Below is an email I sent to the author of an article that was semi-critical of Wikipedia. I think it illustrates the way many in academia don't get it and how many of those are polluting the critical thinking skills of students.
--- Daniel Mayer maveric149@yahoo.com wrote:
Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2005 06:45:27 -0700 (PDT) From: Daniel Mayer maveric149@yahoo.com Subject: Wikipedia is fun, but credibility varies a lot To: Susan.Barnes@rit.edu CC: maveric149@yahoo.com
Just a note about this article
http://www.democratandchronicle.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050717/BUSI...
First, the English Wikipedia had about 640,000 articles at the time your article was published. Not 444,000. Second, Jimmy Wales started Wikipedia under the ownership of Bomis in 2001 - The Wikimedia Foundation was not formed until June of 2003.
If your article had been published on Wikinews, then these errors would have been very quickly corrected before being marked for publication.
This just goes to show that *all* forms of media have reliability issues. This also shows that media published on paper with a PhD as an author is also prone to obvious errors. Giving students the impression that they can trust that by focusing on the unreliability of web resources like Wikipedia is a great disservice to them. All media needs to be scrutinized by students.
It is true that we sometimes discount what an expert says ; the reason is that we value getting it right vs blindly accepting what an expert says without checking.
Daniel Mayer, A Wikipedian
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