Ask HN: Why aren't education systems based on Wikipedia?

Libraries have existed for much longer than Wikipedia. And probably showed up before schools in many parts of the world.

So if access to info was all it took schools would have never been invented.

Access to info is just one piece. The other piece is a good guide/teacher who knows which routes through the ever expanding library of knowledge are fruitful and which ones to avoid. Justly randomly meandering around is a very inefficient and time consuming way of working out what the right paths are.

Third piece which most people sweep under the carpet, and most critical to Learning is practice. The brain hardly ever registers anything deeply without repetition. And creating an environment where that practice is happening is not straight forward. Its more tempting to go look at something novel than to read the same thing again and again till its on your finger tips. Good teachers create such environments. The Internet is great in the access to info dept, but there are other pieces to the story for Learning to happen.

> Libraries have existed for much longer than Wikipedia

That's what I thought untig using Wikipedia a lot. With books information is hardly linked, difficult to save. With Wikipedia, it's super easy to bookmark or copy link in Notes.

> Justly randomly meandering around is a very inefficient and time consuming way of working out what the right paths are.

School and innovation is mostly about meandering around for many years. I find general knowledge notions (geography and history) very useful to attack mathematics, physics or biology notions for example. I think what's very important there is how we link the Wikipedia knowledge and its sources in some "virtual palace".

> again and again till its on your finger tips. Good teachers create such environments

From my experience in school and college, we have the lecture one or a few times and no more. Wikipedia + Google/Lectures + Notebooks make it fun for me to go back to enhance my own notes: add an explaination image, some notes, add a link.

Yup Wiki/internet definately has advantages over books and libraries. Just that there are processes going on outside of better quality info, better access to info etc. Maybe someday some one will find better ways to incorporate them and produce better learning environments. Nothing is static. Things are always changing. People have been talking about it eg - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VW31eOorx-I

But Today I think lot of kids (and adults) are getting lost because of the sheer amount of info. Lot more needs to be done to improve it.

Congratulations, you have independently discovered what is called unschooling, a form of homeschooling, which is itself a form of self-directed learning. The closest you can get in a formal school is Montessori. See Ivan Illich’s book Deschooling Society, anything by John Holt, John Taylor Gatto, Grace Llewellyn.

Wikipedia is a decent resource but I wouldn’t base an entire education on it.

> Wikipedia is a decent resource but I wouldn’t base an entire education on it.

Google makes it very hard to find similar quality links. Any tip? I love Wikipedia table of content, templates [0] and "external links" section.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Academic_publishing

Books? Other people who can teach skills and mentor? Practicing skills?

There’s more to learning than surfing the web. Most important things we learn in life don’t come from reading web sites.

Wikipedia is great for some types of information (math, well-established science), but really bad for others. It's not accepted as a proper reference source for a reason!

Part of the job of the educational system is to teach kids to do independent research while maintaining appropriate levels of incredulity, which can be very difficult if not consciously and rigorously skeptical. They don't always do a good job, but abandoning classroom education in favor of self-study is probably not a proper solution for the vast majority of students.

> great for some types of information (math, well-established science), but really bad for others

Wikipedia seems to be quite good on article diversity [0]

[0] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Shares-of-articles-in-ea...

> It's not accepted as a proper reference source for a reason!

Wikipedia is not a source in itself. It's even a principle of the website [1]. The sources are linked in most cases. If not, the source is null.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_not_a_r...

> teach kids to do independent research

From my own scholar experience, searching books and the web was mostly a "bad practice"; even self teaching or asking ourselves questions to conduct was misregarded.

> abandoning classroom education in favor of self-study

Successful self-teaching (self-teaching activity that leads to progress and evolution maybe) is from my experience mostly found in priviliged economic groups but with a various range of mindsets and family background (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_autodidacts)

> Wikipedia seems to be quite good on article diversity [0]

Yes, Wikipedia has good diversity of articles, but not necessarily good quality of articles. Anything that might be political, controversial, open to interpretation, etc., has a good chance of being biased one way or another. Math and science articles are generally very high quality though.

I recommend the book Unschooling by Kerry Mcdonald. In the book, he gives good example on how public schools interfere with a child’s curiosity.

Thank you for the recommendation!

I think your idea is good if you can provide a better teacher to student ratio. It may work with 1 teacher with 5 students, but I prefer 2 teachers with 10 students. With 1 teacher for 20, 25 or 30 students, it's impossible to implement.

But I'd include some mandatory minimal content. Some topics are important in spite they may look boring.

> 1 teacher for 20, 25 or 30 students

1 teacher for many students seems to be a mass education requirement implemented at some time to protect the local elite who has highly educated parents and friends for home teaching or can afford private teachers. I don't have a clean source for this though, mostly personal experience.

> But I'd include some mandatory minimal content.

Most people, particularly young people, seem to have a speicifc curiosity naturally triggered over time with Youtube recommendations (ie. History of their country, a Pysics channel, or anything). What minimal content would you advise or can you think of as a general minimal content requirement?

> mass education requirement implemented at some time to protect the local elite

Nah. Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explaining by people that don't like to pay taxes. To increase the teacher to student ratio from 1/25 to 1/5, you must increase the the taxes like x5, or at least x3 or x4, some costs like school cleaning are not linear. People prefer to pay less taxes, government prefer to spend the money elsewhere. Classes are as big as possible.