Its math and science content is too nonsensical to be useful.
I occasionally read a history article, maybe once every 6 months. But history from things happening hundreds to thousands of years ago, predating modern media... sorry historians, it might as well be fiction.
I'm sure someone has thought long and hard about why the content is losing quality.
The problem with math and science content is that there are many possible audiences with many possible backgrounds, and such content tends to require substantial prerequisite knowledge. So when you have a source edited by anyone, you end up with a hodgepodge of different material aimed at different audiences with different expectations of background. It takes a lot of effort and expertise to rewrite this mishmash into a clear and coherent narrative.
This is a much harder problem for an encyclopedia than for a textbook chapter or a journal paper, because each article is supposed to (somewhat) stand alone and be both broadly accessible and somewhat comprehensive. For a textbook chapter you can systematically build up prerequisite knowledge from earlier chapters and you can assume that students will spend significant time and effort working problems and will have some expert guidance and support if they get stuck. For a journal article you can assume readers have deep subject-matter expertise, e.g. have a PhD in the field. In both of those cases you can leave out most information about the topic as clearly out of scope.
Traditional encyclopedias typically punt by just not including much technical detail at all. (Some Wikipedia articles also do this.)
* * *
As a basic example, let’s think about what might be included in an article about “circle”. You can look at this from a kindergartener’s point of view, or a high school geometry student’s, or an ancient astronomer’s, or a physicist’s, or a signal processing engineer’s, or a 19th century projective geometer’s, or a complex analyst’s, or a group theorist’s, or an algebraic geometer’s, or a topologist’s, or a number theorist’s, or an ergodic theorist’s, etc. Some of these audiences are easy enough to satisfy, but to provide deep comprehensive coverage of the way a fundamental concept like the circle is related to every mathematical field is going to take careers worth of background. Which parts to attempt, which parts to skip, and how to organize them is a very challenging set of editorial choices.
"Its math and science content is too nonsensical to be useful."
Can you name a example?
I found them to be generally of higher quality than controversial topics. So maybe not always with the best didactic approach, but usually a good start. And then I follow the links, if I want to dive in deep.
Wikipedia is useful for me, for quickly checking something. Not scientifically dive into a deep topic.
My personal annoyance with Wikipedia articles on advanced math is that often it's "monoid in the category of endofunctors" on steroids.
A lot of those articles seem to follow a pattern of: "An A is a B that also does C".
If you click on the link to understand what a B is, you get "B is a D in the space of Es with properties F and G".
and so on...
I can understand that this appears logically consistent and very satisfying for people who have already understood the concepts, but it doesn't help at all if you're trying to gain an understanding.
A good textbook has a sense of order in which dependent concepts are introduced. With Wikipedia, the task of discovering that order is outsourced to the reader. Maybe you could develop some kind of path finding algorithm to figure out the optimal reading order for understanding a given concept, but to my knowledge, that doesn't exist yet.
The other problem is that no shortcuts are offered. Even if you figure out the order yourself, Wikipedia gives you no hints how much of B, C, D, E and F you have to understand to get the idea of A. The expectation seems to be to read the entire articles on the dependent concepts, which can be long, rambling and full of obscure special cases.
There are alternative wikis for math and they’re way harsher.¹² Wikipedia is the middle ground between math wikis written by current students and professionals vs pedagogues.³ But I’d argue that if you want pedagogy or step by step proofs, then why not simply buy a well vetted textbook, of which math has many?
Also, Wikipedia tried a wiki textbook project and no doubt people were very unsatisfied because they couldn’t compete with textbooks, which often have a singular pedagogical vision behind it. It’s hard to compete with famous well discussed texts.
I’m happy with Wikipedia as a reference which supplements those students who are already studying the material; in other words, those students looking up topics in Linear Algebra are taking or have taken the course already.
That's certainly true, buy I think it also makes it quite unsuited as a reference (except for people who are already familiar with the concepts and just need a quick reminder).
Wikipedia math articles are not useful to get a shallow understanding of a topic. On the contrary, it pulls you into a rabbit hole of dependent concepts just for you just to be able to understand the words in the article's summary.
From an actual reference, I'd expect that it gives a brief, self-contained description of the basic idea of a concept, without going too deep into specifics, possibly with a "see also". That's not what Wikipedia does.
But I think that this is a core difference between an encyclopaedia and a textbook. If you need the topics presented in an order that takes you from a certain level of understanding to the next, you need a textbook.
Well that's the problem. An encyclopedia should neither provide nor need such an ordering. But Wikipedia often does need it, while also not providing it, the worst of both worlds.
Wikipedia math has competition and they are generally much harsher than Wikipedia, which indicates the direction which communities of volunteers wish to go when they disagree with Wikipedia's execution.
The people who are looking up references to advanced math concepts are likely students who are already on a mainstream pedagogical pathway and are looking to fill in holes to a concept map they're already building.
The use case of someone who (1) does not wish to consult the vast and well-discussed pedagogy of math and (2) is not an advanced math student and thus wishes to have stand-alone math definitions is a Very special case.
> Wikipedia math has competition and they are generally much harsher than Wikipedia, which indicates the direction which communities of volunteers wish to go when they disagree with Wikipedia's execution.
Okay, but I don't think those communities are relevant to this conversation.
> The use case of someone who (1) does not wish to consult the vast and well-discussed pedagogy of math and (2) is not an advanced math student and thus wishes to have stand-alone math definitions is a Very special case.
Number 1 is a weird assumption! Unless by "consult" you mean spend weeks studying a textbook, the problem is that consulting is too difficult! And if I understand "harsher" correctly you just said the other sites are harder to use, didn't you?
So then it's just "not an advanced math student", which may or may not be a majority of people on these pages but it's a very significant amount and it's the more important target for a general encyclopedia.
Wikipedia is by definition a reference. If you want to learn something use different material. Trying to make wikipedia articles tutorials is out of scope (not that it isn't nice to get practical examples for concepts, which ime there often are!)
A problem in mathematics is that mathematicians do not always agree on the definitions of things -- even very fundamental concepts [1] [2] -- and so Wikipedia in the interest of neutrality presents all definitions in use. In a given textbook, an author will choose one set of definitions and stick with them, which makes things manageable for the reader. In Wikipedia, the number of alternative interpretations of a sentence grows geometrically with the number of ambiguous terms.
[1] What is a "natural number" (do they start at 0 or 1?)
[2] What is a "function"? Does it carry along a "co-domain"?
I don't understand why this bothers people. If something on Wikipedia is above or below my level, I just skip it. It takes all of three seconds to recognize. I've consistently found it to be a great starting point for self-study in all sorts of math.
A novice isn’t always going to know the difference between something they could understand with effort and something they don’t have the context to understand.
It’s an incredibly common cause of anxiety in math education, and even if you’re not personally affected by it others may be.
For sure, but Wikipedia aims to be a Encyclopedia and not a math course.
Now it surely would be nice, if it could work more like it.
That wikipedia knows my skill set and automatically hides or show additional paragraphs in certain topics etc. or even the paragraph in a simpler language etc.
But this a bit more ambitious - and not really achievable with the current approach. So if I want a math course, I search for a math course.
>It’s an incredibly common cause of anxiety in math education
I question whether this can be a root cause of anxiety. Simply not understanding stuff does not normally cause anxiety. Most people don't get anxious looking at, for example, Chinese characters.
On the other hand, imputing that something should be frightening can actually cause a fear response:
Teaching students that incomprehensible math should frighten them doesn't seem like a good approach. There are no grades or critical teachers when you're passively reading a Wikipedia article.
Not only that, 4 paragraphs until the first citation, 16 paragraphs until the next one. All that information might be correct, but there's no easy way to confirm it.
PDEs are a significant enough thing that the article is probably correct. But once you get into more niche math articles, a lot of the writing is incorrect.
I know enough to know the examples for Base sqrt(2) are not correct, but I don't know enough to write a proper example.
For example if this is true "Base √2 behaves in a very similar way to base 2 as all one has to do to convert a number from binary into base √2 is put a zero digit in between every binary digit"
Then Base(10) 3 aka Base(2) 11 converted to Base(sqrt2) would be 101. But it is actually 1000.000001
As RDBury on the Talk page mentions, "bases that are not Pisot–Vijayaraghavan numbers are not guaranteed to terminate or even be periodic". Whomever wrote that example just happened to pick an integer where the Base(sqrt2) version terminates and has such a pattern, and treated it as if it applies to all integers.
As someone who reads a lot of history, please head over to r/AskHistorians
It has very strong moderation, and low quality answers are deleted. Their papers cite methods and hypothesis which removes a lot of "fiction" from the equation.
Also, they get quoted in mainstream media too. The content quality is out of this world.
Ignoring the very controversial topics, like Israel and Palestine or the current war in Ukraine, Wikipedia can be a very good starting point when it comes to history.
The entries are not exhaustive nor are all of them very scientific-sounding, but at least the basic facts which we sort of know of are there.
Are you not familiar with the hype that it'd become the end-all-be-all repository of human knowledge? It's been talked about that way since at least the 90s. It's not uncommon to see people on this site post sentiments that it has achieved that—in some fields, kinda, in many others you can barely scratch the surface before you have to hit a library (probably a university library, and you may need ILL) to keep going, or if you're very lucky the book you need exists in digital form and you can buy or pirate a copy, but the "open Web" simply does not have the info you want, and even if it does have it, it's a crap-shoot whether it's presented and organized at least as well as some print version you could get instead.
at least most of new research article is online, although we still have problems with publish company, but everything is towards to better way. e.g., Germany government and now maybe White House are standing at side support open every article.
But real books on real topics have been getting purged from libraries (especially school libraries) for well over a decade now. In many school districts, older books containing actual truths, are destroyed rather than marked as removed from circulation and re-sold. Some libraries I know of locally purged almost all of their books on "old, white" history, and replaced them with "more modern" bullshit works by "CRT" writers.
To the point of this article, much of this is driven by the teachers, who say they will not accept sources that might have "social biases" (as if it were possible for any book to not have those!) The library then purges those books because "no one has checked them out in a couple of years".
The sad thing is that almost 100% of books being added to the libraries fall into just a few categories: Books promoting or "celebrating" perverted sex of any and all kinds (including pretty much all "youth fiction"), Manga, or "Graphic Novels" (let's face it, some have good artwork, but are really just nicely bound and printed comic books, usually with little to no redeeming educational value.)
Sadly, I don't know a single person under 30 who has a clue how to actually use a library to find real sources - they all just default to Googling. The web is amazing, but what's NOT on it is staggering, and of amazing quality and scholarship (which is itself a lost art...)
More worryingly, I've seen a LOT of valuable content vanish from the search engines, which just shoves that content right down the memory hole, using the same flawed logic as those high school librarians - no one's asked for it recently.
We lose access to and context for valuable information when our search engines (it's all about the money from hits and eyeballs) only keep what is "popular". Alas, we've replaced Carnegie Libraries with Kardashian libraries, to our great loss...
So you stopped using it, but now use it less, and you read history articles that are fiction because they're so old, but the quality had declined recently? Pick a lane.
"But history from things happening hundreds to thousands of years ago, predating modern media... sorry historians, it might as well be fiction."
What? I'm confused on what you're saying here. Are you stating there are no primary sources on history from more than a few hundred years ago? All history is made up? I'm sure there are poor quality historical articles, but I wouldn't go so far to call all history "fiction".
History is very much an interpretive science. You can infer a lot of things from a site that predates written history. One of the salient examples were some severely deformed bodies found ritually positioned with assumed valuables. And that's all the context you get, and now you have to frame it with anthropologically modern references polluted with ideologies like Hobbes/Rousseau while conjointly projecting Holmberg's mistake into the past when the concept of "marginal" people didn't exist. There's a lot of errors that can arise and a lot of features that can metamorphose into only a distant conception of what once was.
And even then, records are questioned. Sometimes period historians really had to stick their necks out to speak the truth (and in the most literal sense) so direct impressions we have of certain elements of history may be reasonably called into question. And there are numerous historians that are known to have fabricated elements.
I once worked with someone in an important position in a major media organization who believed nothing was recorded before the printing press, and was quite vocal about it. He quite strongly believed that everything else was made up.
I always wanted to ask him what he thought about Egyptian hieroglyphs, but he was too far above my pay grade to approach or challenge.
Its math and science content is too nonsensical to be useful.
I occasionally read a history article, maybe once every 6 months. But history from things happening hundreds to thousands of years ago, predating modern media... sorry historians, it might as well be fiction.
I'm sure someone has thought long and hard about why the content is losing quality.