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JGWeissman comments on Yes, a blog. - Less Wrong
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How much does that happen? It is my understanding that educators don't mind students using Wikipedia to gather information, as long as they use Wikipedia's references to validate that information, and then cite those references. That is, Wikipedia is a valid tool for finding sources and summaries of those sources, but it is not a source itself.
Three out of sixteen teachers I can think of that mentioned Wikipedia recommended using its references, the other thirteen forbade its use and condemned it as inaccurate. They're usually alright with other encyclopedias, just not the one that clearly cites and links to its sources.
It is hard to admit that finding out most factual information is an outright trivial task these days and that most of what they had initially believed to be critical for rigorous research at the highschool level is now strictly inferior to reading wikipedia.
If they can't stop students from using Wikipedia, pretty soon schools will be reduced from teaching how to gather facts, to teaching how to think!
But, but, then I'll lose a good part of my competitive advantage!
I used to TA a class whose covert purpose was teaching students how to think. The class encouraged everyone to use resources like Wikipedia whenever they didn't know something, so that it could focus on things more interesting than merely gathering information. That class tried to get everyone to think about things, to use their existing knowledge to solve types of problems they'd never seen before, and to learn in a way that went way beyond memorizing facts and regurgitating them on the test. If the class covered probability, it would make students analyze card games or the lottery. If it reviewed trigonometry, students would have to derive some identities. In the labs, they had to write computer programs. And so on.
Many (most?) of the students were actively pissed off by this. Why were their questions to the professor answered with helpful links to Wikipedia or someone's lecture slides, or a web page? Why did the class refuse to tell them exactly what they'd need to commit to memory to get a good grade on the tests? It went against everything they'd come to expect from "education". And the computer programming was especially maddening; they couldn't just pattern-match their way through it without thinking.
It was a required class for all freshmen in electrical engineering, and a lot of the graduating seniors said it had been one of the most valuable classes they'd taken. Not because of the material it covered, but because it had shaken them out of the bad habits they'd been given in high school "to prepare them for college." It was an uncomfortable process for them at the time, though.
I think a class like this in isolation is bound to be off-pissing, no matter how useful it is. University courses have the extra problem of forcing you to be interested at a specific topic at a specific time. Students learn to grind through traditional courses even if they don't feel particularly interested in the topic at the time of taking the course. That course sounds like tossing undergrads into something like the environment grad students are in for the duration, and grad school has a reputation for causing massive procrastination. Free-form problems need more spontaneous enthusiasm to come up with good approaches to, and bringing that up for a semi-arbitrary topic on command is harder than having it for a topic you are already interested in.
It'd probably still be learnable, given a whole curriculum of courses like this instead of just the one.
That's fantastic. What school was this?
This is what kind of rubs me the wrong way about the above "idea selection" point. Is the implication here that the only utility of working through Hume or Kant's original text is to cull the "correct" facts from the chaff? Seems like working through the text could be good for other reasons.
I'm curious, have you used Wikipedia for non-scientific/technical stuff? it can be quite a biased source there..
Reading the discussion pages there can help with this problem.
The difference is really between using it and citing it. Its a nice first start, but not a good source to quote from.
And yet, citing from Britannica is okay - and Britannica doesn't cite its sources IIRC. And a head-to-head comparison found Wikipedia to be more accurate. (Citation needed.)
When I was in high school, citing from Britannica was not acceptable!
Wow. What was left? "It doesn't count unless it is on parchment!"?
I think the reasoning was that an encyclopedia is a good starting point, but isn't a real source, because it's brief and compressed. But really I'm not sure why, in fact. Why couldn't you cite the encyclopedia for simple, verifiable historical facts? It's not as if Britannica is going to be less accurate than a "real book" with an author. I remember some kid asking about it, the teacher saying scornfully, "Well, encyclopedias aren't a real source," and then I decided "encyclopedia = BAD" and thought no more about it.
If I recall my MLA guide correctly from years ago, you don't need to cite anything for common knowledge, "John Adams was the second president of the United States" being an example of common knowledge. If you needed to cite, you should cite primary sources like newspapers, journal articles, or biographies; not secondary sources like textbooks or encyclopedias.
Your high school was extremely atypical, was it not?
maybe.
Really? My teachers tend to dislike encyclopaedias in general, not just Wikipedia.
Well, the ones who rail against it are the ones who get most of the press time... "My school encourages using appropriate references to the extent that such use is appropriate for its purpose" doesn't attract much attention.
I give talks and workshops about Wikipedia. It is shocking how many people think they know how Wikipedia works and how to use it who really have no idea. The educators who forbid it aren't thinking of it as a jumping-off point for further research, and they don't actually know how the content is produced and maintained, or at least have never thought about the implications of their beliefs.
(My very favorite clever phrase describing my feelings comes from the name of a Facebook group: "Abolish abstinence-only Wikipedia education.")
The anti-wikipedia bias has shifted from being a pretentious hold-over from the "I spent 8 years learning the names of the relevant sources in my field" to an outright cognitive bias held by the uneducated "Where'd you get that fact - wikipedia? - in that case, I'm allowed to ignore your argument. I get my facts from talk radio."
That sounds like a perfect example of how knowing about biases can hurt people. It's similar to something I often see in religious arguments: someone who wants to rationalize away an argument will often come up with a really flimsy counter-argument, overlook its flaws, and stop thinking about the issue immediately. It's a particularly pathological case of being more critical of opposing views than ones you agree with.
The educators I've spoken to tend to dislike encyclopaedias in general. It's nothing against Wikipedia.