[Foundation-l] At school

[Jon Davis]

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 at 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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