{"id":68,"date":"2007-12-10T01:12:28","date_gmt":"2007-12-10T01:12:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/2007\/12\/10\/dont_think_twice_its_all_right\/"},"modified":"2007-12-10T01:12:28","modified_gmt":"2007-12-10T01:12:28","slug":"dont_think_twice_its_all_right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/2007\/12\/10\/dont_think_twice_its_all_right\/","title":{"rendered":"Don’t think twice, it’s all right"},"content":{"rendered":"

You’ve probably heard how Jimmy Wales is talking up<\/a> Wikipedia, the encyclopaedia where any\u2014 no, we’ve done that joke already.<\/p>\n

\nWikipedia has introduced a system of peer review, as if this solves anything. The problem is with the word ‘peer’. If articles were guaranteed to be edited by people who know what they’re talking about, then it would be fine. But you have no such guarantee, and in esoteric subjects (much of science, for example cough<\/strong>) you can not be sure that another student (a ‘peer’), for example, is not deliberately falsifying entries to steal a march on the competition. Paranoid, moi?<\/p>\n

\nYou betcha.<\/p>\n

\nAs my friend Mark puts it<\/a> :<\/p>\n

\nI am not in favour of citing Wikipedia as an “authority”, if by this we mean using it as a means of establishing points without any further discussion. I encourage my students, who are preparing for examinations at the moment, to engage critically with a range of secondary sources, one of which may indeed sometimes be Wikipedia.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\nAnd of course, with access to a University library, there is no excuse<\/em> for not critically reviewing the primary literature, and doing your own fact-checking.<\/p>\n


\n(if you do use Wikipedia, and you are checking articles therein, and you find a mistake; please do correct it. Just because I’m suspicious of the enterprise does not mean I want<\/em> it to be wrong!)<\/p>\n

\n(x-posted from the ‘Rats)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You’ve probably heard how Jimmy Wales is talking up Wikipedia, the encyclopaedia where any\u2014 no, we’ve done that joke already. Wikipedia has introduced a system of peer review, as if this solves anything. The problem is with the word ‘peer’. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}