What does /sci/ think about Wikipedia?
it's pretty cool, i guess
>>7904071
Wikipedia is shit. It's unreliable, biased and practically useless for finding information.
>>7904071
Wikipedia is sort of a jack of trades master of none. It's alright if you just want a brief read of a topic.
>>7904071
I find it very good for math. Even advanced topics. Actually, it might be the case that more advanced topics are better than lower level articles.
>>7904071
Made for and by cucks.
It is fun to browse articles and chain click topics in which I have a more-than-glancing interest in.
It is also useful for really quick searches for information I need on the fly. If I'm reading a paper and don't know a medical term; I'll wiki it for the first paragraph, and then make note to find a real paper on that topic or go to the hospital library and find a book.
>>7904094
Well fucking correct the errors you find. Prick.
It's pretty nice for looking up trivia or getting a general idea of a concept you don't know. Also good for finding qualitative information or explanations, especially if you don't need to be 100% sure of its accuracy.
I find it of limited use for learning anything more involved, though. I especially dislike the way they go through mathematical derivations. More often than not things are explained in a way that seems more convoluted than unclear than necessary.
>>7904071
Criticized for being unreliable, yet everyone still uses it anyway.
Seriously, I've seen US military engineering handbooks with Wikipedia articles inside.
>>7904071
amazing. It literally changed my life.
I'm not even kidding.
>>7904071
I really really like it
>>7904208
I thought this way too until I read the article about definable real numbers
>>7904071
Wikipedia is actually fairly useful for complex, objective ideas like physics and mathematics, at least in regards to notions no longer especially hypothetical or controversial. That last word is the real lynch pin. As long as an idea isn't controversial, Wikipedia tends to be a good resource and, as per its nature, can always be made better. (Rule of thumb. If you dislike wikipedia because you perceive errors, but make no attempt to correct those errors, then the problem is with you!)
In truth, when it comes to such subjects, I've found Wikipedia as useful and accurate as most more prominently renowned encyclopedias. But what's distinct is that the world oversight potential actually affords the chance for them to become stronger, not weaker as many presume, than references governed by small but bureaucratic bodies. The University I work for is considering an addition to technical writing that involves learning to use and, more importantly, contribute intelligently to refining Wikipedia. The more people that focus on this training and application, the better the resource becomes!
>>7904071
I actually hate wikipedia, I used World Book real shelf encyclopaedias in the 1990s and it was the best learning experience of my life.
Why I hate Wikipedia
>Biased
If your read up on Roswell, Wikipedia will give the clear stance that "it never happened". Even though crashed alien spaceships are very likely bull, unless there is 100% damning evidence then it's not the encyclopaedia's position to take sides. A real encyclopaedia would say "the true nature of the incident is unknown but some believe...."
>Overcomplicated
The technical articles are unintelligible unless you already have some knowledge of it. And when you do have knowledge of it it turns out that the technical articles are full of holes. So it tries to be rigorous but fails alienating both novices and experts alike.
>Bad biographies
Random unimportant information, at times non-chronological, the usual over detailed, weird obsession with death, all paper encyclopaedias never go into details on deaths unless it was tragic, mark of respect you know. Not Wikipedia, they will give blow by blow details of an 80 year old man on his deathbead.
>Poorly formatted
it just looks bad, picture choice usually sucks too.
>>7904290
This too, it makes people lazy as fuck.
I used to think I was stupid because I couldn't understand a lot of the "simple" examples on wikipedia
Then I learned those things
they're not simple
i'm not sure if it's wikipedia or math elitists but a whole fuckton of math pages seem purposefully overcomplicated
>>7904447
math elitists.
>>7904426
>Biased
>If your read up on Roswell, Wikipedia will give the clear stance that "it never happened"
>If your [sic] read up on Roswell, Wikipedia will give the clear official stance that it was a project mogul balloon.
Fix'd, your welcome btw.
>The technical articles are unintelligible
This a really good criticism.
>The square is the n=2 case of the families of n-hypercubes and n-orthoplexes.
Wikipedia on squares, it's literally in the second paragraph, you haven't even gotten to the "contents" box at this point.
>>7904399
Most of the time mathematicians and physicists contribute to those and so they are reliable, also they are the least likely articles to be shit posted on since its not the first thing people think of or are even aware exists.
>>7904071
Math and science sections tend to be decent. Rarely great. It's useful for learning things you might never encounter in your textbooks or about subtipics in a subject that a textbook won't have space to eloborate on and would require finding additional texts to learn about.
>>7904094
only for political and economic issues.
not true in math/physics
>>7904447
seem purposefully overcomplicated
in my first two semesters reading any linear algebra stuff on wikipedia was painful. it was just forced to be complicated.
>>7904464
For the record i don't believe in Roswell but that's what the Government said. Just because the government said it doesn't make it fact. The article should have said "The government said it was a Project Mogul balloon" and left it at that. My point is no matter how ridiculous the claim encyclopaedias should not take sides. If Wikipedia started the article on Religion with "God doesn't exist" how will that go down?
>>7904464
What is your problem with that square example exactly?
From the person you are quoting I take it that you either are using it to reifornce the point of unintelligibly or articles being needlessly complicated.
Squares are an important structure beyond the euclidian square and it seems necessary to define them strictly, which that defintion deals with. The first defintion handles the elementary defintion and the second refines it to be more rigorous
>>7904399
This, but for some reason the articles about chemistry are always lacklustre compared to the physics or math ones.
Extremly good for anything that don't need viable sources: shitposting and maths
>>7904520
I am the guy he quoted and he pointed out exactly what I'm talking about. Encyclopaedias are for general public information. That square definition needs to stay in pure maths books. If youa re going to make it totally rigorous then there is no point in aiming it at everyone. As I said I read paper encyclopaedias an none had any of that n-orthoplex shit in it, it just said it had four sides, each internal angle was 90 and they all added up to 360. Basic shit like that so kids can get their homework done. If you are higher level than this then you shouldn't even be using Wikipedia. In the paper encyclopaedias they had links to more advanced books if you wanted to know more. that's how it should be done.
>>7904541
Wikipedia has links to books as well, and if you care about the fancy stuff they mention in an article you can easily click on on the link.
>>7904071
it's very cool but it still misses many cultural inputs imho.
for example eastern and asian countries often denied western countries to do research on scientifically interesting artifacts because of politics.
Just throwing this out there, a list of the lamest edit wars in the wiki, provided by the wiki
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars#Guidelines_on_how_to_create_lameness
>>7904797
As a britbong I can confirm the county thing is kind of a hot topic. Poshfags in London who don't want to admit to living with Muslims will claim to live in Middlesex (a former county absorbed into London 50 years ago) Similar story with former parts of Surrey, Kent and Essex that were swallowed up by London. Kingstonians will bitch that their town is still in Surrey because Surrey council is still based there even though it's now in a London borough. Then there's Monmouthshire, no-one really knows whether it's in England or Wales. And does Avon still exist? If you're American imagine fighting over ownership of Maine with Canada or trying to carve a new state out of three others. It would be mayhem. Our government does it to our counties all the time and naturally people complain even though it's just lines on a map.
>>7904797
Oh yeah and Cornwall wants to be a separate country altogether.
>>7904071
Wikipedia is just a collection of things gathered from books and other sources. It's as reliable/unreliable as books are.
>>7904797
Holy shit this is hilarious, Ukranian government tells Wikipedia that their capital is actually called Kyiv, Wikipedia tells them to fuck off, we prefer the Russian name. Telling a country what to name their own city, real classy Wikipedia. It's funny that they bent over to SJWs in renaming Mount McKinley Denali and Burma Myannamar or whatever but when it comes to a white country fuck cultural sensitivity right?
>>7904071
Like 4chan an interesting idea with very varying execution. Poo posters here. Deletionists on Wikipedia.
I used to be a contributor but the politics was just too mad (autistic?).
Also see this: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia
Really great for math and physics.
>>7904384
>"the set of all definable numbers is countably infinite (because the set of all logical formulas is) while the set of real numbers is uncountably infinite"
Truth is undefinable, so the bijection need not exist inside the model. This is embarrassing. Is that sentence from Wikipedia as fallacious as I think it is?
>>7904094
Are you kidding?
It's excellent for math.
When I want to know about a mathematical concept or review it, I go to Wikipedia.
People sometimes joke that "the Wikipedia page for math X is so hard" but if you're at a certain level, the whole thing generally makes sense and then it's excellent.
>>7904071
It's a bunch of off-context shit pulled off from multiple different sources if not any at all. If I ever try using Wikipedia or anything further than the molar mass of certain organic compounds, I always end up realizing that I wasted time trying to decipher useless information from wikipedia and I could've easily just opened any other website with 10x more valuable information and/or I could've opened a book on the topic just to get an overview.
>>7905777
That sentence is correct, and clear as day if you know what a definable number is. Definable real numbers are a subset of the real numbers to start.
"Truth is undefinable." That however is horseshit.
It's mostly good for anything nonpolitical that you want a quick primer on but I've seen tons of errors in many recent articles (poor grammar, misspellings, incorrect information, dead links, secondary sources). But for me journals make Wikipedia almost obsolete. I find Wikimedia's other projects like wikibooks and wiktionary much more useful.
>>7904071
It's a great starting point. I usually follow the references to make sure it's true though.
>>7904518
Oh man this is some grade A logic. So even though it's been throughly debunked for 2 decades, the encyclopedia shouldn't take sides because one side believes in false rumors and the other believes the truth?
>>7904900
Back to /pol/
I like it as a way to refresh memory in some courses you had already taken or to get an idea of a subject you have no idea of.
But when it comes to learning, i can't really trust non-trivial things because it can be unreliable.
>>7905785
You don't know what you're talking about.
Tarski's theorem on the undefinability of truth precludes a formula in the language of set theory from defining the satisfaction of other formulas.
Thus, the map that sends each parameter-free formula to the real it defines is, itself, not necessarily definable, and in fact is not definable. Thus this map does not exist in the given model of set theory, so this reasoning for the set of definable reals (if there even is such a set) being countable is fallacious.
>>7905785
I did some research, and I was indeed right and wikipedia is downright factually wrong, and with fallacious reasoning.
It is consistent that every real number is definable. This seems paradoxical because there are only countably many formulas, but my explanation of the fallacy illuminates why this is not a paradox.
Here is a source:
http://jdh.hamkins.org/pointwisedefinablemodelsofsettheory/
It is consistent that every real number is definable. Thus, the set of definable real numbers need not be countable.
That wikipedia article is shameful.
>>7905963
I edited the wikipedia article to delete the sentence stating that the set of definable numbers is countable. Hopefully it stays deleted.
>>7906054
...And they undid the edit. Probably didn't even read it. They just saw an edit by a nobody and undid it.
That wikipedia article remains shamefully incorrect.
This does indeed highlight a problem with wikipedia, even for math/science articles.
>>7905782
The page on Definable Real Numbers is both fallacious and factually incorrect, as shown in this thread.
>>7904071
Great if you already have a background in related topics/topics just below current level of complexity.
Not good for actual formal learning.
Great for just interesting stuff.
I usually end up swamped in >15 tabs because hyperlinks
>>7904243
>correct the errors you find
Clearly does not know of deletionists and editing wars.
Facts do not win the day. The editor with the most time on his hand to revert, revert and revert once more and has the largest posse is the one to "win".
>>7904290
>Seriously, I've seen US military engineering handbooks with Wikipedia articles inside.
How do you know it was not done the other way?
One of the many problems with Wikipedia is that reputation is based on editing and articles and this encourages plagiarisms. A funny side effect of this is that several GNU documents that very specifically are not CC licensed have been put on Wikipedia, given a light brush of editing and then placed under CC license. The day RMS discovers this will be a memorable day. And I will buy all the popcorn in the shop for the event.
I have also seen university lectures put up as articles. You can tell since the tone of an academic is quite different from that of the present kind of Wikipedia editors.
>>7904447
It's not good to learn things from Wikipedia, but it makes for a good, quick summary of properties of objects I haven't thought about in a while.
>>7904550
Sssh!! Don't tell him about the references section!
>>7904071
>What does /sci/ think about Wikipedia?
in general or about /sci/ things?
For stuff like experimental methods, like having a quick review on what EELS was, it's great. For math stuff it's too complicated and not even comprehensive.
For history it's good, but you have to be aware of unsourced stuff.
Unpoliticized current events like train crashes or natural disasters are covered fair.
For SJW subjects you have to be careful.
I edit quite a bit myself, and if you source stuff reliably and stay aware from the worst stuff like the Gamergate article for example, you can be pretty honest.
>>7909821
To be fair, there's basically no way to cover Gamergate without fucking it up one way or the other.
>>7911309
>SJW Nazi's fuck up and throw a fit
seems pretty simple
>>7904071
Error prone. Only use it to get a broad understanding before referring to a textbook
>>7909821
>the Gamergate article
Literally "McCarthyism was a movement against communist harassment in the film industry."
>>7909272
butthurt editor detected
