[WikiEN-l] A danger of massive homework and research requests

[KNOTT, T]

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 at yahoo.com] 
Sent: 28 January 2004 21:41
To: wikien-l at 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.