
‘You Could Look It Up’: The World Before and Since Wikipedia - benbreen
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/you-could-look-it-up-the-world-before-and-since-wikipedia/2016/02/17/57d0cab8-d196-11e5-88cd-753e80cd29ad_story.html
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ergothus
I vastly love being in a world where you can get answers. That said, I've
noticed one trend in my younger co-workers and friends that is a little sad
(to me).

I will often try to find concepts I don't know. Simple things like "Why do we
say 'deceased'? Aren't they 'ceased'? If they are 'de-ceased', that leaves US
as 'ceased'". I'm moderately curious, but mostly I enjoy finding the little
perversities. Maintaining a sense of wonder, if you will.

Amongst my younger (I'm mid-to-late 30s, they are mid-to-late 20s) friends and
co-workers, though, I typically get the response of "I don't know, what does
google say?". Then they look it up, and stop wondering. (Sometimes the answer
is pretty good, often it boils down to 'no one knows')

On the one hand, I'm glad to see people moving past the "I wonder..." stage
towards GETTING answers. On the other, even when the answer is inadequate,
they then stop wondering.

I'm curious if this anecdote is generally true, and if so, if it's a temporary
fad in our relationship to information, or if this represents one step in a
path of "permanent" change in our relationship to information.

I suppose I could google that...

~~~
mlangdon
I jokingly enforce a no-googling-at-the-lunch-table rule on my millennial
coworkers (I'm gen Oregon Trail).

This allows for the type of fatuous speculation that makes for decent
conversation.

Occasionally I even give in to the need to know.

~~~
Ensorceled
That's odd, what kind of decent conversations are based on fatuous speculation
on facts that are a google search away?

I'd much rather have real conversation about politics, whether "The 100" is
good TV, social issues, or just about anything really, than an argument about
facts that could just be googled.

~~~
nommm-nommm
It's called having fun!! lighthearted mindless conversation. Joking. Laughing!
Using our imaginations.

No arguments.

I'd rather do almost anything else than "talk politics." Especially with
people who like "talking politics." Playing in traffic seems much more
appealing.

~~~
IanCal
I agree.

I think there's a big benefit in finding out that you're often wrong. It's
easy to look something up and go "yeah I knew that" when really it was just
one of the things you thought might be true. Regularly seeing that what you
were really, really sure about is actually completely wrong after having to
try and justify what you're saying is wrong (e.g. that X was in film Y, etc).
Similarly, realising you don't understand something too well when trying to
explain it to someone else.

Also, mistakes and weird misconceptions form bits of jokes that grow and
change over time.

------
hackuser
I have a book called The Treasury of the Encyclopaedia Brittannica. It's
probably the best demonstration of the difference between serious research and
Wikipedia; here is a small sample of the articles (all excerpted from past
editions of the Encyclopaedia):

* Space-Time by Albert Einstein

* Radium by Marie Curie

* Mass Production by Henry Ford

* Wireless Telephony by Guglielmo Marconi

* Wilbur Wright by Orville Wright

* Leon Trotsky by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

* Guerrila Warfare by T.E. Lawrence ('Lawrence of Arabia')

* Yosemite Park by John Muir

* Life, Terrestrial and Otherwise by Carl Sagan

* The Philosophical Consequences of Relativity by Bertrand Russell

There are many, many more. Do I want to learn from those people or from the
'wisdom' of the crowds?

I think it's out of print, but I highly recommend it. (ISBN 0-670-83368-4)

~~~
TheCoreh
Isn't that essentially appeal to authority? As long as the information is
factually correct it doesn't really matter where it came from.

~~~
marcoperaza
Appeal to authority is totally valid when the authority is an expert in the
subject matter.

> _As long as the information is factually correct it doesn 't really matter
> where it came from._

And who is the arbiter of factual correctness? Or conceptual correctness.

I've noticed that lots of Wikipedia articles are completely inaccessible to
people without lots of domain knowledge. I find that math articles in
particular tend to obfuscate rather than elucidate.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
I don't remember Britannica being any better.

Britannica was purely a social signalling tool. The content was secondary.
People bought it as evidence of middle class disposable income, not because
they seriously expected to learn anything from it.

My family couldn't afford Britannica, so I had to walk to a local library to
read it. I remember it being fascinating from an "I didn't know that was even
a thing" angle, but close to useless for learning about specific topics -
mostly because the learning needed an entire book, not a short article.

Wikipedia is great for factual gazeteer-type information about people and
places, but it has the same problem with math and science - i.e. you literally
can't teach the content in that format.

I've sometimes wondered about a WikiTextBook site which has definitive and
progressive tutorials/lessons on topics that don't fit the 'pedia format,
starting from pre-school all the way up to post-grad.

Online courses do this already, and some of them are very good at it. But it
would be useful to have everything collected on a single site instead of
scattered all over the web.

~~~
tzs
> I've sometimes wondered about a WikiTextBook site which has definitive and
> progressive tutorials/lessons on topics that don't fit the 'pedia format,
> starting from pre-school all the way up to post-grad.

I've wanted something similar, but going the other way. That is, you start at
post-grad level and can expand things to lower level as needed.

For instance, an article in this format on the prime number theorem would
start out stating the theorem and presenting a proof at a level that you'd see
if this was a proof from a mathematics journal. At any step in the proof you
could expand the article in two ways.

1\. Horizontal expansion. This fills in omitted steps, but stays at the same
level.

2\. Vertical expansion. This explains the step in terms of less advanced
material.

Expanded material could further be expanded, both horizontally and vertically.
So for instance suppose that in the top level proof of the prime number
theorem an integral appeared and was evaluated. Expanding horizontally would
fill in the details of how you evaluate that integral.

But suppose you have not studied calculus. You could expand that integral
vertically, and keep expanding, until you get down to an explanation of
calculus. That would give you essentially a course in calculus--but _just_ the
calculus needed to support the prime number theorem proof.

This could be the basis of an alternative way to teach math and physics (and
other sciences). Pick a set of interesting, advanced results, chosen so that
when you expand all of them the bottom level will have covered the complete
undergraduate math and physics curriculum. I think this could be a good
approach because it provides more motivation. Everything you learn at the
bottom level is motivated because it is needed for that specific advanced
result you are trying to learn. Contrast that to the current approach where
you have long stretches of material that might not seem interesting but that
you are learning because you are told you'll need in 3 or 4 years when you are
finally getting to look at interesting stuff.

------
leephillips
I think there a a lot of insight into the Wikipedia phenomenon in this rant on
Penny Arcade:

[https://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2005/12/16](https://www.penny-
arcade.com/news/post/2005/12/16)

And in Jaron Lanier's article:

[http://edge.org/conversation/digital-maoism-the-hazards-
of-t...](http://edge.org/conversation/digital-maoism-the-hazards-of-the-new-
online-collectivism)

------
frik
The English language Wikipedia is great. Some other language have big problems
with certain admins that prevent new articles or any additions at all (e.g.
German language). WikiMedia should do something and "fix" those administrative
issues.

~~~
heinrich5991
This needs to be a bit more nuanced. I do see new articles popping up in the
German Wikipedia.

~~~
frik
> nuanced

Really? No. It's a well known wide spread systematic problem. The root cause
should be fixed by the international Wikimedia Foundation.

Read about the issues on English Wikipedia:

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Wikipedia#Characteristi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Wikipedia#Characteristics)

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Wikipedia#Deletions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Wikipedia#Deletions)

~~~
kuschku
German Wikipedia is not associated with Wikimedia, and Wikimedia has no
control over them.

------
greendestiny_re
Hello world.

I have a different gripe with Wikipedia that has nothing to do with whether
articles within it are factual or not: poor writing style.

Wikipedia editor guidelines encourage cooperation and consensus, but this
regularly results in edit wars, where editors aggressively delete each other's
edits. To resolve this, editors will usually resort to an unspoken system in
which one editor will write one fragment of a sentence and cite sources for
that fragment, the other editor writes the next fragment and cites it and so
on. The result is a horrible mess that, although most likely entirely factual,
is perfectly unreadable.

Worse yet, it is very difficult to simply copy such a paragraph from Wikipedia
and paste it to your friend's chat box - the inline citation marks remain as
full blown numbers and have to be removed by hand.

~~~
vilhelm_s
I don't think the fact that citations occur inside sentences is necessarily
because the articles are collaboratively edited. Scientific articles generally
do the same thing, even if they are just written by one person, in order to
make it clear which part of the sentence the citation refers to.

------
stirner
_“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”— in the words of Douglas Adams — “has
already supplanted the great Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard repository
of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains
much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the
older, more pedestrian work in two important respects. First, it is slightly
cheaper; and second, it has the words ‘Don’t Panic’ inscribed in large
friendly letters on its cover.”_

"Worse is better."

