[Foundation-l] Charity Navigator rates WMF

[Anthony]

>>> More interesting for us
>>> would be why these kids use Wikipedia.  Are the authorized proprietary
>>> textbooks that bad?
>>>
>> No, kids just understand that they're going to get caught if they
>> plagiarize from their textbooks.  What they don't realize is that the
>> "NPOV" language of Wikipedia tends to be glaringly obvious, even when
>> you're talking about calculus.
>>
>
> I suppose that another strategy would be to subject them to a quiz based
> on the very material they lifted from Wikipedia ... without a copy of
> the article in front of them. O:-)

That's actually the way it usually goes down.  My wife calls the
student up and asks them questions to gauge their understanding of the
material, before formally accusing them of anything.  I'm going to
stop with the specific details though, just in case some of her
students or future students are subscribed to this mailing list, which
is a distinct possibility.

>>> To take Wikipedia "as a serious
>>> source of information" will take time, and depend less on what we do
>>> than on what they do.
>>>
>>
>> I honestly can't see it ever happening.  Not unless Wikipedia abandons
>> "anyone can edit", anyway.
>>
>
> "Anyone can edit" can work ... if it's accompanied by a viable article
> evaluation system.  That means more than just checking for vandalism.  I
> would very much support some kind of numerical system for this where the
> published rating would average all the ratings made by any individual
> who cared to do so..

I guess.  I'd support a system where a real-named individual (or maybe
even a very well-established pseudonym) signs off on an entire
article.  But I don't see that happening.  "Some kind of numerical
system" which averages the ratings made by lots of instances of
"anyone can publish a rating", would probably be a step backward.