• smokeppb [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    I distinctly remember every course teaching proper use of citations back in that decade saying Wikipedia is a trash source and you should at best use it to get acquainted with a subject you have no knowledge in. Also, “pretty early days” doing a lot of heavy lifting there since it was founded in 2001. It was 10th busiest in the world by 2007 (source: Wikipedia article “History of Wikipedia” (lol)).

    • hexaflexagonbear [he/him]@hexbear.netOP
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      10 months ago

      2009 was so late in wikipedia history that not on had every field (and subfield) made their own specialized wikipedia pages, many of them had started dying off at that point lol. Also that was a fun experiment that I wish hadn’t died. I found the specialized wikis (which had proper authorship and some peer review) to be more useful than published literature reviews as a grad student. Scholarpedia pages are still up and probably useful, but I doubt many have been touched since 2012. Might be fun to run random matlab and python code from there just to see how compatible it still is lol.

          • FunkyStuff [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            10 months ago

            throwback to my 10 year old self reading the article on complex numbers over and over trying to understand even 3% of it, all because I heard about them in passing and it sounded interesting

          • Sloogs@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            10 months ago

            I think even for people that have studied a fair bit of math a lot of it is difficult to parse. Which I guess is fair. An encyclopedia is meant to be a reference and summary of knowledge, not necessarily a teaching tool. I think it still makes an alright guidepost for something, which I can then use to find learning materials.

  • NewAcctWhoDis [any]@hexbear.net
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    10 months ago

    In 2009 I already knew better than to copy from Wikipedia without changing the wording a little, no excuse for being dumber than a middle schooler.

    • hexaflexagonbear [he/him]@hexbear.netOP
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      10 months ago

      Harvard president had plagiarism allegations against her, he was particularly vocal about it. A business insider journo went through his wife’s doctoral dissertation and found like 30 instances of plagiarism, including 15 instanced of entire paragraphs being copied straight from wikipedia.

      It didn’t look like the plagiarism was really particularly meaningful, like it wasn’t original ideas just like lifting some historic summaries. But it’s still pretty problematic. And I’m gonna guess that the Harvard president case is similar, mostly just filler.

      Oh he’s had multiple meltdowns about this, not obvious from the screenshot but his tweets on this are well over a page long