On 5/31/07, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 6/1/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote:
The school deserves credit for allowing the kids
to use Wikipedia. I
hope the message gets back to them.
A friend of mine's 13 year old sister uses it so frequently, I don't
think she even bothers using any other sources for the myriad of
pointless "research projects" she's required to write. I've explained
to her the dangers of taking Wikipedia at face value, and the sheer
lunacy of attempting to plagiarise it. But mostly I mock her laziness
- she's mature enough to know better.
I have to say though, I was a little bit touched when she plagiarised
some text I wrote at [[Paris]]. An extremely indirect, 3rd-millennium
way of doing someone else's homework for them. If you actually think
about the technology that was required for that to happen, well, it's
rather mindblowing really.
Steve
Yeah, the technology is mind-blowing, but still, the plagiarism is
bothersome.
When we were growing up and writing research papers we had to read a book on
the subject and orally summarize what we'd read before we could begin
writing or doing more research. I realize now this was partly my parents'
way of preventing plagiarism, but it certainly showed me the limits of the
encyclopedia articles I read. My nieces are required to do pretty much the
same thing, though less formally (I was home-schooled, they go to public
schools). They read a book on the subject in addition to getting
information off the web, but they are always required to read a book on the
subject and discuss what they read with other family members.
KP