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Anonymous #1
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 wikipedia 
#16350691 - 06/08/12 09:24 AM (1 year, 10 days ago) |
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wikipedia should not be used as a source. im sick of people thinking they have statistics or facts and then they give me a link to wikipedia. Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia. and if you had any education you would have learned in 6th grade you cant use it to prove facts.
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Anonymous #2
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I am often guilty of citing Wiki as a reference...but you speak the truth, A1.
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Anonymous #3
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People that link to wikipedia are people that are too lazy to look for the original sources in wikipedia. With the exception of high-level college information (especially math) I pretty much trust wikipedia with all information. Oh, and stupid quasi-opinion stuff, like the importance of such and such a band or such and such a president
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Anonymous #4
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The Probabilistic Age
Why are people so uncomfortable with Wikipedia? And Google? And, well, that whole blog thing?
A: Because these systems operate on the alien logic of probabilistic statistics, which sacrifices perfection at the microscale for optimization at the macroscale.
Q: Huh?
A: Exactly. Our brains aren't wired to think in terms of statistics and probability. We want to know whether an encyclopedia entry is right or wrong. We want to know that there's a wise hand (ideally human) guiding Google's results. We want to trust what we read.
When professionals--editors, academics, journalists--are running the show, we at least know that it's someone's job to look out for such things as accuracy. But now we're depending more and more on systems where nobody's in charge; the intelligence is simply emergent. These probabilistic systems aren't perfect, but they are statistically optimized to excel over time and large numbers. They're designed to scale, and to improve with size. And a little slop at the microscale is the price of such efficiency at the macroscale.
Q. But how can that be right when it feels so wrong?
There's the rub. This tradeoff is just hard for people to wrap their heads around. There's a reason why we're still debating Darwin. And why Jim Suroweicki's book on Adam Smith's invisible hand is still surprising (and still needed to be written) more than 200 years after the great Scotsman's death. Both market economics and evolution are probabilistic systems, which are simply counterintuitive to our mammalian brains. The fact that a few smart humans figured this out and used that insight to build the foundations of our modern economy, from the stock market to Google, is just evidence that our mental software has evolved faster than our hardware.
Probability-based systems are, to use Kevin Kelly's term, "out of control". His seminal book by that name looks at example after example, from democracy to bird-flocking, where order arises from what appears to be chaos, seemingly reversing entropy's arrow. The book is more than a dozen years old and decades from now we'll still find the insight surprising. But it's right.
Is Wikipedia "authoritative"? Well, no. But what really is? Britannica is reviewed by a smaller group of reviewers with higher academic degrees on average. There are, to be sure, fewer (if any) total clunkers or fabrications than in Wikipedia. But it's not infallible either; indeed, it's a lot more flawed that we usually give it credit for.
Britannica's biggest errors are of omission, not commission. It's shallow in some categories and out of date in many others. And then there are the millions of entries that it simply doesn't--and can't, given its editorial process--have. But Wikipedia can scale to include those and many more. Today Wikipedia offers 860,000 articles in English - compared with Britannica's 80,000 and Encarta's 4,500. Tomorrow the gap will be far larger.
The good thing about probabilistic systems is that they benefit from the wisdom of the crowd and as a result can scale nicely both in breadth and depth. But because they do this by sacrificing absolute certainty on the microscale, you need to take any single result with a grain of salt. As Zephoria puts it in this smart post, Wikipedia "should be the first source of information, not the last. It should be a site for information exploration, not the definitive source of facts."
The same is true for blogs, no single one of which is authoritative. As I put it in this post, "blogs are a Long Tail, and it is always a mistake to generalize about the quality or nature of content in the Long Tail--it is, by definition, variable and diverse." But collectively they are proving more than an equal to mainstream media. You just need to read more than one of them before making up your own mind.
Likewise for Google, which seems both omniscient and inscrutable. It makes connections that you or I might not, because they emerge naturally from math on a scale we can't comprehend. Google is arguably the first company to be born with the alien intelligence of the Web's large-N statistics hard-wired into its DNA. That's why it's so successful, and so seemingly unstoppable.
Paul Graham puts it beautifully:
"The Web naturally has a certain grain, and Google is aligned with it. That's why their success seems so effortless. They're sailing with the wind, instead of sitting becalmed praying for a business model, like the print media, or trying to tack upwind by suing their customers, like Microsoft and the record labels. Google doesn't try to force things to happen their way. They try to figure out what's going to happen, and arrange to be standing there when it does."
The Web is the ultimate marketplace of ideas, governed by the laws of big numbers. That grain Graham sees is the weave of statistical mechanics, the only logic that such really large systems understand. Perhaps someday we will, too.
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Anonymous #3
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What he said
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Anonymous #5
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Wikipedia is fine as a reference, and most often contains it's own sources, which have been condensed into a smaller, more available formats, for easy understanding and distribution.
Wikipedia if a fine reference for many discussions on the shroomery, and is way more thorough and accurate than the lame-assed original post.
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Anonymous #6
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me likey the wiki
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Anonymous #7
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Wikipedia is great. Its among the best source or reference you can cite besides an actual academic journal. I cited it all throughout undergrad and now let my students cite it as well, like most teachers.
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Anonymous #1
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Anonymous #7
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Regardless, there is no better source than Wikipedia except for full blown academic papers.
Usually when I see somebody rejecting Wikipedia as a poor source its because they just got pwnd in their argument and are lashing out.
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Anonymous #8
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I have to agree wikipedia is about as accurate as anything is going to get on the internet. Most of the info on Wikipedia does cite original references at the bottom of the page, just most people do not bother reading all the bibliographical info once they satisfy their little tidbit of trivia. It is pretty tightly controlled and any misinformation is quickly fixed and the offending "contributor" is generally warned or banned. And those that do post misinformation generally get heavily chastised by the rest of the wiki community. Knock it all you want, but IMHO it is pretty reliable.
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Anonymous #9
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So why not go and look at the source on Wikipedia if you don't trust the information? There will be a link to the original source on the page. It's not just a dumping ground of baseless information.
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Anonymous #10
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Looking for actual sources to cite on the internet is pretty weak in and of itself. Wikipedia is as good as any other internet source.
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Anonymous #11
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Quote:
Anonymous #1 said:
wikipedia should not be used as a source. im sick of people thinking they have statistics or facts and then they give me a link to wikipedia. Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia. and if you had any education you would have learned in 6th grade you cant use it to prove facts.
Wikipedia did not exist when I was in 6th grade.
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Anonymous #12
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lol
I like it but I am noticing that some articles are beginning to read like passive aggressive bitchfests.
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Anonymous #3
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My question to the OP is what is an internet source you trust? It can't be news networks b/c anyone who reads the Shroomery news knows how inaccurate a lot of that stuff tends to be. Essentially what it sounds like to me is you don't like to be shown anything other than original research, which is hard to come by in the internet. How about instead of complaining about sources you just stop trying to have people prove you wrong when you probably don't want to be proved wrong in the first place
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Anonymous #13
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i was watching around the horn (or PTI) on ESPN once and some how rutherford b. hayes got brought up...the host said on wikipedia the b stood for broseph and i thought it was funny...don't trust wikipedia
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