Hi Dan,
I have to disagree a bit I'm afraid. Before I discovered Wikipedia my internet maths bible was www.mathworld.wolfram.com, a pretty comprehensive maths encyclopaedia. Now, revising for my final university maths exams I probably use both Wolfram and Wikipedia with about equal frequency. I trust Wikipedia's content because I know that lots of the maths related articles have been looked over (or created) by users like Michael Hardy and Axel Boldt. From their contributions it's clear that they know what they're talking about (there's other users I could mention here).
I'm not convinced that Wikipedia's fallability is such a bad thing, it's a good demonstration of the fact that you should never base something entirely on one source. If I'm trying to understand a maths topic I'll generally look it up on Wikipedia, Wolfram, the books on my shelves and the notes from my lectures. None of these sources are perfect (sadly, especially my lecture notes) but often the different explanations between the four can shed light on the topic.
Also, I don't really have any idea how, for example, Britannica writes their maths articles. Do they actually employ mathematicians to write them? Do they get a list of Topics in Maths and do some googling? It's probably true that Britannica have a lower error/article ratio than Wikipedia but it doesn't mean I should have blind faith in them. In fact, I expect that the more esoteric the topic, the more likely it is to have errors in it as it's more difficult to check. Another example could be biographies of long dead people, how much effort do they put into looking through contemporary research on the person and how much do they, in effect, just reprint out of date versions from years ago?
Anyway, I'm beginning to ramble so I'll wrap this up. My point is that used properly (the same as every other resource) I believe that Wikipedia is a useful educational resource.
Cheers,
Andrew (Ams80)
----- Original Message ----- From: "Daniel Ehrenberg" littledanehren@yahoo.com To: wikien-l@wikipedia.org Sent: Friday, May 16, 2003 1:24 PM 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
--- Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
I believe it already is a "valid educational source".
Waiting for approval from educational bureaucrats, and being restricted by their political whims would destroy Wikipedia as we know it. The scrutiny would be not just on an article by article basis, but on a school district by school district basis. The range of these from permissive open-minded to Christian or Islamic fundamentalist is so wide that we would never have the resources to do all the needed editing.
Wikipedia's primary value is not as a static source in the way that a printed book or CD wuld be. It is as a growing, dynamic and editable source. In the perpetual battle between the irresistable force and the immovable object we are on the side of the irresistable force. Here in British Columbia the provincial department of education (at least in theory) bases education on three principles of learning. The one that is relevant in this context is that education requires the active participation of the learner. The learner is not there to just passively vacuum up knowledge; he needs to contribute to that knowledge interactively. The old model based on respecting the elders who painstakingly amassed a precious body of knowledge is not working as well as it used to.
In the economic terms of supply and demand the supply of knowledge has been made higher than ever by electronic means. The last time knowledge got such a boost came with Gutenberg in the 15th century. Taking an example from a modern 18th century democracy like the United States, we have the Electoral College. It reflects a time when Gutenberg's revolution had taken hold, but before the revolutions in transportation of the 19th century. Communicating the results of elections from Georgia and New Hampshire was not a simple task. It would have stretched the imagination of the drafters of the constitution to conceive that some day a far larger and more populous country would be able to have all the results in one place before the end of voting day. (The Florida anomaly would have been no less baffling to them as to the modern person.)
Returning to education, the opportunity that we offer is in dynamically learning the skills of democratic participation. Focusing on the negative act of controling sexually explicit material or the positive act of promoting religious or patriotic values would both have us missing the opportunity. Part of the skill too is learning to cope with the disruptive elements in the society.
I could maintain this rant a lot longer! :-)
Eclecticology
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