No, if you want to cite directly from it or get all your sources from the article’s references and nowhere else.
Yes, if you want a starting point or if you want to familiarise yourself with general concepts.
Of course, there is a proviso: always expect mistakes, controversy, and vandalism. Just in case.
The subject matter may look like a boring source to add jokes, false information, and opinion, but it happens all over the place. Take everything with a pinch of salt.
By the time you’re at the stage of writing essays and completing coursework, Wikipedia shouldn’t be top of your list. But it’s a great place to start when you’re researching and gathering notes.
Here are three major reasons Wikipedia will work for you:
Off to a Great Start – A wiki entry isn’t good enough for gathering references, because it only skirts the surface. Even an in-depth article won’t cover everything to the extent you’re expected to dive into. You are expected to look at academic articles and books from many sources. But Wikipedia is great to use at the beginning. Get stuck in when you start out, not when you finish up.
Convenience – A quick look online is easier than taking out the textbooks. You may even want a simple outline of a topic. Enter Simple Wikipedia. Brief explanations when even the original Wikipedia article is too much hassle. A great way to remind you of the core information.
Jumping Off Point – Don’t think of the Wiki footnotes as a set of articles to add to your own references. Go further and read the references within those referenced articles. Also, find key words that the Wikipedia piece makes a big deal of and look them up in recent scholarly articles. That way, you get the important older papers, plus a look at more up to date stuff. And all off the back of a Wikipedia page.
Talking of jumping off points, there are others close to home. Use your textbooks in the same way. Yes, Wikipedia is convenient, but you probably have your textbooks close to hand much of the time. You don’t have to do much to get the treasure. Grab the books, find the topic you’re researching, and look at the references given in the book (usually at the end of the chapter, or at the back of the book). Voila! More books and academic papers for you to dig out to study and reference. And not the same ones that everyone else looking at Wikipedia will dish out either. Win!
The point of all this is that Wikipedia has a place. As the Guardian piece states, “the default response of academics to simply advise against using the site is unlikely to have much effect”. After all, why not use the site?
I say go ahead and use it. But use it wisely. The key is to use Wikipedia to your advantage and not merely for shortcuts. Make the site part of your wider scholarly plan and there shouldn’t be a problem. It’s when you rely on it as your major go-to that you’ll end up with issues.
Wikipedia is your friend, even at uni, so long as you treat it right. How much do you use it?
[Martin’s note: A slightly different post today. This is my submission for #edcmooc, a University of Edinburgh MOOC running via Coursera. It’s a wordy ramble about digital interactions and being human. If you are interested in that type of thing, I hope you enjoy it.]
Technology (photo by iMaturestudent – Andy Mitchell) CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Subjectivity blurs. Without definitive meaning, terms like utopia and dystopia are not separable and boundaries between the human and the posthuman are not clear.
My life is shaped through the interactions that take place and my interpretations of those interactions. Digital interactions extend beyond the physical and material, yet have room for creating crossover, as demonstrated in Avatar Days.
Avatar Days highlights online characters walking around a real world, yet they do not interact with the people around them. Even waiting in line in a supermarket queue, the film does not show a transaction at the counter. Despite appearing to the outside world, the avatars looks noticeably distant and detached. What is real is unreal and vice versa.
Does this make us different as humans? And at what point do these changes allow posthumanism to exist, if not already?
I suggest that technology alters behaviours in communication more than it alters the people communicating. Learning itself hasn’t evolved into something unrecognisable, but the methods available to us to facilitate that learning have grown. What was once only possible face to face is now possible with no other living person present, or with other people participating all over the world at the same time. People must still analyse the detail, find enthusiasm to get the most out of the resources, and have reason (and the choice) to be a part of something.
Transmitting a message from one side of the world to the other has become faster, easier, more accessible, and ‘closer to the real thing’ than ever before. Break it down and it’s still transmitting a message. Conversation is still conversation. Information is still information.
Conversations and information transmit with speed and ease, reaching a growing number of people. Before publishing this artefact, I saw David Hopkins’ submission for #edcmooc. His presentation linked to a video that is rather fitting.
Isaac Asimov’s vision is playing out now. This is made possible by technology, yet it happens through our actions, interactions, and collaborations. Creative links to what has been can help create what is to come.
The Harlem Shake meme gripped the attention–and creativity–of many people around the world in a short space of time. Within days, thousands of videos were being posted online. Each video an artefact. I considered a few alternative versions in the hope that other people had already created them:
The videos existed. Other people had experienced similar thoughts to my own and I was able to see this using a single search term for each in YouTube.
Digital cultures and interactions start to show–almost in realtime–that we can get along together, create together, converse together, and experience so many things as a collective. By the same token, when overlap doesn’t appear, tensions are such that our own reality finds it difficult to make sense of another person’s reality.
“Moral matrices bind people together and blind them to the coherence, or even existence, of other matrices. This makes it very difficult for people to consider the possibility that there might really be more than one form of moral truth, or more than one valid framework for judging people or running a society.” [p.110]
Under Haidt’s scenario, out goes common sense, truth, and a sense of right and wrong. However, their removal is practically impossible in our own sense of reality and in the collective (and divisive) nature of the world.
If we are so different amongst the similarity, where does being human end and posthuman begin? Indeed, at what point does a transhuman condition exist? If transhumanism is an ongoing project, when did it begin and who decided?
“I have written often about today’s smartphones evolving into digital co-pilots, our constant companions that will help us get through the day. [Ray] Kurzweil sees such devices shrinking to microscopic size and residing within our bodies. Will we have tiny computers in our bloodstream, ever alert for something amiss? These devices will be our links to what is now called the cloud, the vast computing power of the Googles, the Amazons, the Apples and the IBMs of the world.”
Would these devices–inside the body–achieve posthuman wonders, and how do they compare to medical advances of the past, such as radiology, keyhole surgery, and many different drugs? The Transhumanist Declaration states, “Humanity stands to be profoundly affected by science and technology in the future”. But what of the past?
The possibilities here are theories and philosophies, despite the transhumanist desire to introduce a practical angle. They are subjective because the focus is on concepts, not facts. When answers are not forthcoming, we are left either to ask more questions or to fill in the gaps with our own answers.
Michael Stevens, of VSauce, says that “we are all alone in our minds” [at 2min 9sec].
Contradictions are at play. Are we connected or alone? How about connected *and* alone? A binary view is unsustainable. Similarly, the future will be neither utopic or dystopic. Utopian and dystopian narratives, on the other hand, will likely live on, because text is powerful. The imagination can open doors to characters and actions that we may never see with our own eyes. Does this make sense? How real is a memory? If our memories could be captured and transferred to another being, how real is any of it?
The struggle to decide what is real will never go away because we cannot know anything beyond our own self. Adding to the confusion, perceptions of self are liable to change with every new experience. The tendency toward narrative explanations of what we encounter in life skews reality anyway. My reality is mine alone. Your reality is foreign, no matter how much we seem to agree. Empathy can enhance the simulation, but does not make it real.
Our individual minds cannot penetrate another, yet control over others is apparent at the same time. Theory of mind has, by definition, not reached reality. Correspondingly, perceptions of the material do not give way to the digital, even though technology brings greater choice and ease over (attempts at) personal exchanges. It is our sentience that stops the binary of one thing over another. Be it utopia and dystopia, human and posthuman, or otherwise. Subjectivity blurs.
Hello 2013, what stories do you have in store for us? And by ‘stories’, I mean that quite broadly. We live in stories all the time.
Toward the end of 2012, students from several universities took time out to pour drinks over themselves.
As you do.
Newcastle started it with milking. The process? Buy the milk, open the milk, pour the milk over your head.
That’s all well and good. However, Durham students argued, what would happen if you poured port over your head instead? Same situation, different drink.
The results weren’t much different, as it turns out, although the clothing stains were more difficult to get out in the wash.
First milking, then porting. Would it end with single malting, I wondered.
A bunch of freshers at St. Andrews quickly answered. And, no, it wasn’t fine whisky at all. It was Moet.
The results of a champagning experiment turned out to be very different to those from milking and porting. Why? Mainly because of the narratives chosen.
Stories are fantastic. Stories are useful for making a point. That’s why stories are used again and again. Narrative flow helps us all to understand what’s going on with minimum necessary effort.
Unfortunately, that narrative flow also helps to create stories that aren’t necessarily there in the first place.
Champagning at St. Andrews took on a much bigger story than Newcastle and Durham’s pouring attempts. From harmless joke to social commentary, from joining in to proving a point, from healthy rivalry to bitter competition, the story behind the video quickly grew much bigger than the video itself.
In fact, the video was taken down from YouTube and an apology was issued, yet the debate rumbled on. The milking and porting videos remain online.
Champagne apparently brings ideas of expense, snobbery, and special occasion. The concern, it seems, was that in associating St. Andrews with champagne and wastefulness would bring ideas of privilege, money, and further snobbery.
In this, baggage and associations enhanced the story further. This take on the narrative would give a negative spin on the university.
Both the Students’ Association and the university expressed unhappiness over the video. President, Freddie Fforde, said, “This video has undermined our image and undoes a lot of good we have done”. A representative from St. Andrews told student newspaper, The Stand, “In a time of austerity, this was at best insensitive, and at worst, lacking respect for the great many students, staff and townspeople in St Andrews who have for a long time been committed to tackling out of date stereotypes and raising more funds for bursaries and scholarships.”
Newcastle and Durham both had newscoverage surrounding the pouring stunts. Yet St. Andrews gained more coverage after the subsequent response. And moreopinion. It provided a new angle. And the more angles available, the easier it is to keep a story running.
The story is in the mind. It’s like asking whether or not you find the video funny. The choice is yours. The same goes for assessing the deeper meaning of its content.
We’ll never know exactly what motivated the champagning video and how it became what it did. Even the makers will look back differently to how things were in the beginning. It’s unavoidable; the true narrative is lost, because we aren’t documenting the story as it happens. That comes later and cannot be exact, even when we want it to be. And everyone involved will have had their own ideas.
What if St. Andrews students made exactly the same video with water instead of bubbly? Or whisky, as I’d suggested? Or a cocktail? Or an energy drink? Or something that wasn’t even a drink?
What if the champagne pouring video had been made by students from Oxford? Or Nottingham? Or Bath or Birkbeck or Birmingham? Or if the video hadn’t even been made by students at all?
What if the video was professionally produced for a TV audience instead? Or if the St. Andrews video had some sort of disclaimer attached to it? Or if students from different universities participated in the same prank together?
What if the St. Andrews students in the video had been from the most deprived backgrounds? Or they were people pretending to be St. Andrews students but were actually from another university?
There are no answers to any of these questions. The narratives would have changed, but there’s no way of telling how.
Taking down the champagning video and apologising for causing offense has added to the story. Subsequent responses also gave new breath.
My response to Milking was: ‘Meh,’ but I did mention it on Twitter.
My response to Porting was: ‘Oh dear. Let’s brace ourselves for loads of variations on this before it goes away.’ And I mentioned it again.
My response to Champagning was: ‘Right, the latest instalment. I can’t be bothered to point this out.’
This is my narrative to you, anyway. Those responses are not concrete and definitive facsimiles of my thoughts with no margin for error.
No matter what my responses were, here I am talking about everything in much greater detail now. And I wonder what stories will shape 2013.
I guess we won’t get to see any whisky-based antics, but do let me know if it happens. Not so much for the video, but so I can prepare for the narratives that arise from it.
In the book Positive Linking, Paul Ormerod says that the top 3 items on a Google search account for 98% of clicks. The top 1 item, the top result that comes back, accounts for 60% of clicks.
If almost every click occurs in the first three results, Google could go as far as leaving just 4 results on a page and almost nobody would notice. There may even be a slight upward trend in users clicking that fourth link, “just in case”.
Four results to a page may even become a reality. SERoundTable reported that Google are testing that four result option, among other combinations.
One reason why so many clicks are on the first result is because many people search for a site through Google when they know the web address anyway. For instance, a Google search for Facebook is done a lot of the time instead of actually typing facebook.com in a web browser.
When logged in to Google, you have the option to ask for more results per page. Check the preferences page to alter what comes through. I currently have Google set to give me 50 results to a page. If Google took that option away and only allowed four results to a page, I’d be hugely frustrated.
What if Google made every first search a 4-result page and made each subsequent page a 50-result page (or whatever you preferred)? I’d probably still be frustrated, because many of my searches rely on more than the first few results. I’d probably learn to live with it though.
Phil Bradley wonders if Google are looking to get more advertising coverage with fewer results to a page. Whether or not this is the case, this will impact power users than average users.
Keep on searching (photo by gerlos)
As a student, you should be a power user as often as possible. Go beyond the first few results. Be the 2%.
Try out different searches if the first one doesn’t help. I’ve been known to make subtle changes to a search, yet get wildly different results.
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