From: Daniel Ehrenberg littledanehren@yahoo.com Reply-To: wikien-l@wikipedia.org Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 05:24:46 -0700 (PDT) To: wikien-l@wikipedia.org Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia for education
Like I said before: *in theory*, wikipedia is a great educational source, but *in practice*, no one believes it. Wikipedia does have its flaws that I believe could be solved by this.
--LittleDan
It is in practice too. We share our library here with the local Charter School and I have set in the computer room watching and helping a student research a paper using Wikipedia. Educators have no particular axe to grind with the bulk of our articles (other than being nonexistant or incomplete).
Another activity I have noted is using editing a wikipedia article as a class project. You can see the results of one effort in the first paragraph of the [[bear]] article.
The only reason Wikipedia is not used more by students and in the classroom and in homework assignments is that most folks haven't heard of it. But anyone who uses google and does research will eventually find us.
There is some risk to teachers using or recommending Wikipedia, but as has been pointed out santitizing the entire encyclopedia to satisfy all possible conservative viewpoints is both impractical and undesirable.
Fred