Well, teachers love to remind students that Wikipedia can be edited by anyone, and it isn’t a peer-reviewed academic journal, and that they use it at their eternal peril.

But with LiD we’re using AI, so occasional inaccuracy isn’t a dealbreaker. 

Rather, Wikipedia commits an even more grievous sin from the perspective of Egan education: 

It’s about as DRY and BORING as a source can possibly be!

Egan repeatedly invoked the idea that “All knowledge is human knowledge.” In An Imaginative Approach to Teaching, he wrote:

“Knowledge, again, is part of living human tissue; books and libraries contain only desiccated codes. The business of education is enabling new minds to bring old knowledge new life and meaning.”

That is, the things you learn are important because the ideas go into your brain and change your thoughts and actions and being. This is where Wikipedia’s weakness lies.

It can be extremely difficult to parse for non-experts. Many of the pages read like textbooks, filled with jargon and mathematical language. 

Another issue with Wikipedia is its relentless ability to take wondrous revelations that humanity spent millennia discovering and presenting them as… kinda meh.

Q: Why are you telling us about Wikipedia if it’s so terrible?

Well, part of the reason we want to introduce Wikipedia as a resource is that it can be an antidote to some of the downsides of using AI and LLMs. You see, when you interact with a chatbot, you need to ask it questions or give it instructions. 

We have been trying to help guide you with our pokes, but sometimes it’s difficult to know what to ask in order to find the juiciest information about your topic. Reference materials like Wikipedia foreground the information so that YOU can make the decisions about what to look at next. 

Also, like our "geek culture" sources, Wikipedia is created by people who are passionate and knowledgeable enough about a subject to take the time to share their ideas with others. Maybe you'll even become one of those passionate, knowledgeable people and contribute your newfound knowledge to Wikipedia after this LiD Quest!

All that to say:

Wikipedia is a wonderful source... if you can bring its reams of dry information to life in your mind. ✨

Here are some tips to do just that

Peek at Simple English Wikipedia

Wikipedia has more than 300 separate domain names, one for each language:

• German: de.wikipedia.org

• Spanish: es.wikipedia.org

• and so on

But one language has two. English is learned as an additional language by more people around the world than any other. It has the familiar en.wikipedia.org, but it also has simple.wikipedia.org — this is the Simple English community.

The Simple English community’s goal is to explain the world not only clearly but simply, only using the 1,000 most commonly used words in the English language. (You remember this from the Simple Definitions poke? Brilliant memory! ⭐)

Spend a couple of minutes skimming some of its articles related to your research questions, and expand into other aspects of your topic, if you're inclined.

Play the Philosophy Game

One of the ways to make Wikipedia more fun is to play a game.

Part of the beauty of Wikipedia is that it’s hyperlinked — you don’t need to flip between pages to see how the world is connected. And back in 2008, someone realized that this allowed for a weird game to be played: The Philosophy Game!

Here's how it works...

In your browser, open Wikipedia. We’ll start with the regular Wikipedia site (en.wikipedia.org), but you could also try this on the Simple English Wikipedia.

Find your topic on Wikipedia. Now click the first link.

Got that new page? Now click on the first link in that page.

Keep going, until you (inevitably, like 99.9% of the time) arrive at the page for... Philosophy!

Here's an example for the topic of "exploration":

Exploration > expectation > uncertainty > epistemic/epistemology > branch of philosophy > philosophy

Hah! That didn't take long.

Let's try it with "asteroid":

asteroid > minor planet > International Astronomical Union (IAU) > international non-governmental organization > government > state > political > making decisions > psychology > behavior > individuals > entity > exists > reality > everything > antithesis > figure of speech > literal meaning > philosophy 

Oh, thank goodness, I was beginning to lose hope there!

Q: Why does this happen?

Philosophy is the mother of all the other disciplines.

I remember asking a philosophy professor why philosophy hadn’t made more progress in the two thousand years since its birth. That’s not a fair question, he said, because each time philosophers do make clear progress, they split off into a new field. Math used to be “philosophy”. Political science used to be “philosophy”. All the natural sciences, too.

I sometimes think that Kieran Egan made a mistake when he named PHILOSOPHIC (👩‍🔬) understanding “Philosophic”. Mentioning it sometimes furrows people’s brows: why are we talking about philosophy? what did I miss?

But he wasn’t wrong to do this: philosophy really has given birth to all the modern disciplines. (We’re all philosophers, now.)

Q: Do all our topics spiral back to “philosophy”?

Try it out! 

And if you’d like to play even more with this, and try something nuts (like clicking the second link in each article).

Q: My topic is not getting back to "philosophy". Why?

Scandalous! J/k, but yes, it's recently emerged that a few changes have resulted in this game breaking. Ahhh! If you're interested in finding out more , you can check out this video: 

Use the Pokes to Guide your Wikipedia Search

The pokes/prompts that we gave you in Weeks 1-3 are informed by Kieran Egan's cognitive tools. These tools help you to see your topic in a different (more human, enchanted, beautiful, or otherwise amazing way). 

So, as you read through Wikipedia, pick some of these pokes to inspire your research e.g. find heroes, verify records, dig deeper into the origins of provebs, and so on. 

Here's how Shelley used Wikipedia to create some Lists for her topic of "exploration".