Wikipedia and the interconnectedness of all knowledge

[Aedes]

I had to do the ultimate experiment on Wikipedia:


It took 3 clicks to get from Chocolate Brownies to Hitler.

It took 6 clicks to get from Cheetos to Attila the Hun.

It took 3 clicks to get from to Louis Baraguey de Hilliers, a Napoleonic general, to the Smurfs, a cheesy cartoon from my childhood.


Is everything we know in this world THAT immediately related? What does that mean for our cognitive need to categorize things?

[boagie]

Is everything we know in this world THAT immediately related? What does that mean for our cognitive need to categorize things?[/quote]


Aedes,

It would seem to be self-evident would it not, when working with wood it is best to follow the grain of that wood, in order to do so, you need to know the grain of the wood. I remember when I was younger realizing that there were methods for memorizing, a mechanical approach which could give one incrediable memory. There was no place to take such training, it was not taught in the schools, and I believe still is not taught in the public school system. Indeed I have heard teachers speak about this topic, stating that memory is not so very important. So, what should we know of the process of categorizations and associations, is there some elemental understanding we all should be made aware of.

[Doobah47]

It seems as if language as a tool is hindered by the existence of parts such as pun, surreal connection or tangent. If I were to say "Hi, look yonder! Thar she blows, a ship" it could be inferred that I meant "hello, listen to me east-ender, there's a hooker over there or maybe you want a shipment of narcotics" - in fact that's just one of infinite inferences one could make.

If we are to use language in order to expand our knowledge in a categorical sense then I suppose that one needs many more words in order to describe the different categories which we encounter.

Of course this is impossible, we could not have a word for every atom (supposing that every part of matter is unique), nor could we countenance a name for everything we know (for example each equation in maths having a name unrelated to it's inventor, ie a 'word' not a 'name').

Having studied some Buddhist script and a summary of Judeo-Christian/Islamic relations in the past month or so, I'd say that philosophy is dumbfounded in the presence of groundbreaking (personal or "for all persons as a whole"*) proof of knowledge; our language cannot explain for example the differences between social interaction and "flirting", sometimes an occurances drifts between boundaries and categorizations.

I suppose that "tota-personal" could be a word to describe such a thing.

Getting back to the point, there are some who say that an individual is simply 7 steps through societal interaction to any person on earth, so why could knowledge and the melange of language not develop the same? A simple point, I know it seems rash and unprovable.

If we regard language is a fundamental provision for knowledge then surely it is the language at fault for such discrepencies in the possible relativity of categories.

I do not believe that a new language must be founded, but that languages be developed in order for the individual to express deep emotions - that is a start, and one which would be greatly beneficial - instead of messing around making words that fit into common linguistic usage, why not make new words that present possiblity for the expression of said individual?

[Holiday20310401]

A little bit off topic but why is it that teachers despise wikipedia. They don't count it as a formal reference!! It's loaded with useful and credible information.

Also, for memory, I find it easier to while studying and right before the exam to eat the same food, best to be something that triggers the dendrites probably.

It is probably because the food triggers a new sort of file labelled "lemon", for example, that all qualia during study are easily accessible for mental projection. Makes sense to me.

And Aedes, I have done that trick on wikipedia many times. Its fun to do it with opposites and find that they are much easier actually.

[Aedes]

Originally Posted by Holiday20310401

A little bit off topic but why is it that teachers despise wikipedia. They don't count it as a formal reference!! It's loaded with useful and credible information.

A real reference comes from primary material, not from topic reviews like encyclopedia articles (Wikipedia or otherwise). The utility of something like Wikipedia for academics is not the information it contains, but rather the references it lists. So you can look up an article there and be given the references of primary material that you can look into as an actual reference. That still may not be good enough, because who's to say that a given Wikipedia article is unbiased enough to give a comprehensive list of references?

That's referring to research at a higher level. But even at the level of elementary school, I do have a real problem with Wikipedia being used as a reference. That is, specifically, that it makes it extremely easy to be lazy about research, and what's important to cultivate in kids is the wherewithal to look at different sources and know how to find them.

[Holiday20310401]

Yeah, but do you know how hard it is sometimes to go through databases to find an article that fits one's abstract well enough? I guess I'm just not god at researching but I've spent a long time browsing database articles, doing advanced searchs on Britannica, Gale, proquest, etc. (proquest is the best for science so far for me).

I personally believe that wikipedia advocates for highschool better than using databases, because the ones that the library subscribes to are too advanced for the average student (including me, I don't need the major, MAJOR details).

I remember using google and wikipedia for a research assignment in civics class on whether Harper should help in the invasion of Iraq or to maintain the peacekeeping (that was the mandatory topic) and I aced it.
But when I have to do a research assignment on the H5N1 influenza virus in biology and I actually use databases I got a low B. And when marking the bibliography portion the teachers tend to exclude googled data. Oh well. lol.

[Aedes]

The other aspect of Wikipedia to be aware of is like any other review you may find yourself inadvertently rephrasing it or at least repeating the order, organization, and prioritization of its content.

I'm currently writing two book chapters for a medical textbook, and I've written chapters and review articles on a few different subjects. And it's REALLY hard to make it seem original when I'm writing a review article on a subject that I've written about before. So I'll generally look at other people's reviews of the same topic to get a sense of content, emphasis, organization, then independently search for references. So in the end I'll inform myself using reviews, but I'll never use them so stringently that I'd need to cite them.

Be happy, when I was in high school we had to do all of this by hand using reference indices, because there wasn't any meaningful internet at the time. Life would have been a lot easier if we had electronic databases. But I still wrote a lot of papers by reading historic newspaper articles and even some scientific publications.

[Holiday20310401]

Yeah, I never really got the concept of 'writing in your own words'. What if they happen to be (as videcorspoon would put it) at the intellectual level of normative framework as the references are. I mean sure don't write word for word, but there should be no problem with using some of the big words that are used in the reference.

And without the internet, lol, I'd have to rely on magazine subscriptions or something. Old articles, would seem hard to get a hold of, unless the library would have some.

And whats your medical textbook about, or is it a reference book.

[Aedes]

Originally Posted by Holiday20310401

And whats your medical textbook about, or is it a reference book.

It's sort of both. I'm writing a chapter on Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever and one on Tularemia.

[Vasska]

You stumbled upon the Wikipedia effect.

Wikipedia is gathering as much (correct) information as possible and thereby create links to all sorts of information. The problem is that almost every word is linked to another article, some are there with a purpose most are not.

Getting from Chocolate Brownie to Hitler is one of those links without a purpose. If you can give the exact way of getting there we might see if I'm right on this one.

This video

also explains it graphically. The first example starts with "game board" and links to other game boards, but as it grows i noticed things like nuclear power (probably linked from a modern board game which featured something like that). But nuclear power will link to A-Bombs, will link to Hiroshima, will link to WOII, will link to Hitler and so on...