Nina Kalinina on Nostr: The Wikipedia Curse, or A Book So Thick It Was Incomprehensible I graduated from the ...
The Wikipedia Curse, or A Book So Thick It Was Incomprehensible
I graduated from the high school before Wikipedia became The Encyclopedia, but I started to rely on it more and more during my university years. For non-experts seeking academic-likr knowledge, Wikipedia is likely to yield more useful results than other top Google results combined.
I think it makes us stupider. Not just Wikipedia, but cheap search access in general. But especially Wikipedia. We can look up a thing and we get the impression that we understand something about this thing, while in fact we're in an unfortunate spot of confidence/knowledge chart explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect.
As it happens with Dunning-Kruger, I didn't notice it for years. My mum, who's a middle school science teacher, noticed it immediately, observed and documented it. In just a decade, she says, children stopped being interested in science. They can look anything up, read it out loud, and they honestly believe they understand the thing. Most of them don't.
I graduated from the high school before Wikipedia became The Encyclopedia, but I started to rely on it more and more during my university years. For non-experts seeking academic-likr knowledge, Wikipedia is likely to yield more useful results than other top Google results combined.
I think it makes us stupider. Not just Wikipedia, but cheap search access in general. But especially Wikipedia. We can look up a thing and we get the impression that we understand something about this thing, while in fact we're in an unfortunate spot of confidence/knowledge chart explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect.
As it happens with Dunning-Kruger, I didn't notice it for years. My mum, who's a middle school science teacher, noticed it immediately, observed and documented it. In just a decade, she says, children stopped being interested in science. They can look anything up, read it out loud, and they honestly believe they understand the thing. Most of them don't.