Wikipedia collapses threatening the very fabric of civilisation Fount-of-dubious-knowledge Wikipedia has gone down around the world, prompting a Twitter frenzy from people struggling to remember how to open books. The anyone-can-try-to-edit encyclopaedia won't serve a page at all beyond a placeholder "error" message, but an announcement on the Wikimedia Foundation's site stated that …
The library is seen as some sort of mystical place that people go to to learn Important Stuff and librarians are there to help people find the books they need to learn the Important Stuff.
Yet, for as long as I can remember, they have mainly been used by old people to obtain crap books that have pictures of beaten-but-unbowed Victorian lasses on the front cover.
"The nearest reference library to me is an hours drive away. (And then an hour's drive back.) "
Have an unsarcastic beer on me.
I have no idea why that made me laugh as much as it did. Just something about it clarifying that the route and typical traffic conditions are the same in both directions.
"It's a 45 minute drive before the morning rush hour and only 1/2 hour back when the schools are off or after 9 at night. If I leave the car there, it's closer to 3 hours, unless I take the shortcut across the misty heathland..."
...typing in the name of a movie and scrolling down to the subheading named "critical reception" - it loads fester than the other movie review websites, you can be in and out in less than 5 seconds if you just want to quickly know if something on Netflix sucks or not!
Well, you consider wrong, sir.
Do you want to borrow a clog to throw in a combine harvester?
Most of it is correct. As higher percentage than you'll see correct on most fan sites or other free sites. And unlike those, Wiki includes links to sources, which other sites do not.
You know to check more than one source, and look for primary evidence, don't you? Wiki allows you to do that.
can we not have screenshots of random people's twitter status embedded in your stories. I have seen this elsewhere but thought I'd be safe on here. It might help internally to promote your strategy to humanise the channel flow and synergise your content sreams or some other bollocks but I DO NOT CARE WHAT RANDOM PEOPLE ON TWITTER THINK AND IF I DID I"D BE ON TWITTER NOT ON EL REG
Rip el reg gravestone icon
What makes you think teachers are any different to rest of the population, most of which is seemingly too lazy to do "proper" research?
Is it better to make a half-arsed attempt to learn something, or to dismiss it altogether because you can't be arsed going to the library?
While I wouldn't verbatim quote stuff from wiki without verifying some of the references, the difference problem with a library is that it only carries the reference material somebody has pre-selected, may or may not be able to order other books from associate libraries, which may or may not arrive in a sensible time frame. Neither approach is perfect, but at least with the wiki references, it gives you a list of places to begin looking for more information.
The last time I went into my local library they nearly had as many computers as they had books*... I can't help but think the library had as much trouble finding information as the rest of us when the Interwiki went down.
* - Ok, that's a lie but the entire basement was filled with PCs, compared to just four the last time I visited.
...yes there are mistakes, but for comprehensive and almost entirely correct descriptions of basic science its pretty good. It's easy for those in the know to notice and correct mistakes regarding the standard model etc. I've also found it good for some of the basic facts and dates in UK history, and as other commentards have said, the reference section at the bottom of articles tends to be very good.
All this doesn't change the fact that Jimmy Wales comes across as a giant douche though (hah - another south park reference sneaked in there...)
"Not that bad?" Personally I think it's the best website on the internet, and probably the single biggest repository of easily accessible human knowledge on the earth. Sure there might be more words in the library of congress or the reading rooms of the London library, but until that all gets digitised and made available copyright free (not going to happen) I'll stick to using Wikipedia and checking references rather than physically visiting London or Washington.
Seems like it's fashionable to bash Wikipedia. For some reason people seem to think it makes them look clever to knock a magnificent and completely altruistic co-operative human endeavour which has probably made more information and knowledge publicly available to a wide audience than anything in history since Gutenberg decided that a machine to quickly produce books would be a good idea.
"For some reason people seem to think it makes them look clever to knock a magnificent and completely altruistic co-operative human endeavour which has probably made more information and knowledge publicly available to a wide audience than anything in history since Gutenberg decided that a machine to quickly produce books would be a good idea."
Not quite right there. Yes, it has made information widely available but knowledge comes from how well the reader applies that information.
Otherwise, I agree with what you said, and other commenters' points about checking the references section. Who knows? You might be able to find contradictory information and use that to balance the Wikipedia article to produce your own conclusions.
Colin
... as if print media was 100% accurate. I challenge those who have claimed above that Wpedia is effectively worthless to provide a link to a Wpage on an uncontroversial subject that really is downright wrong. I have a lot of problems with Wpedia - the douchebaggery of Wales, the egotistic posturing of admins, etc but it really isn't bad enough to consider it to be mainly, or even significantly, "rubbish".
When my kids' teachers complain that Wpedia isn't always right I agree - but it is *good* to teach them not to rely on any single 'authority'. Check your sources, and apply critical thinking. Even when reading El Reg.
“I challenge those who have claimed above that Wpedia is effectively worthless to provide a link to a Wpage on an uncontroversial subject that really is downright wrong.”
I certainly don’t claim that it is effectively worthless, but there are plenty of examples where duff information sits along perfectly good information. For example, when Norman Wisdom died, some news stories stated that, along with other songs he had written, he co-wrote ‘White Cliffs of Dover’ – all perfectly bunk but they had taken it from Wikipedia. Now, arguably that’s a bit of an extreme example as someone was being mischievous, but I think it it’s illustrates the point.
There have been times that I’ve read something that was stated as a fact or as the accepted belief, when it wasn’t. This isn’t to say such claims were far-fetched (usually, they were far from it) but it’s not accurate to claim something as a stone cold fact when there isn’t sufficient proof and if I didn’t have specialist knowledge, it would have seemed reasonable enough to me. On occasion, I have made contact and revisions have been made, but I feel it’s spitting in the wind.
Also, even when there’s a cited source, you can’t take it as read (no pun intended) that it’s a good one. For instance, I looked up the entry for Charlie Dimmock (I wanted to check something quickly about women on television, okay) it said:
“Dimmock, who is well-endowed, became known for going braless in all weathers.[3]”
Fair enough one might think, and the source is “Chris Roberts (2006). Heavy Words Lightly Thrown: The Reason Behind Rhyme. Thorndike Press. ISBN 0-7862-8517-6”, a frothy book about the meaning behind nursery rhymes - even with a mention of Dimmock, it seems a bit of an odd choice… Still, the version history for the Wikipedia indicates that the matter about her wearing a bra was looked into.
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Sorry Euchrid, I may not have been clear. I don't think Dimmock's norks or even Wisdom's compositions are really 'encyclopedic' content.
As well as 'uncontroversial' I should have said 'important'. For instance, what mineral is usually refined to get elemental arsenic? What is VxWorks, or for that matter, what is a Real Time O/S? What is the median of an exponential distribution? How do you calculate an exponentially weighted moving average? How much does MSL Curiosity weigh a) on earth b) on mars?
I'm am sure that the accuracy of the Wpedia articles that cover stuff that you would never see in a regular encyclopedia are frequently inaccurate. You should thank your lucky stars that anyone has even tried to gather this information for you. But what I'm talking about are Wpedia pages that cover stuff you would see in a regular encyclopedia. These, in general, tend to be fairly bloody reliable.
Wikipedia , pr fluff and self-published propaganda masquerading as knowledge .. eg:
"Consumer versions of Windows were originally designed for ease-of-use on a single-user PC without a network connection, and did not have security features built in from the outset. However, Windows NT and its successors are designed for security (including on a network) and multi-user PCs, but were not initially designed with Internet security in mind as much, since, when it was first developed in the early 1990s, Internet use was less prevalent" link
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