As a professor, I have found it a fascinating journey to go from telling students "Don't use Wikipedia! It's not a place to do research," to telling students, "Start with Wikipedia! It's a good and reliable source, and an excellent example of collective knowledge-keeping."
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@Pkbwood At the WikiConference North America last year, there was talk about that change. "It's not 2007 any more," people would say. "It's not 2007 any more."
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@Pkbwood Wikipedia is the closest we've ever gotten to a real hitchhiker's guide. And it's free!
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@Pkbwood don't rely on the text, but the references list is, and has been, an excellent addition to research.
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@Pkbwood
Rarely is a Wiki article by itself a good place to do research. But included sources/ references are absolute gold.
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@Pkbwood I think the difference is whether you use Wikipedia as a source versus using Wikipedia as a starting point to find actual sources.
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@lianna Absolutely, but I used to tell students not to go anywhere near it!
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@Pkbwood @lianna Right! Or if you just want a brief (or sometimes quite lenghty) summary.
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@Pkbwood we used to use it anyway. "Wikipedia isn't a source" yes OK but it has sources. We would read the article, read the references and then reference the references as sources. And not mention it to the lecturer.
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@Pkbwood I read you. My m.o. is if I don't know I first search my own library, then go to Wikki. It's a great resource for fact checking to. I may be biased but a close friend is UK based compiler & checker.
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@Pkbwood As an editor who often needs to fact-check or otherwise source information quickly, I've watched Wikipedia go from "OMG NO DON'T GO THERE" to "Check Wikipedia first and follow the sources to what you really need." Its editors do a fabulous job these days. (It's not 2007 anymore, as they say.)
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@Pkbwood Wikipedia is incredibly impressive for what its community managed to achieve, but it is not a reliable source, and neither is any other encyclopedia. Wikipedia, like other encyclopedias, includes a lot of nonsense and claims that are not supported by the references. Hopefully you are teaching your students how to carefully check the articles against actual reliable sources.
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@Pkbwood The key word of your advice is “start”.
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@Pkbwood Just today, I tried convincing a relative that Trump is a fascist by pointing to the existence of a "Trump and fascism" Wikipedia page, and he (not an academic) told me it's not a reliable source, so I had to explain that it works because everything is verifiable.
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@Pkbwood
"The problem with Wikipedia is that it only works in practice. In theory, it can't possibly work."
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@Pkbwood "Don't use Wikipedia" was always misguided. Only thing wrong was failure to teach students what an encyclopedia is and how to use it (not a source itself, a way to get background knowledge and references to sources).
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@Pkbwood Even early Wikipedia was far more reliable & extensive on most topics than legacy print encyclopedias. And teachers never said "don't use World Book or Britannica"... 🙄
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Wikipedia has had subtle problems with every topic I'm qualified to assess. The most egregious was when it had me listed as a flight lead in a combat mission that took place when I was thirteen years old. It resisted correction for years, until the entire section was just deleted.
I have a shell script that just pulls the URLs from the "References" section of a given article and prints those. It's the only reliable way to use Wikipedia.
CC: @Pkbwood@mastodon.online
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@khm @Pkbwood 🤷 not my experience with it.
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@khm @Pkbwood I guess maybe my expectations are low or something, but I expect to find some degree of factual error in just about anything. The rate in Wikipedia is far lower than legacy encyclopedias and in more specialized texts, and admits correction (even if UX for getting stuff corrected is sometimes bad) where other stuff doesn't.
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@Pkbwood I used to tell my students to go to the Wikipedia page, look at the references and external links, check the validity and availability of those sources, then use those sites and texts. Wikipedia as resource bank.
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@Pkbwood we all remember the “don’t use an encyclopedia” era. Wikipedia serves/served that same function but better. Everyone has to start somewhere and an overview by experts is the best place to start.
It’s not where to finish.
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@Pkbwood
Agreed, Wikipedia is an excellent starting point for a huge range of topics.
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@Pkbwood
It's the year 2025, and I've never met a single person outside of the Internet who told me they've looked at the discussions or log file of a Wikipedia article, or used the sources.
Are there anyone out there? For real?
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@yours_truly @Pkbwood i know several. Especially when you have technical topics i saw several times that articles changed several times from descriptions a to b back to a back to b. Or the article is outdated and showing only half of the truth. Thats a typical problem if anyone can write or change without a check from an expert if it is correct. Also some articles / topics are better or less depending which language you are using.
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@Pkbwood I was told at uni in 2005 not to use Wikipedia but I completely ignored them and used it anyway. :)
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@Pkbwood as a librarian I have been thinking the very same thing
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@Pkbwood I always go to Wikipedia first. I carry it around with me so it’s always at my fingertips.
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@Pkbwood
Agreed 100%
Although I would tell my students that while they might not want to actually cite Wikipedia (there is still prejudice against it as a source) the article would have a a few to hundreds of other sources -- and those are generally an excellent starting point for a research paper.
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@Pkbwood I feel many of us do not trust anything we see as 'new'. I'm 62 now, and always embrace the 'new' things, and loved wiki when I first found it, eons ago. My mother, an English teacher, when she found it, was appalled that her students would use it. It still hasn't sunk in that it is more reliable than print sources, for her.
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@Pkbwood I have likened it to lit reviews, which they seem to get.
I also tell students that a vast number of academic articles are pretty much trash – half-literate pseudo-intellectual posturing, findings that are absolutely trite and inconsequential, pursued and printed only because they're "publishable", not because they're insightful or worthwhile.
The dogmatic worship of peer review is just the industry's self-aggrandising marketing – exploratory, critical reading is the only way through.
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@Pkbwood I’ve just written a statement of support for some internally funded work on using wikimedia in doctoral education…
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@Pkbwood here’s some previous work https://leedsunilibrary.wordpress.com/2023/10/04/championing-knowledge-equity-with-wikimedia/
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@Pkbwood I'm always startled when someone tells me wikipedia isn't a legit source. Wikipedia is amongst the wonders of the modern world. It is merely astonishing. I tell my learners, read the article, then read the talk page, then read the citations.
I'd trust a wikipedia article about a dozen more times than I'd trust an Encyclopedia Britannica article.
The latter is a single approved author. The former is a community, many of whom are subject experts.
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