On 8/15/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 15/08/06, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
Great news.com commentary piece on WP, humorous and serious at the same
time:
http://news.com.com/Teens+warning+on+the+gospel+of+Wikipedia/2010-1038_3-610...
"Of course, for students, Wikipedia is the miracle cure for procrastination (and there's science to back that up; a recent poll showed that nine out of 10 doctors suggested Wikipedia as a cure to putting homework off. The other 10 percent were too busy uploading spurious entries to participate in the poll)."
Good. I feel like half my talking to the press is getting across that we're fallible and we do our best, but it's a perpetual working draft and this is a feature rather than a problem - and there's no substitute for thinking.
- d.
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Scanning through the "talkback" from that article, I was somewhat amazed at the several, seemingly genuine notes of thanks to the author from high school students who hadn't realized the "limitations" of Wikipedia.
As much as I was irritated by Colbert's stunt, perhaps it had some beneficial results if it has the effect of helping high school students understand why using a single source, especially WIkipedia, is not appropriate for serious research.
-Rich [[W:en:User:Rholton]]