literacy.”
Students face “an ocean of information” today, much of it of poor quality, so a better approach would be to teach students how to “triangulate” a source like Wikipedia, so they could use other sources to tell whether a given entry could be trusted. “I think our goal should be to equip students with the critical thinking skills to judge.”
Since you clearly missed it. Everything else was just trolling you and now I am fat thanks to all the food, thanks…
MajorMajorMajor said:
I will laugh, then realize I have no idea what was said in your paper, then I will look to wiki for the basics.
Nickname should get the gist of what’s going on in it. Everyone else, though, is *edited*ed lol
Our only criticism during the mid-project presentation was that we needed to dumb things down for the audience… and they were all engineers
NuRayZ said:
MasterP said:
That was a rhetorical question because the information I was asking for, IE his figures were in the legislation, wasn’t possible to locate because they weren’t actually in the bill. It’s not really fair to penalize Wiki for not publishing false information lol
i thought we eventually found the figures? or am i just retarded?
Nickname was gracious/bored enough to go find it. The meaning behind that post was they weren’t the figures you said they were and thus would be impossible to locate. There was no question that figures were there
Bitey said:
You’re not bursting my bubble, I know wiki has been around for a while, 9 years is not that long though… Anyways as I have said like a million times over in this thread, wiki is fine for a checking source, I just don’t think it should be the end all be all when you are researching…. Basically this : “I understand what their concerns are. There’s no question that [on Wikipedia and similar sites] some things are great and some things are questionable. Some of the pages could be by eighth graders,” he said. “But to simply say ‘don’t use that one’ might take students in the wrong direction from the perspective of information literacy.”
Students face “an ocean of information” today, much of it of poor quality, so a better approach would be to teach students how to “triangulate” a source like Wikipedia, so they could use other sources to tell whether a given entry could be trusted. “I think our goal should be to equip students with the critical thinking skills to judge.”
Since you clearly missed it. Everything else was just trolling you and now I am fat thanks to all the food, thanks…
I missed nothing, what you’re quoting is someone trying to explain why it’s good to teach students to question sources of information that contain accurate information just because it’s on the internet and instead of taking that accurate information and acting on it, to intentionally search for information that contradicts it.
And what does he mean by “Wikipedia and similar sites”? Similar “untrustworthy” sites such as the IEEE journal archive? Britanica Online? Dictionary.com? Conference proceedings? There are VERY few thorough online reference sources and fewer still that are actually free. It’s that free and open part that’s the real deal killer for librarians like the one you keep quoting. School librarians, since day one, have been against FREE reference material of any kind. To them, anything that didn’t cost money isn’t a credible source, regardless of how accurate the information is. Don’t take my word for it though, go look at any accuracy or comparative study done on Wikipedia and what you’ll find is that librarians, in every study they’re involved in, have given Wikipedia a bad review. You’ll also find that science-related reviewers generally find Wiki to be as accurate, if not moreso, than Britanica and w/e the big German one is and give it praise despite the noted layout issues some articles have.
So like I said earlier, the science-related majors generally love it and liberal arts hate it. It’s curious that you’d choose to quote from an article titled “A Stand Against Wikipedia” when there are more than enough neutral articles you could have quoted from. Are those the kind of articles you read when you were forming your opinion of Wikipedia or did you pick articles that weren’t completely negative?
MasterP said:
So like I said earlier, the science-related majors generally love it and liberal arts hate it.
I found this really interesting. I believe I actually said “hmmm” lol
I think this may be true. From just looking at my friends, the engineers and guys in biochem tend to use wiki as source for equations, chemical compounds, or basic information to help with their electives. Us history majors really only use it as a jumping off point and for date accuracy because we have it beat into us that Wiki is not a proper source.
Not sure how this came to be as I feel both groups need to analyze the information and come up with interpretations of the data. I think the “no wiki” rule that many teachers ascribe to are to merely make the student look at more sources to construct a better argument. (at least in history)
Also,most of my professors currently do not hate wiki. One or two themselves say that wiki is the first place they look when they need to check something. So maybe its a random thing, not a classified by major thing.
HA MAJOR THING MAJORMAJORMAJOR
MasterP said:
I missed nothing, what you’re quoting is someone trying to explain why it’s good to teach students to question sources of information that contain accurate information just because it’s on the internet and instead of taking that accurate information and acting on it, to intentionally search for information that contradicts it.
And what does he mean by “Wikipedia and similar sites”? Similar “untrustworthy” sites such as the IEEE journal archive? Britanica Online? Dictionary.com? Conference proceedings? There are VERY few thorough online reference sources and fewer still that are actually free. It’s that free and open part that’s the real deal killer for librarians like the one you keep quoting. School librarians, since day one, have been against FREE reference material of any kind. To them, anything that didn’t cost money isn’t a credible source, regardless of how accurate the information is. Don’t take my word for it though, go look at any accuracy or comparative study done on Wikipedia and what you’ll find is that librarians, in every study they’re involved in, have given Wikipedia a bad review. You’ll also find that science-related reviewers generally find Wiki to be as accurate, if not moreso, than Britanica and w/e the big German one is and give it praise despite the noted layout issues some articles have.
So like I said earlier, the science-related majors generally love it and liberal arts hate it. It’s curious that you’d choose to quote from an article titled “A Stand Against Wikipedia” when there are more than enough neutral articles you could have quoted from. Are those the kind of articles you read when you were forming your opinion of Wikipedia or did you pick articles that weren’t completely negative?
Do you take everything I say negatively? No I don’t only read negative articles about Wikipedia, I even went and wasted my time looking at your retarded accuracy studies for Wikipedia. Just so you know I chose that article because I was curious what they had to say about it, I referenced it because even though the title of the article is negative it is more of a fight for the USE of Wikipedia than against it. If you would take your head out of your *edited* for two seconds you would see that I personally am agreeing with you that Wiki is a great source for most information finding, especially in quick reference.
I don’t understand how you take ‘Students face “an ocean of information” today, much of it of poor quality, so a better approach would be to teach students how to “triangulate” a source like Wikipedia, so they could use other sources to tell whether a given entry could be trusted. “I think our goal should be to equip students with the critical thinking skills to judge.”‘ as a negative action against Wikipedia, as far as I can tell the person is saying to USE Wikipedia, break it apart and reference other proven sources to check its validity, just like you should do for anything you find anywhere, whether it be a scholarly resource or Wikipedia, you should never go one place, do a search, find what you want and then immediately reference it as the one source, researching 101? Hence why I have no issue with what this person says, I think it should begin to be used as a source, but it isn’t and never should or will be the end all source for researching, no one source ever should be.
So please do me a favor and take your head out of your *edited*, so I don’t have to break this stuff down for you, STOP BEING NEGATIVE, not everyone agrees with your world view and just because I disagree with you that Wikipedia is not the second coming of Christ does not mean that I am immediately wrong.
tl;dr I agree with MasterP, Wikipedia is a great source for quick reference and beginning research, but it should be checked like all other sources when you research, he needs to stop taking what I say negatively.
Bitey said:
tl;dr I agree with MasterP, Wikipedia is a great source for quick reference and beginning research, but it should be checked like all other sources when you research, he needs to stop taking what I say negatively.
need moar summaries like this. i is lazy
Bitey said:
Do you take everything I say negatively?
If you would take your head out of your *edited* for two seconds you would see that I personally am agreeing with you that Wiki is a great source for most information finding, especially in quick reference.
My head’s up my *edited* because I took this statement to be negative?
Bitey said:
and never in a research paper. Which ever professor told you that is super fail. You can use it to find something and then check real legitimate non-profit or scholarly sources
lol?
Bitey said:
You missed the part about everything else being troll and me being fat now huh?
Maybe I like arguing with trolls…
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