Only referring to Frazz’s Panel Two comment here: Isn’t asking somebody just as valid as looking something up?
Of course, looking it up has the advantage that you can usually just get the answer without your source criticizing your methods.
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Comics I Don't Understand 
I agree with you. But one of the joys of looking up answers is all of the other things you find along the way.
It’s kind of the old give a man a fish/teach a man to fish thing. You learn more by seeking out the answer for yourself, including hopefully something about evaluating the quality of sources.
It’s Frazz. He can’t just give you the answer and be done with it.
I agree with Bill, Frazz’s comment is pedantic in a way that’s not actually correct.
And while, as Arthur and DemetriosX pointed out, there can be advantages of looking things up on your own, asking Frazz and accepting his answer without further inspection strikes me as no better or worse than the most common way of looking this up, which would be asking Google and accepting its answer without further inspection.
DemetriosX, that was fine in the Encyclopedic Era: today, “researching” means going to Wikipedia or Googling “Who was the first president to live in the White House?”
For the record, if she’d asked me rather than Frazz, I’d have gone back to the teacher and asked whether she meant the first president to live in an executive mansion at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, or the first president to live in the building after it was rebuilt as the current structure, or the first president to live in the building when it was known as “the White House.”
A couple times I have seen the question “Who was the first President you voted for?” and I always want to quibble with it. If it’s a stand-in for “How long have you been voting?” then it is miscast. I voted in the 1972 Presidential election, but my choice was McGovern, who lost. Do I answer based on that, or jump to Carter in 1976, who did win and become a President?
” Isn’t asking somebody just as valid as looking something up?”
Depends on whether or not the first person you come across, and ask your question of, knows what they’re talking about and will admit it if they don’t.
Part of what kids have to learn is that Google will give you MANY answers to a question, and you need to learn how to filter the ones that know what they’re talking about.
I think his *2nd* panel comment has virtually nothing to do with whether he’s supposed to answer her question. He’s responding to her claim of being “curious”, a claim which was false as a response to “Why?”.
In my view, CIDU Bill’s reaction is actually to Frazz’s 1st-panel “Why?” question, since that’s what may indicate Frazz’s opinion about whether the girl’s asking him is in the spirit of (or following some rule of) the assignment. To me, her less than honest answer indicates she’s not sure it is (or does) either.
As for the question itself, I immediately had a set of thoughts similar to CIDU Bill’s and am glad he had the exact history.. (My historic memory was a feeling that a vibration appeared in Washington D.C. and finally settled down into the White House. (as if it was the end of a pulsating sci-fi transport or metamorphosis))
Bill: While I agree that copying the answer the Google gives you is not “research,” I don’t see that going to Wikipedia and reading the entry on the White House is any less “research” than looking up “White House” in an encylopedia.
Well, Winter, there’s the assumption that the encyclopedia has editors and fact-checkers, while Wikipedia facts could just be coming from some guy in his mother’s basement.
The answer to her question is almost certainly in the history book right in front of her on the table. But she will get a more interesting answer from Frazz.
Based on what CIDU Bill said above, I’m wondering:
1. Did Thomas Jefferson ever live in the White House?
2. Did Thomas Jefferson ever call it the White House when he lived in it?
3. Did Thomas Jefferson even know he was living in the White House?
4. Late in his life, did Thomas Jefferson ever say “White House! Of course! DAMMIT! Obviously! I should have known! And here I was calling it the Executive Mansion all this time!”
5. Wikipedia (the guy in his mother’s basement) says the sandstone exterior walls were whitewashed at the end of construction. So was it the White House even before the War of 1812?
6. How did the British soldiers get sandstone to burn anyway?
Frazz works in a school. He knows that some kids will try to do their worksheet questions without doing work. He is just giving her some tough love and making her do her own research.
We can all go to Wikipedia and look up answers based on what others have posted, it may be wrong, though.
Bill: Wikipedia can be wrong, but so can the encyclopedia. Wikipedia’s error rate is essentially the same as Encyclopedia Brittanica (https://www.nature.com/articles/438900a). And with Wikipedia it’s generally much easier to check the sourcing.
I had a Compton’s Encyclopedia when I was a kid, and it had some enormous biases. Among other things, it stated as facts that Jesus was born of a virgin and raised a man from the dead. Curiously though, it then only said that some people think he was the son of God.
He could have just said “I don’t know”
@Winter Wallaby “Wikipedia can be wrong, but so can the encyclopedia. Wikipedia’s error rate is essentially the same as Encyclopedia Brittanica ”
The beauty of the printed page is it has some consistency, so that the 8am answer is the same as the 8pm answer. The earlier point on bias holds for many ‘sources’. My Uncle Bill told me this so it must be true!
“A solar physicist could, for example, work on the entry on the Sun, but would have the same status as a contributor without an academic background. Disputes about content are usually resolved by discussion among users.”
This reminds me of Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People,” where the doctor’s factual information about the spring’s dangers is determined to be incorrect by popular vote at a town meeting.
The editors at Wikipedia make a big deal out of the idea that majority rule has nothing to do with the validity of a submitted “fact.” In addition, they don’t weigh the editor’s background; they instead rely on cited sources (and do a fair bit of bickering about what’s reliable). So, even though anybody can edit the Wikipedia, un-sourced information from experts and amateurs alike is summarily rejected, and pretty quickly.
All of this was not always true. The Wikipedia in 2019 is a far different animal from the one of, say, 2006. At this point, I would argue that the Wikipedia has grown into a reliable source on the level of any printed encyclopedia.
Speaking of WikiPedia . . .
https://www.gocomics.com/mythtickle/2019/02/20
Cidu Bill: The point of your quote seems to be that Wikipedia is more inaccurate because lots of people can edit it? I think Dyfsunctional makes a good point as to why that’s not the case, but more even more critically, I don’t understand the point of making arguments that Wikipedia must theoretically be more inaccurate, when actual measurements show that it’s not.
In terms of authority, neither Wikipedia nor an encyclopedia are considered authoritative as academic sources, for the same reason… they aren’t intended to be. They were never intended to be. They’re supposed to provide a summary, to lead an academic to “real” sources. Neither one is as useful as a good research librarian, but not everybody has access to one of those.
Back to the comic strip: Frazz is giving the answer he does in panel two not because he believes it is always true, but because he knows in this case that the kid is supposed to get the answer out of her History textbook and he’s being cute. When the kid doesn’t get it, he’s a little more direct in the third panel.
What I love about what Wikipedia has become, with its total eschewal of anything smacking of “original research”, is that it is almost exactly now that which Isaac Asimov parodied in Foundation with Lord Dorwin. Rather than go to nearby Arcturus to view archeological remains for himself (a suggestion he scoffs at), the “archeologist” Dorwin will read the old masters, the great archeologist, and weigh what they have written against each other, and thus determine what is correct.
Making the whole thing even more on point, the original Foundation project was disguised as an encyclopedia project…
https://www.gnovels.org/ScienceFiction/Asimov56b/index_20.html
So, even though anybody can edit the Wikipedia, un-sourced information from experts and amateurs alike is summarily rejected, and pretty quickly.
That depends a lot on the particular information. As an example, when adding a synopsis of a book to an author’s bibliography, usually no source is required. After all, the primary source is the book itself. Someone else can later correct or expand the entry.
larK: Paper encyclopedias are also intended as collections of accumulated knowledge, not sources of original research. Asimov parodied the idea of only never doing any original research, but that doesn’t mean there’s no place fo collections of accumulated knowledge.
So at the risk of being moderated, the point when I realized that Wikipedia had become Dorwin’s encyclopedia was when I was trying to determine the origin of a certain derogatory term for Jews — the explanation Wikipedia offers is transparently not so, and thus useless; but because someone put that explanation as an anecdote in a crappy book he wrote back in the 60s, that explanation has a source! Regardless of how blatantly wrong the anecdote is to anyone who does the most cursory check of Yiddish (the Yiddish for “circle” is not “kikel”, but “krayz”, as you’d expect, Yiddish being a germanic language (“Kreis”), and not a latinate one (“circle”)); checking with the Yiddish language is “original research” and thus verboten. Being as there are no other sources, the blatantly wrong anecdote is therefore “correct”. No matter how much I tried to link to Yiddish dictionaries as sources, all my edits were summarily reverted.
larK: Have you ever seen anything incorrect in a traditional paper encylopedia? If so, were you able to change it?
I’m not saying that Wikipedia is perfect. I’m saying that the aggregate rate of inaccuracy is comparable to that of traditional encyclopedias. So pointing to one incorrect entry in Wikipedia that you weren’t able to get fixed doesn’t seem to do much to counter an aggregate measurement.
If I see an inaccurate entry in Wikipedia and am unable to change it, then what advantage does Wikipedia have over a traditional encyclopedia? If in aggregate it is as accurate (or inaccurate) as a traditional encyclopedia, then we’ve reinvented the wheel, haven’t we?
“Rather than go to nearby Arcturus to view archeological remains for himself (a suggestion he scoffs at), the “archeologist” Dorwin will read the old masters, the great archeologist, and weigh what they have written against each other, and thus determine what is correct.”
This is Medieval Scholasticism in a nutshell. For an example, open any part of Summa Theologica at random.
You saw ONE that you couldn’t fix. Are you extrapolating that NO entries can get fixed? I’m not even sure it’s right to say that they have it wrong. Your opinion is that they do, but other than the claim (which I don’t necessarily dispute) that the Yiddish is wrong you don’t have any references. Your argument is with the author of the book, not Wikipedia.
Speaking for myself, the queasiness I have with Wiki is its impermanence, and that no single entity stands behind the whole. Granted, the E. Brit. and others had an army of editors/authors for each article in the edition, but I have a sense that there was a coherent whole when it’s published. With Wiki, today’s ‘fact’ is tomorrow’s ‘unfact’.
So – I will use Wiki as a pointer to the cited references, but would not dare use it in a footnote for a scholarly paper. “Retrieved from Wikipedia on a Wednesday, 2:02 pm; may have changed since then” :^). Encyclopedias also change across editions and time, so maybe I’m more concerned with how changes are moderated rather than the medium.
Berber makes an excellent point about temporal instability. As I see it, the primary problem with Wikipedia is that it has abandoned its initial potential as a primary reference, and has replaced that with an unrealistic standard requiring documentation of evidence. This results in far too many articles whose footnote section is longer than the article itself. This probably resulted from the anonymous character of the majority of their submissions, and the ever-present danger of malicious vandalism (or more subtle perversion of articles for propaganda purposes).
The result is that Wikipedia has become (generally) a second-level collection of citations, and although it remains valuable as a directional guide, I would never cite it as an authoritative reference in any situation. However, the surfeit of footnotes renders this unnecessary, since it is almost always possible to backtrack to a more “reliable” authority.
A second problem that Wikipedia has is its irregular horde of volunteer administrators, some of which will revert sensible additions (and even corrections) just on the basis of their own particular whims. I’ve never added more than a sentence or two to any one article, but after the third or fourth correction got bounced for no good reason, I decided that I would let Wikipedia fix their crowd-sourced collection of orthographic and factual errors on their own. This decision was accelerated by the increasingly frequent appearance of popups begging for cash contributions. It’s almost as bad as NPR’s pledge week.
But if it’s supposed to be a primary source that anyone can edit, then everyone who has an opinion on a topic edits in their original research. Who vets the information, and using which criteria? Suppose I edit the Evolution page to put in my personal theory that it’s midichlorians driving development to a form that can use the Force? Is that wrong? Says who? Should it be a vote?
@Mitch4 – Given that the point of question about what the first president you voted for is to narrow down your age for (at best) big data, they want to know what election you first voted in. So the right answer is at least two elections away from the first one you voted in.
John Adams was the first President to live in the “executive mansion”. While it was called the white house sometimes before, Theodore Roosevelt was the first to use the name on stationery, etc. and set the official use of the name.
There is a painting of Abigail Adams hanging the laundry in the large “east room” of the white house.
Jefferson did live in the White House. It was called that on and off so he might have called it that. While it was white from whitewash back then, it needed to be painted white while the next President after Jefferson was in residence – due to it being burned by the British during the War of 1812 while Madison was President. It has been redone and enlarged a few times since then, including the interior being gutted twice to work on – last time under Truman. The West Wing is one of the additions.
Much of Washington DC was built on land that George Washington sold the government. He, of course, did not live in the White House (or Executive Mansion) as his presidency had the Federal government located in New York City.
I recently came across a bit of trivia that I feel should be more widely disseminated: The first Native Born citizen President who was not born a British Subject (so, the first “real” American President) was also a non-native speaker of English; Martin Van Buren, the 8th president, grew up speaking Dutch.
Well, that IS interesting, as so did I . . . ‘-)
Figured you’d like that one… ;-)
@ Meryl A – The White House had already been painted white, and had also been referred to by that name before it was burned by the British (in 1814), although not officially, but the “Snopes” page gives citations.
“If I see an inaccurate entry in Wikipedia and am unable to change it, then what advantage does Wikipedia have over a traditional encyclopedia?”
Wikipedia allows new entries to be made. Traditional encyclopedias have what they have and they don’t have what they don’t have. Wikipedia can incorporate new things over time.
Kilby – yes, I did say that it was called that on and off back then and agreed that TJ had lived there as President – before it was burned by the British. According to the White House history site it was whitewashed before the fire and painted white after the fire.