It has become fairly wide spread now for schools to "teach" children to not 'trust' Wikipedia, for a number of reasons. Most of the time, teachers are using vandalism and the ability for anyone to edit as a "bad thing" to discourage kids from using Wikipedia for research because it makes it too easy for the kids. I agree with the fact that Wikipedia makes many school research projects too easy. I finished college just before the Wikipedia ban became popular, and I can attest to how much I used it. What teachers should be doing is telling kids to use the Reference section's on Wikipedia as a good place to start.
As for vandalism, yes, there are plenty of vandals and vandalism BUT there are more "good guys" than "bad guys". On top of this, we (the good guys) have lots of tools and bots that make spotting vandalism very easy and changing it back even easier. With a tool like huggle, a vandal fighter can (and I've clocked myself doing it) revert a bad edit within 7 seconds of it being saved. It takes us with the tools less time to fix the page than it did for the vandals to smash their keyboard or write explicatives and hit save.
In the end, vandals get bored. It is thrilling to defile Wikipedia once or twice, but when your changes are swiftly dealt with... it loses its appeal. There isn't much fun in writing graffiti that no one will see.
-Jon
On Mon, Feb 15, 2010 at 13:53, Tyler programmer651@comcast.net wrote:
Kids at my school are criticizing the heck out of your Foundation and will not trust Wikipedia because anyone can edit it. If anyone can edit, then why do you exist? There could be a billion vandals. When the old ones get banned, there could be new ones.
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