Thursday, July 30, 2009

History of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The point is that to understand how a word has evolved, it's important to know about its history.

History of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
Hyperactivity has long been part of the human condition. Sir Alexander Crichton describes "mental restlessness" in his 1798 book.[1][2] The terminology used to describe the symptoms of ADHD has gone through many changes over history including: "minimal brain damage", "minimal brain dysfunction", "learning/behavioral disabilities" and "hyperactivity". In the DSM-II (1968) it was the "Hyperkinetic Reaction of Childhood". In the DSM-III "ADD (Attention-Deficit Disorder) with or without hyperactivity" was introduced. In 1987 this was changed to ADHD in the DSM-III-R and subsequent editions.[3]

30 comments:

  1. Very informative

    Question: As anyone can write anything on wikipedia is it an reliable source?

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  2. Great question. Do a google search on "wikipedia reliability and validity" then let me know what you think. Either here or on twitter.

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  3. http://mgmt339.wordpress.com/2007/03/25/158/

    i found this from google and from twitter i found this
    http://twitter.com/pbandjeli

    It is just a bunch of opinions but most say that Wikipedia is not reliable.

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  4. Ok. Now the harder part. See if you can find any links that says wikipedia is reliable enough.

    Maybe try wikipedia v encyclopedia britannica and see what comes up. In any case, the best way to figure out what makes sense to you, you have to hear both sides. Then compare and contrast. Then make your own decision.

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  5. How about this?
    http://news.cnet.com/Study-Wikipedia-as-accurate-as-Britannica/2100-1038_3-5997332.html

    My opinion is that i would not use Wikipedia in a paper for the fact that most of it is written by people i don't know who have a common source of knowledge on the topic but might get things wrong that would cost me marks in an exam.

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  6. But who exactly is writing the Encyclopedia Britannica? Do you know who they are? Or how they decide what to put in and what to leave out.

    Also, I'm not talking about a paper for school. If the teacher doesn't want you to use wikipedia, that's the rules.

    I'm talking about using it to get a pretty good idea of what's going on.

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  7. I agree that Wikipedia gives its readers a "pretty good idea of what's going on" in some cases. In others it gives every detail and in some there is a lot of bs and are very unreliable.

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  8. But what about my questions:

    Who exactly is writing the Encyclopedia Britannica or the textbooks that are used in high school?

    How do they decide what to put in and what to leave out?

    Does it really make sense that they get it just right, all the time?

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  9. Schools do not recommend Wikipedia, although they do recommend Encyclopedia Britannica. Why?
    Because Encyclopedia Britannica is reliable. The Encyclopedia is written by numerous intellects who know each subject backwards and forwards using research and their own knowledge. They make sections of knowledge and then pack them with whatever they want for them to make a good Encyclopedia. If they don't "get it right" all the time its false knowledge and thats their choice but most Encyclopedia's (besides Wikipedia)are very true.

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  10. Ok. That's possible.

    But what happens when the experts get it very wrong. The experts on finance got it very wrong on the financial meltdown. The experts on war got it very wrong on the war in Iraq.

    Meanwhile at Wikipedia, you have thousands of amateur experts at very specific topics. It's called crowd sourcing. You might want to do a google search to find out what people say about it.

    Check out today's posts to see what I'm trying to get at.

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  11. Those are contreversial matters ones that require opinions. I am talking about matters such as animals and plants and facts. Usually in Encyclopedias give both sides and are not written by people who may not know what their talking about.

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  12. But the science on animals and plants and "facts" are changing every day. Do you think the latest developments are reflected faster in wikipedia or in encyclopedias?

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  13. They are reflected on Wikipedia. But Wikipedia is not a reliable source so it would not be as worth it than to wait because most of it is bs.

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  14. Sorry. You just made an assertion that you will either have to bring some evidence to the table or retreat to "I'm not sure."

    What is your evidence for "because most of it is bs?"

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  15. What i meant to say is that most articles in Wikipedia have facts that just aren't true. At some point i will look through a couple articles on Wikipedia and see which ones are and are not true. But many admit this same detail about Wikipedia.

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  16. Sorry, unless you have some evidence, I'm not even close to buying "most articles in Wikipedia have facts that just aren't true?"

    Nature magazine is a serious publication that would hurt their brand significantly if they published stuff that wasn't supported by evidence. CNet is also an organization that has to try to be as accurate as they can. Otherwise people wouldn't keep going there.

    So at the CNet site I found these words:
    "Wikipedia is about as good a source of accurate information as Britannica, the venerable standard-bearer of facts about the world around us, according to a study published this week in the journal Nature."

    For now, that's my evidence.

    Just because alot of people say something is true, doesn't make it true. My opinion is based on the snippet above and the fact that wikipedia has a working process in place that finds and fixes bs, a lot faster than the Britannica.

    If you want me to take your opinion seriously, you have to show me the evidence you see. If you can't find any evidence, I'll stick to my opinion and let you stick to yours.

    The thing is that wikipedia is such an amazingly fast way to satisfy your curiosity that I think it's an awesome learning tool.

    I just can't buy that the gezillion of people who have made wikipedia the 2nd or 3rd most visited site on the web all have it wrong. If it were filled with bs, why would so many people keep coming back?

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  17. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lance_Armstrong

    Look at the second to bottom line of the first paragraph, so irrelevant and just false. Wikipedia is just a famous website. I don't know how they did it, maybe marketing i don't know but i do know for a fact that if you need an encyclopedia and you are doing a school paper or an intense peace of research do not go to wikipedia because of the fact you are risking false information. Schools do not recommend Wikipedia why?

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  18. Could you cut and paste here the sentence in question? I couldn't find which one you mean.

    Do you think Wikipedia can become that huge destination point through advertising? I've never seen any marketing? so that doesn't make sense.

    Just a note: A school paper is not an intensive piece of research. A school paper is something you write for a teacher to judge it is bad, mediocre or good. Different animals. I'm not suggesting that wikipedia is appropriate as the sole source for intensive research. But I am suggesting that the encyclopedia is not a good sole source either.

    Back in the day, kids would copy out sections of the encyclopedia and call it research. These days kids copy out sections of wikipedia and call it research. Same thing. Different tech.

    Meanwhile, any response to the scientific study reported in the Nature journal?

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  19. I have a question. Why, in nearly all high schools is Wikipedia prohibited as a source for writing essays?

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  20. A very interesting question.

    My hypothesis is two fold:
    1. It's so easy to copy and paste that it's very hard to get kids not to do it.
    2. If most of what the content you need is so easy to get on the web, the job of the teacher as the unquestioned authority on what's true is undermined.
    3. Very few teachers, or most other people, take the time to examine the evidence before they get an opinion. So much easier to just say what everyone "knows" to be true.

    It's the "systematically applied" stuff about common sense.

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  21. Is it correct to say Wikipedia is unreliable or not?

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  22. it depends who you ask and the standards you demand for reliability.

    If you ask me is it reliable for high school?
    No doubt in my mind. Plus you can get an answer while you are still interested in the question. Plus there are footnotes that you can click. So my take is that it's better than reliable. It's really useful. But no cut and paste without quotation marks and where it comes from.

    Is it reliable for research?
    The same as any other source. Trust but verify. If you don't verify to your own satisfaction, it's not research. It's something more like "he said this" and "she said that." and blablablabla.

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  23. But anyone can write in it. How is that a reliable source? There is still a chance that a page might be edited with wrong information no?

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  24. Just wanted to put a data point on the table about wikipedia and whether it makes sense to use.

    I get a financial email newsletter about investing money. Investing money is one of those places where bs has a cost. In this case it's about credibility. If a financial columnist uses not credible sources, it hurts his own credibility. Since credibility is very important to how an adviser makes money, you know this is an important issue.

    Anyway here's the relevant snippet:

    Now for the other half. Anyone remember RTC? Long story short (courtesy of Wikipedia),

    The Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC) was a United States Government-owned asset management company charged with liquidating assets (primarily real estate-related assets, including mortgage loans) that had been assets of savings and loan associations (S&Ls) declared insolvent by the Office of Thrift Supervision, as a consequence of the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s.

    Here's the link if you want to check it out for yourself.
    http://bit.ly/UFbrX

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  25. I think the real issue for reliability is how fast it's fixed. Not who can enter. As far I as I know, there are well defined processes to fix it fast.

    It doesn't mean that everything is 100%. But nothing is 100% true. That's why it's so important to make your own decisions about what makes sense to you. If it doesn't make sense to you and you care, keep searching, thinking until it does.

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  26. Well i've just had a bad experience with Wikipedia when i went there for a paper on the Alamo and it gave me completely wrong dates so instead of getting an a i got a b... I do not call that reliable.

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  27. But maybe the lesson from that is to check a couple of sources. It would have been very easy to do a google search to see what other people say.

    Wiki says:
    "The Battle of the Alamo (February 23 – March 6, 1836) is the most famous battle of the Texas Revolution. . . .March 6 the Mexican army launched an assault on the Alamo"

    Then with a pretty quick google search I found this at Alamo.org or something like it.

    "Although the Alamo fell in the early morning hours of March 6, 1836,"

    There is a discrepancy. Wiki says the battle started on March 6. The folks who run the Alamo musuem say it ended March 6. in this case i'm going with it ended March 6. If I really wanted to be sure I would check a couple of more sources.

    If drop dead accuracy is the basis of judging a paper, I would spend a little extra time checking a couple of places to make sure it's right.

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  28. Yes but this proves in one sensE that Wikipedia is not reliable and that you cannot rely on it for a paper nor genuine research

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  29. Do you think a school paper is the same thing as genuine research?

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  30. Just found this one this morning...

    Wikipedia currently has more than 13 million articles in more than 260 different languages. The site attracts over 60 million unique users a month and it’s often hotly debated that the information it contains is more reliable than any printed Encyclopaedia.

    Here's where it came from: http://bit.ly/aP506

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