I am afraid that a connection between Wikipedia and bad habits is more spread than we can think of. I notice this in many Latin American countries where I consult; mostly in universities where teachers discourage its use mainly for two reasons: (a) afraid of copy and paste (they don't have the time to check if this is happening, they just assume it), and (b) they think that Wikipedia information is not reliable enough. Both, but specially the last one should prompt an aggressive "marketing strategy", as Jiri suggests. By all means, proper use as a learning tool should be encourage by teachers, scholars and intellectuals, which is not Wikipedia's mission. But a clear and noticeable note in Wikipedia's main page may help to change this view. Rodolfo
Jiri Hofman wrote:
If I understood well, Lars has written that _making_ publicly connections between Wikipedia and bad habits around its usage, is bad for Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is a powerful tool. And as every powerful tool, it can be used in a good or bad way. We should clearly point out what are those good and bad habits, strongly encourage the good ones and even stronglier discourage the bad ones. This should be a part of Wikipedia's "marketing strategy". I hope such a clear position and strategy would help to stop making connections I wrote about above.
I know wikipedians already do something like this. However, according to Lars' report, it seems we (or at least Swedish wikipedians) don't do enough.
We shouldn't create only the best encyclopedia but also create and propagate instructions how to use it, in order to stop the bad habits. But we should in the first place understand why the connections are bad for Wikipedia.
We _are_ partially responsible how our tool is used.
Jiri
On Wednesday, 30. September 2009 0:33:01 Lars Aronsson wrote:
Thomas Dalton wrote:
What you describe isn't necessarily a bad thing. Independent learning and research is a very important part of education. It all comes down to the details of how it is done.
Independent learning (when done right) can be useful and important. But that's not how Wikipedia's name is being used here. Those who like independent learning have their own names for it.
Those who call it "Wikipedia education" are the teachers, politicians and newspaper editors who dislike it (or how the method is being abused to reduce costs for teacher salaries). And that's where their abuse of our name becomes our problem.
-- Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
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