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 "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.
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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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