Writing questions out of Wikipedia

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QuizbowlPostmodernist
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Writing questions out of Wikipedia

Post by QuizbowlPostmodernist »

I know some people love it.

See this Slashdot thread:

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/0 ... =146&tid=1

Comments?
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The Goffman Prophecies
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Post by The Goffman Prophecies »

I'm definitely a bit guilty of writing questions from Wikipedia.

I find myself more often than not using the Random Page feature to generate ideas for questions, and then usually googling the subject to confirm any discrepancies I might not be sure of.
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Matt Weiner
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Post by Matt Weiner »

According to your university's website, you have free access to Britannica. This is the case at most institutions. I suggest everyone use the only real encyclopedia instead of noted source of true and objective facts, the Internet. Cross-checking Wikipedia entries is a good idea, but even using them can give you a false idea of how important something is. When difficulty comes into play, you need a real sense of how worthwile it is to know a specific thing, and Wikipedia is too full of people with agendas to get that sense from their writing.

Quizbowl according to Wikipedia would be 50% geography, 20% minor scandals that are embarassing to liberals, 20% minor scandals that are embarassing to conservatives, and 10% place names from Tolkien.
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Post by Captain Sinico »

In all seriousness, Wikipedia is fraught with errors. In particular, its math and science entries tend to contain critical mistakes or extremely inadequate or incorrect definitions and descriptions when the equations in the entry are correct. This is compounded by the byzantine, favoritist, almost political correction process, which usually consists of people posting things like "WHY ISN'T THIS IN LINE WITH SYMPLECTIC TOPOLOGY?!" and "Please define in terms of implicit functors, since that's what we use here. Implicit functors are the greatest and allow you to blur the difference!"
In other words, what Matt said of the entries is true even of the correction process, i.e. it seems to consist mostly of people backing their pet topics without regard to conventional use or the good of the readers, or just using the biggest words they know in the field in question and hoping they're relevant.
Therefore, it is my experience that Wikipedia not only contains grievous and frequent errors, but its design seems to encourage their perpetuation and dissemination. I recommend again, in the strongest terms, against writing questions or doing any type of research about the accuracy of which you care (this should include quizbowl questions you’re writing) from the broad internet, including and especially Wikipedia. This seems to be another recurrent topic, but the answer is simple, so I don't understand why it keeps coming up. There are generally any number of good, authoritative sources available both in print and on the internet for any given topic, so there's no excuse for using crap like Wikipedia as a primary (much less only) source.

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No Sollositing On Premise
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Post by No Sollositing On Premise »

Wikipedia is probably the best quickie online source to write questions from, and I usually use it after I've planned a tossup or bonus topic and I'm organizing clues to write the tossup. After I have the tossup written (with or without Wikipedia), I cross-reference each clue and re-edit for language and flow. I consider Wikipedia to be the handiest and most accessible online encyclopedia there is, but it is generally unreliable when you want any deep (ie difficult pyramidal opening) clues in a tossup. In conclusion, Wiki's good, but don't treat it as a trustworty academic source.
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Post by Susan »

I was curious--are there any collections of searchable online textbooks for physics/chemistry/other non-biology sciences (or for any field, really)?

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Post by jackflaps »

McGraw-Hill has their science and technology encyclopedia online at http://www.accessscience.com, and I imagine pretty much every college library subscribes to it. Most every other science database I know of is academic, and therefore I don't go anywhere near them.

As for Wikipedia, I've written questions using facts I pulled from it in the past, but I wouldn't write "from" it any more than I would write "from" any other source; every library science student in the world knows you should at least be double-checking everything you read against something else. It's good for easy biographical things and for the odd interesting lead-in, but I wouldn't write a full question based on what it says.
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online physics/mathematics

Post by mreece »

Hi Susan --

Almost anything you could want to know about physics or mathematics is readily available on the web. In both fields heavy use is made of the archive -- http://www.arxiv.org -- where all new papers are posted before they are published. Print journals are essentially ignored in many fields of physics.

The result is that any topic of current research interest can be read about easily by going to arxiv.org and doing title or abstract searches.

The textbooks that people tend to use in classes typically are not available online. On the other hand, extensive lecture notes are generally available on any topic you want, although sometimes you have to do a fair amount of searching to find them. When you find such things they're often in the form of Postscript files that aren't searchable (though hopefully well-organized with a table of contents or an index). Searchable PDFs are sometimes available, though.

Particularly of note, as online physics texts go, is Warren Siegel's online "Fields" textbook ( http://insti.physics.sunysb.edu/~siegel/errata.html ), a comprehensive book on classical and quantum field theory. Also of note are Sean Carroll's lecture notes on general relativity ( http://pancake.uchicago.edu/~carroll/notes/ ), where I first learned the subject.

Gerard 't Hooft has a listing of recommended (mostly undergraduate level) online sources for people wishing to learn physics (and the relevant mathematics). It is at http://www.phys.uu.nl/%7Ethooft/theorist.html . I haven't looked over many of these in detail but since they're selected by an eccentrically brilliant Nobel Prize winner I expect them to be good if eccentric.

Similarly, in mathematics you can find huge numbers of courses with detailed lecture notes available online. (Just the other day I found a listing of tens of algebraic geometry courses with notes.) Some are listed at: http://www.gotmath.com/notes.html .

What all this means for the writing of quiz bowl questions is a bit of a tricky question. I'm confident that I could quickly find an authoritative online source to check any fact I put in a question, but I'm familiar with the resources that are there (and with which people most know what they're talking about.) These sources are not really collected in any one easily searchable place, short of the arxiv, which is research-level and largely not suitable for question material.

But, maybe people can learn to use some of the resources I've pointed to when writing questions. It's probably better to look at course lecture notes than encyclopedias, at least. But we do lack the nice online versions of standard textbooks that you have some of in biology.

(I should note one exception: in algebraic topology, two very good texts that exist in print are fully available online, Allen Hatcher's at http://www.math.cornell.edu/~hatcher/ and Peter May's at http://www.math.uchicago.edu/~may/CONCI ... evised.pdf . In the unlikely chance that anyone reading this wants a recommendation on algebraic topology books, I particularly like May's, but then, I was probably brainwashed into liking it.)

Matt
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Re: online physics/mathematics

Post by grapesmoker »

mreece wrote: (I should note one exception: in algebraic topology, two very good texts that exist in print are fully available online, Allen Hatcher's at http://www.math.cornell.edu/~hatcher/ and Peter May's at http://www.math.uchicago.edu/~may/CONCI ... evised.pdf . In the unlikely chance that anyone reading this wants a recommendation on algebraic topology books, I particularly like May's, but then, I was probably brainwashed into liking it.)
I'm actually taking an algebraic topology class right now and so would like to thank you for this information. I'm using the Armstrong book, but I think it would help to have some outside references.

[/derail]

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QuizbowlPostmodernist
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Post by QuizbowlPostmodernist »

Yup, if there's any underasked topic, its algebraic topology.
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Post by QuizbowlPostmodernist »

More on the pervasiveness of Wikipedia found via http://www.boingboing.net/:

From:
http://edition.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/europ ... a.basayev/

"Basayev tendered his resignation from all posts in Maskadov's rebel organization but continued to be involved in the reconnaissance and sabotage battalion, Wikipedia said."

Guess we gotta stop writing current events questions from the CNN website.
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Matt Weiner
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Post by Matt Weiner »

QuizbowlPostmodernist wrote:More on the pervasiveness of Wikipedia found via http://www.boingboing.net/:

From:
http://edition.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/europ ... a.basayev/

"Basayev tendered his resignation from all posts in Maskadov's rebel organization but continued to be involved in the reconnaissance and sabotage battalion, Wikipedia said."

Guess we gotta stop writing current events questions from the CNN website.
That's not a bad idea. What the hell kind of reporters are they hiring?
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QuizbowlPostmodernist
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Post by QuizbowlPostmodernist »

Matt Weiner wrote:
That's not a bad idea. What the hell kind of reporters are they hiring?
I have no idea. Seriously, CNN started going down the tubes when Turner sold out to Time Warner and really went to hell when AOL took over.

I don't even bother to visit CNN any more except when someone links to something there.
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