I try to avoid Wikipedia. There are better sources of free information on the web. Do you see scholarly books with footnotes that cite Wikipedia as a source? Neither do I. Nobody to my knowledge cites articles published on Wikipedia in his or her CV.
Yet Wikipedia articles are far more accurate than the majority of conservative scholarly articles on critical Biblical studies. Many scholar articles in the field are also bad and gain little traction or are outdated. The information most Christians access when it comes to such issues is miles below wikipedia in terms of accuracy.
A critical scholar gets paid to read peer reviewed articles, write them and teach this subject. Worrying about why they don’t cite Wikipedia is a bad comparison. We are talking about how the majority of people access information. Its also exponentially better than social media. Its not for real research at high levels but it provides encyclopedia level knowledge on a bazillion things and its all free and accessible anywhere you go with a device you always have in your pocket.
Nothing is even close to it in terms of utility and helpfulness in spreading knowledge. Its an encyclopedia that should serve as a spring board for real research.
How would you classify the articles on the Biologos site? This is not a peer reviewed scholarly journal is it? Do the articles have any real value then?
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This may sound a bit weird, but students should develop Google skills. Part of those skills is exercising and strengthening the inner bovine excrement detector. Wikipedia is an ok place to start, but homeschool students could learn about cross-checking, understanding potential biases of sources, and so forth.
As a side story, I do run into people who just lack Google skills. I was taking a command line coding class, and one of the students was worried that they wouldn’t remember everything taught in the class. The instructor just looked at them strangely and said, “you can just Google it”. When I was teaching myself rudimentary Python I found Google to be indispensable. Anyway, stepping off the soap box . . .
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Well sure … there will always be better and more reliable. You probably don’t have the best possible set of friends in the world either. So should you ditch all your current friends and go questing for an even better set? Of course not. This is real life we’re talking about. Listening to and learning from your friends (or places like Wikipedia) might be a place to start. We just don’t end there if we’re needing to be more formal or extra sure about something.
Just because there will never be “I heard…” or “they say…” cited as any kind of reputable source doesn’t mean we stop listening to or don’t learn from less formal sources.
And as far as “friend availability and price” goes … it’s pretty hard to beat Wikipedia for what it manages to deliver for the insubstantial price (for most of us) of mere internet connectivity.
Added edit:
I will add that I have proudly become a supporter - (only a modest amount, alas) of Wikipedia. Because like public radio or any other enterprise that is not-for-profit, I really, really value those information sources right now. Especially when one compares them to the alternative for-profit sources. From those we get things like … “cigarettes don’t kill people … leaded gasoline doesn’t hurt anyone … science is a doubtful enterprise …” and so forth. That’s the sort of misinformation we can expect from corporate headquarters and power-brokers in our halls of power. Their insidious blather is (by their design) saturating the present cultural market place of ideas and leading right-wing evangelical leaders astray who’ve decided to prostrate themselves before the god of fear-mongering instead of the God of Truth. This makes them and their followers particularly easy targets for partisan merchants of doubt. We see these folks pop in here quite a bit. They demonstrate by what they say, how deeply they’ve been thrown under the bus by those on whom they’ve chosen to bestow their unwarranted trusts.
So next time you see an annoying pop up from some of the few remaining mainstream, mostly-good information sources we still have left, take the time to throw support their way.
Rant over.
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It may surprise some folks to learn that, although John Holt “originated” the idea of homeschooling, Ray Holt, [a Seventh Day Adventist] was a collaborating colleague until Holt died.] [My source: A Brief History of Homeschooling, on the Coalition for Responsible Home Education website.]
- During the 1980s the tenor of homeschooling changed as a new wave of individuals entered the movement. These were evangelical and fundamentalist Christians engaged in culture wars rhetoric about public schools as “Satanic hothouses.” Given credibility by Focus on the Family founder James Dobson and initial support by Moore, these newer homeschoolers took an antagonistic outlook toward public school administrators and were unwilling to cooperate with public schools they saw as evil. It was at this point that the legal battles began in earnest as homeschoolers found themselves faced with newly uncooperative local public school officials and the negative feedback cycle that ensued as officials responded even more negatively when faced with litigation. Also in play was the fact that some school officials felt threatened by the growing number of homeschoolers.
- As sociologist Mitchell L. Stevens says, the early members of the movement included “anarchists, practicing witches, macrobiotic vegetarians, devotees of family beds, Orthodox Jews, and a large number of fundamentalist Christians.” [Source: 9 Things You Should Know About the History of the Homeschooling Movement
A disadvantage of online sources generally is that they are not usually conducive to actual browsing. If you looked up malacology in a paper encyclopedia, you might also pick up something about Malaguena. Web searches don’t help much with that (yes, you often get random results, but not so helpful, like finding out that a misspelled snail genus is a bird genus, a misspelled Triassic archosaur, and a death metal band.) Some online journals do not even provide any sort of table of contents.
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How would you know?
For too many people, Fox News is how they get their information
Most of them are gone and so you haven’t seen them. Mostly they were excellent, but a few were terrible.
I agree. All children should learn how to evaluate the information they come across. An article in the latest issue of Scientific American, “Schooled in Lies,” explains that “Kids are prime targets of disinformation.”
Then people should make public libraries (and public schools) a top priority. My library makes Academic Search Premier, available to all patrons, accessible from home. The librarians also have access to even more databases. We can even access LexisNexis from the library.
But even without a library there are good online resources other than wikipedia. PBS, universities, museums, etc. come to mind.
That’s why interlibrary loans are so valuable. You can borrow books from all over the U.S. My last ILL came from a seminary.
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Oh neat! so you read that pro-Scence magazine about which https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/scientific-american/ says:
- Overall, we rate Scientific American Pro-Science and Left-Center biased based on editorial positions that favor the left and through advocating for the consensus of science and properly sourcing scientific information., and
And which https://www.allsides.com/news-source/scientific-american says:
- Scientific American has a Lean Left bias.
- AllSides changed Scientific American’s media bias from Center to Lean Left in June 2020 following an independent review from an AllSides editor. The editor found that many Scientific American articles are written from the perspective of critical race theory, a widely debated foundation for academic study and critical thought typically associated with left-wing academics and commentators. The editor noted numerous articles in which SciAm revealed an ideological slant toward critical race theory, including a piece that claims that concerns about obesity in African American women “reflects the racist stigmatization of black women’s bodies.” Another article proclaimed, “Why Racism, Not Race, Is a Risk Factor for Dying of COVID-19,” and another spoke of the “weaponization of medical language [that] reinforced white supremacy at the torment of Black Americans.” Articles like this seem to indicate SciAm has adopted writers with a strong bent toward critical race theory, a movement and collection of activists and scholars engaged in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power. Critical race theory begins with the view that race is the predominant structural element of American (and other) societies, and its merits as a foundation for objective scientific study have been widely criticized and debated. Critical race theory is typically associated with the American left.
- The editor found many articles on SciAm are not colored with left-wing political theory, but the presence of many left-wing views means Scientific American has a Lean Left bent.
What’s really interesting is that the latter site–when I entered “Wikipedia” into its search engine–tells me:
- Is Wikipedia biased?
AllSides provides media bias ratings for over 800 sources and writers. Until now, we rated Wikipedia as Center, but have changed them to Not Rated because the online encyclopedia does not fit neatly into AllSides’ media bias rating methodologies, which were developed specifically for news sites.
However, it’s worth exploring numerous studies and concerns that Wikipedia has a left-wing bias, including from Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger.
Gee, fancy that: Wikipedia’s more like an encyclopedia than a journal.
I must be one of those. Or maybe the problem is that Google isn’t optimized for finding sources for databases that do not list sources, obscure publications, and data on obscure fossils.
Reminds me of this:
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Because I read them and have accessed probably close to a thousand scholarly journal articles and have hundreds of critical New Testament books on my shelf. When you read about things like the synoptic problem its fair.
Not perfect but contains a wealth of accurate information.
Do you really need a text book or scholarly journal article for that? Not if your goal is to see pros and cons of a host of solutions nd learn what is the primary scholarly view. But if you want to defend a new position at the highest level then your first step is to go learn to read Koine Greek. If you want a middle of the road knowledge then its a great place to go and get an overview and then jump into books and article from there which will have even more extensive Bibliographies. Wiki is the Queen of information.
There are different levels and purposes for information. Hoarding it all in libraries no one uses or behind scholarly journal paywalls is a thing of the past. People want digital information and they want it fast. I like the library. I wish more people went there.
Vinnie
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Get the word out for your p.l.s and start lobbying for better funding for others so the rest of the US has equitable access as you seem to enjoy.
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Good question about what all Elsevier produces. I didn’t know myself, since my library can’t afford to do business with them, unless we drop everything else we do. Here is their “overview” of “solutions”. Not everything offered here is a database. It was interesting to see what else they do: Elsevier Solutions Overview .
Wikipedia themselves strongly advise against citing WP as a source. They fully recognise that the quality and reliability of articles is highly variable. See the lead of their own advice:
WP can be very useful. But self-awareness about how we ourselves assess information is an essential accompaniment to reading what is there.
(Declaration of interest: Over the years I’ve made over 12,000 edits to WP main article space across a range of subject areas.)
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Citing Youtube videos, on the other hand, is far more common and approved?
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When I was in college Wikipedia was usually the butt of a joke or a sign that someone hadn’t really bothered to research something – but it’s improved a lot. Enough so that I don’t plan on buying an entire bookshelf of encyclopedias like my parents did – my kids can just use Wikipedia.
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It’s not that expensive. Anybody from out of town who supports my library at the $300+ level can access the academic search premier database, etc. That’s less than people pay for cable, etc. Anybody in Connecticut with a library card can check out a book or other media from any library in Connecticut. And anybody is welcome to enjoy a movie, lecture, concert, author talk, or whatever in our community room. (A lot has moved to zoom lately.)
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