As the Guilty party who answered the question. I have to say that I checked out the wikipedia article on the Gulf stream and found it to be rather lacking. There were no details such as flow rate, average temp, etc. No false colour maps. No history of who discovered it etc.
As a result of answering the child's HW question I've added gulf stream and all the other ocean currents to my to do list and will be improving them shortly. The thing is, has the question not been asked I probably would never have looked at the page. SO although I agree that there is a danger of setting a precedent and I do see your point I have to disagree that allowing HW questions on this list is necessarily a bad thing.
Theresa -----Original Message----- From: Robert [mailto:rkscience100@yahoo.com] Sent: 28 January 2004 21:41 To: wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Subject: [WikiEN-l] A danger of massive homework and research requests
But there is a great danger
to directly answering questions like these: In a short amount of time Wikipedia might become known as a place where people can mail in requests for info, and then we will be flooded with thousands of requests each month for help on homework and research. We'd get questions from people in junior high, high school, and college.
KNOTT, T wrote:
As the Guilty party who answered the question. I have to say that I checked out the wikipedia article on the Gulf stream and found it to be rather lacking. There were no details such as flow rate, average temp, etc. No false colour maps. No history of who discovered it etc.
As a result of answering the child's HW question I've added gulf stream and all the other ocean currents to my to do list and will be improving them shortly. The thing is, has the question not been asked I probably would never have looked at the page. SO although I agree that there is a danger of setting a precedent and I do see your point I have to disagree that allowing HW questions on this list is necessarily a bad thing.
Perhaps we ought to have some sort of a requests list we could specifically direct these requests to? That'd probably encourage many more such requests, but they'd be unobtrusive, in a place where we could go to find out what sorts of things people are looking for and not finding.
-Mark
Delirium wrote:
Perhaps we ought to have some sort of a requests list we could specifically direct these requests to? That'd probably encourage many more such requests, but they'd be unobtrusive, in a place where we could go to find out what sorts of things people are looking for and not
finding.
This sounds like a good plan to me. I've never been the sort of person to turn away someone with a straightforward question, and I'd like somewhere we can answer them off the normal list. Plus, it'd be easier to find archived responses to questions if they're not mixed in with the general list archive.
-- Jake
How about a link on the Main Page: Ask Wikipedia
Fred
From: "Jake Nelson" jnelson@soncom.com Reply-To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2004 06:20:34 -0600 To: "English Wikipedia" wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] A danger of massive homework and research requests
Delirium wrote:
Perhaps we ought to have some sort of a requests list we could specifically direct these requests to? That'd probably encourage many more such requests, but they'd be unobtrusive, in a place where we could go to find out what sorts of things people are looking for and not
finding.
This sounds like a good plan to me. I've never been the sort of person to turn away someone with a straightforward question, and I'd like somewhere we can answer them off the normal list. Plus, it'd be easier to find archived responses to questions if they're not mixed in with the general list archive.
-- Jake
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
I am also interested in ocean currents although I know nothing about them.
Recently I wrote [[Cromwell current]]. May you check it for correctness and improve it? thnx.
--Optim .'.
--- "KNOTT, T" TKNOTT@qcl.org.uk wrote:
As the Guilty party who answered the question. I have to say that I checked out the wikipedia article on the Gulf stream and found it to be rather lacking. There were no details such as flow rate, average temp, etc. No false colour maps. No history of who discovered it etc.
As a result of answering the child's HW question I've added gulf stream and all the other ocean currents to my to do list and will be improving them shortly. The thing is, has the question not been asked I probably would never have looked at the page. SO although I agree that there is a danger of setting a precedent and I do see your point I have to disagree that allowing HW questions on this list is necessarily a bad thing.
Theresa -----Original Message----- From: Robert [mailto:rkscience100@yahoo.com] Sent: 28 January 2004 21:41 To: wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Subject: [WikiEN-l] A danger of massive homework and research requests
But there is a great danger
to directly answering questions like these: In a short amount of time Wikipedia might become known as a place where people can mail in requests for info, and then we will be flooded with thousands of requests each month for help on homework and research. We'd get questions from people in junior high, high school, and college.
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
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