Beyond Wikipedia, what are some of your favorite online learning resources?
Beyond Wikipedia, what are some of your favorite online learning resources?
From time to time I find a dive into the Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy useful for refreshing my memory on some ideas and concepts.
Also the MDN Learning Area is really useful for getting a handle on some web development details.
What others are you fond of, whether esoteric or exoteric*?
*
one of my other favorites is any sort of thesaurus that provides antonyms, 'cause some antonyms just aren't as commonly used!
🤞 this federates properly this time (sorry if the old post eventually emerges, I initially posted this shortly after the Lemmy update kinda threw a wrench in things across instances)
Whatever you do, make sure that you learn legally and avoid those horrible sites that steal the hard work of researchers and prevent publishers from properly incentivizing academic research by allowing just anyone to download research for free. You know, horrible sites like LibGen, SciHub, or Anna's archive.
Totally disgusting sites that you should definitely avoid.
Do not go to sci-hub.se! Can you believe someone had the audacity to allow access to government funded research papers for free? Everyone knows that only elite institutions deserve the benefits of publicly funded projects.
Support your local capitalist by paying them for the content they rightfully stole.
based comment right here
I forgot about that one, thank you!
Oh that sounds horrible, thank you for letting me know where to avoid as I had no idea.
YSK: That publishers do not fund or incentivize academic research.
Authors of scientific papers do not receive money for publishing them (sometimes they have to pay). The peer reviewers work for free. The high prices of scientific journals simply turn into obscenely huge profit margins for the publishers. Publishers harm research by siphoning off money from research budgets and also by preventing better ways of sharing research. Their obscene profits depend on doing things a certain way.
Funny story: Traditionally, researchers have transferred the copyrights to their papers to the journal. When the internet had become a thing, authors made their own papers available directly for download. Publishers then went after the authors for sharing their own research.
But surely the journals provide some sort of service for the researchers, right? Like paying for experts to review their scientific claims, or fact checking their citations, or even basic grammatical proofreading, right? If the journals are earning so much from research, then conducting academic research must be a lucrative field with so many publishers competing to be the first ones to publish a paper.
As a quick reminder to everyone: Researchers have to pay to get their papers published in scientific journals. They receive no money back from those journals. The journals are all double-dipping by charging both the author and the reader to use them. It isn’t stealing from researchers when researchers don’t get paid for your usage regardless.
In fact, one of the most ethical ways to get access to research papers is to go to journals, find the author(s) of the paper you want to read, and email them directly to politely ask for a copy. They’ll gladly send it to you for free, because they also hate the journal system that they’ve been forced into using.
As an information, you can always rely on the wikipedia page for those sites to find the up-to-date domain, so you can avoid it at all cost!!
Our teacher show us exactly how to access scihub, libgen and sites like this just for us to "avoid them".
I struggle to find recent publications on SciHub, y'know, to report them to the hardworking journals that tirelessly implemented paywalls.
Any ideas how I can find papers that are within the past 6 months?
Honestly - if it's a specific article, then just email the author. Unless they're a blowhard they'll usually be happy to shoot off a copy of the final PDF or at least a preprint. Doubly so if you're a grad student and say how excited you are about their research.
Whoever set up these sites should be ashamed of themselves. How dare they make critical knowledge that can improve humanity freely available?
Khan Academy is full of awesomeness.
Sometimes I get curious and search the origin of words at https://www.etymonline.com/
I swear 3/4 of the times I use a search engine is just "[random word] etymology", learning the origin and evolution of words and language is so fascinating.
It's straying close to Wikipedia, but Wiktionary is a useful resource as well.
Here are some:
lifesciencedb.jp/bp3d ( human body parts in 3D )
plosone.org ( peer reviewed scientific journal )
gutenberg.net.au ( ebooks )
librivox.org ( audiobooks )
More general:
instructables.com ( DIY projects )
en.wikivoyage.org (travel guide)
foodista.com ( food recipes )
My public library card works with Overdrive, so I use that to download ebooks and audiobooks
Seriously. Every time I see a post like this my first thought is to tell OP to go to the library. They will have a huge list of online resources that you can access for free with your card number.
https://www.openstreetmap.org/ – geography
https://www.orchidroots.com/ – official orchid names, and pictures
and the sister projects of Wikipedia, in particular:
https://en.wiktionary.org/ – dictionary
https://en.wikisource.org/ – old books (also in other languages)
https://en.wikivoyage.org/ – touristic information
https://species.wikimedia.org/ – species
You said "beyond Wikipedia", but I will also mention that Wikipedia in other languages is an excellent resource to learn a language.
TV Tropes
Warning: Do not go to TV Tropes unless you have a lot of time to burn, and enjoy having 97 nearly identical tabs open at the same time.
I give this link to anyone I know who struggles with tech literacy, and I've learned some things myself from some of the more advanced lessons. And it's all free.
For those hesitant to click through this, it's an interesting looking site trying to teach about cybersecurity stuff! Wouldn't have guessed that based on the name!
I don't think I would have graduated college without Khan Academy. For coding, MDN, Geeks4Geeks and W3Schools are also great.
The Khan Academy is absolutely phenomenal for Math
If you wanna read research there's scihub. There's also clinicaltrials.gov and retractionwatch.com.
I like to use GPT4 as a tutor.
It needs to be told to be factual and quote its sources, but man is it awesome to have it explain complex things in ways that I can easily grasp them.
This is not to be confused with GPT3.5 which is like a toy, while GPT4 is a tool.
Microsoft Copilot now has free GPT4 (I have not tested that version all that well): copilot.microsoft.com
I'm a software engineer, for stuff that are related to library/programming languages, I usually try to look at the official documentation first. Some of the best documentation pages IMO are: SQLite, PostgreSQL, and Rust book. MDN is good too, like you said. Looking at the source code helps too, especially the test files. I currently write lots of Go (programming language) code, and IMO their test files are so good, and you can learn how some functions behave or how to use it.
Other than that, I actually starting to learn to draw too, and for that I, so far, use drawabox. I think it's a good starter for learning to draw--as it gives you the most fundemental stuff when drawing. (technically not online, rather a book, but just before opening this thread I found this resource for learning drawing perspective: https://ia801206.us.archive.org/34/items/PerspectiveMadeEasy/Norling - Perspective Made Easy.pdf)
I also wanted to start playing guitar, but haven't got the money to buy one, but from what I hear Justin Guitar is a good free online resource. Haven't used it though
Poe.com is great for all manner of learning through a chatbot. It's got like a dozen different models that are great for answering natural human questions. You know like the one's you used to be able to answer through a web search without wading through pages of BS that don't actually answer the question. You might consider double checking it with a search engine or a different model to help cut out on any hallucinations it occasionally has.
It's also got some image generators to play around with, but they aren't really useful for learning.
People talk a lot about stackoverflow for figuring out bugs and miscellaneous coding questions but the whole stackexchange project has a lot of other very excellent websites.
ChatGPT is amazing. The fact that 20% of what is says is wrong just increases the adventure. Like that scene in that David Brin book where one alien race had tricked another alien race into misunderstanding science, and hence lose a key battle.