• FosterMolasses@leminal.space
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      7 hours ago

      How ironic that school teachers spent decades lecturing us about not trusting Wikipedia… and now, the vast majority of them seem to rely on Youtube and ChatGPT for their lesson plans. Lmao

      • Socialism_Everyday@reddthat.com
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        3 hours ago

        Tankies don’t think Wikipedia is the devil. You could call me a tankie from my political views, and I very much appreciate Wikipedia and use it on a daily basis. That is not to say it should be used uncritically and unaware of its biases.

        Because of the way Wikipedia works, it requires sourcing claims with references, which is a good thing. The problem comes when you have an overwhelming majority of available references in one topic being heavily biased in one particular direction for whatever reason.

        For example, when doing research on geopolitically charged topics, you may expect an intrinsic bias in the source availability. Say you go to China and create an open encyclopedia, Wikipedia style, and make an article about the Tiananmen Square events. You may expect that, if the encyclopedia is primarily edited by Chinese users using Chinese language sources, given the bias in the availability of said sources, the article will end up portraying the bias that the sources suffer from.

        This is the criticism of tankies towards Wikipedia: in geopolitically charged topics, western sources are quick to unite. We saw it with the genocide in Palestine, where most media regardless of supposed ideological allegiance was reporting on the “both sides are bad” style at best, and outright Israeli propaganda at worst.

        So, the point is not to hate on Wikipedia, Wikipedia is as good as an open encyclopedia edited by random people can get. The problem is that if you don’t specifically incorporate filters to compensate for the ideological bias present in the demographic cohort of editors (white, young males of English-speaking countries) and their sources, you will end up with a similar bias in your open encyclopedia. This is why us tankies say that Wikipedia isn’t really that reliable when it comes to, e.g., the eastern block or socialist history.

      • OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml
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        16 hours ago

        There’s a lot of problems with Wikipedia, but in my years editing there (I’m extended protected rank), I’ve come to terms that it’s about as good as it can be.

        In all but one edit war, the better sourced team came out on top. Source quality discussion is also quite good. There’s a problem with from positive/negative tone in articles, and sometimes articles get away with bad sourcing before someone can correct it, but this is about as good as any information hub can get.

        • vin@lemmynsfw.com
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          7 hours ago

          And don’t forget the British-American bias. Hopefully the automated translation and adaptation that is being pursued by wikipedia helps to improve it.

          • Resonosity@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            3 hours ago

            I remember in the past few years that I’ve had to switch to non-American or non-British versions of Wikipedia just in order to find the answer I was looking for.

            We need to remind Americans and Britains that knowledge on Wikipedia doesn’t stop with their languages. We need to do a better job of gathering knowledge from non-English sources and translating those into English. Same goes vice versa for English sources and pages into languages that other people can understand.

            There’s still a lot of work to be done with Wikipedia to make it truly a universal knowledge repository. But it is one of the best we have

        • SaraTonin@lemmy.world
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          11 hours ago

          I remeber an article form a decade or more ago which did some research and said that basically, yes there are inaccuracies on Wikipedia, and yes there are over-simplifications, but** no more than in any other encyclopaedia**. They argued that this meant that it should be considered equally valid as an academic resource.

      • NauticalNoodle@lemmy.ml
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        17 hours ago

        It’s worth checking out the contribs and talk regarding articles that can be divisive. People acting with ulterior motives and inserting their own bias are fairly common. They also make regular corrections for this reason. I still place more faith and trust in Wikipedia as an info source more than most news articles.

      • mistermodal@lemmy.ml
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        18 hours ago

        The site engages in holocaust denial, apologia for wehrmacht, and directly collaborates with western governments. On the talk pages users will earnestly tell you that mentioning napalm can stick to objects when submerged in water constitutes “unnecessary POV”, and third-degree burns are painless because they destroy nerve tissue (don’t ask how the tissue got destroyed, and they will not be banned for this so get used to it). Jimmy Wales is a far-right libertarian. It might be a reliable source of information for reinforcing your own worldview, but it’s not a project to create the world’s encyclopedia. Something like that would at least be less stingy about what a “notable sandwich” is.

    • krypt@lemmy.world
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      19 hours ago

      growing up I got taught by teachers not trust Wiki bc of misinformation. times have changed

        • krypt@lemmy.world
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          6 hours ago

          subject at hand was wikipedia, but it applies to any wiki format I guess - just check sources.

      • setVeryLoud(true);@lemmy.ca
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        17 hours ago

        Nope, we all misunderstood what they meant. Wikipedia is not an authoritative source, it is a derivative work. However, you can use the sources provided by the Wikipedia article and use the article itself to understand the topic.

        Wikipedia isn’t and was never a primary source of information, and that is by design. You don’t declare information in encyclopedias, you inventory information.

        • krypt@lemmy.world
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          6 hours ago

          “Nope” to what exactly? you regurgitated what I said - but told us how you misunderstood it

        • shalafi@lemmy.world
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          17 hours ago

          Wikipedia was not then what it is now. You’re spot on with all that, spot on, but in the early days it wasn’t nearly as trustworthy.

          • setVeryLoud(true);@lemmy.ca
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            17 hours ago

            Fair enough, I’m not old enough to remember those days of Wikipedia, my memory starts in roughly 2010 wrt Wikipedia use 😅

            • ɯᴉuoʇuɐ@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              14 hours ago

              You can check old versions of any article by clicking ‘history’. And yeah, the standards used to be pretty low.

        • unphazed@lemmy.world
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          19 hours ago

          We homeschool our daughter. Saw a cool history through film course that taught with an example movie every week to grow interest… nothing in the itinerary said they’d play a video of Columbus by PragerU. They refused the refund, as it was 2 weeks in, and said it was used to foment conversation, but no other video was being offered or no questions were prepared to challenge the children. I worded my letter to call out the facts about Columbus vs the video, and the lack of accreditation of the source. I tried not to be the “lib”, but I very much got the gist that’s their opinion of me, and how they brushed me off. That fucking site is a plague on common sense, decency, and truth. Still fired up, and it was last month. We pulled her out of the course immediately after the video.

          • Devmapall@lemmy.zip
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            18 hours ago

            I can’t imagine homeschooling. Not that I think it’s bad but that it has to be so hard to do. And harder still to do it right.

            Glad you pulled out of that course. PragerU is hot garbage and I hate how my autocorrect apparently knows PragerU and didn’t try to change it to something else.

            How hard do you find it to homeschool? How many hours do you reckon it takes a day?

            • MagicShel@lemmy.zip
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              14 hours ago

              You’ve gotta keep in mind that in a regular school your kid is one of 20-30 for the teacher and they are lucky if they get five minutes of individual help/instruction. Everything else is just lecture, reading, and assignments.

              It doesn’t have to be onerous. We homeschooled until around 3rd grade. Even so, the other kids they are in school with are academically… not stellar. My youngest (13) has a reading disability and she struggles to pass classes. She still frequently finds herself helping out other students because they are even worse off.

              I’m not anti-public education, but whether it’s Covid or just republicans gutting the system, public education is in a state right now. I figure funding needs to increase by 30-50%. Kids need more resources than they are getting. And until they do, homeschooling isn’t an unreasonable option. But it’s not for everyone, of course. One parent has to work (or not) from home or odd hours.

    • slaacaa@lemmy.world
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      11 hours ago

      One thing I don’t get: why the fuck LLM’s don’t use wikipedia as a source of info? Would help them coming up with less bullshit. I experimented around with some, even perplexity that searches the web and gives you links, but it always has shit sources like reddit or SEO optimized nameless news sites

      • vividspecter@aussie.zone
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        8 hours ago

        Perplexity is okay with more academic topics at the least, albeit pretty shallow (usually isn’t that different to google). There might be a policy not to include encyclopedias, but it would be an improvement over SEO garbage for sure.

        • slaacaa@lemmy.world
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          5 hours ago

          Yeah, I use it instead of search, as that has gone to shit years ago due to all the SEO garbage, and now it’s even worst with AI generated SEO garbage.

          At least this way I get fast results, and mostly accurate on the high level. But I agree that if I try to go deeper, it just makes up stuff based on 9 yrs old reddit posts.

          I wish somebody built an AI model that prioritized trusted data, like encyclopedias, wiki, vetted publication, prestige news portals. It would be much more useful, and could put Google out of business. Unfortunately, Perplexity is not that