[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia's Effect on American Knowledge

[Cheney Shill]

--- MacGyverMagic/Mgm <macgyvermagic at gmail.com> wrote:

> People in general are ill-informed. You wouldn't believe
> how much urban
> legends are believed to be true and how much info is
> misconstrued.
> 
> Examples:
> 1) You've just been knighted by Queen Elizabeth. She
> takes away the sword.
> What does she say afterwards?
> 2) What are lemmings known for?
> 3) What form are raindrops?
> 4) What do dolphins drink?

I'm equally concerned that you think that knowing the
answer to that question constitutes anything more than
trivia that's even less useful than knowing cartoon
characters.  Utterly useless even to the knighted who
already have what they came for.

Was it an attempt to make some other point?  Maybe that
even the Queen is painfully ill-informed?

The point of the article, however, is that current-event
knowledge has gotten worse.  It's a relative measure. 
I.e., not that someone feels that knowledge in general is
lacking based on an arbitrary point, but that it has
dropped since the Internet (including Wikipedia) has become
widely available.

Maybe the problem isn't the Internet, but in the schools
teaching reading comprehension.

~~Pro-Lick
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/User:Halliburton_Shill 
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pro-Lick
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Pro-Lick 
http://www.wikiality.com/User:Pro-Lick (Wikia supported site since 2006)


--spam may follow--


       
____________________________________________________________________________________
Building a website is a piece of cake. Yahoo! Small Business gives you all the tools to get online.
http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/webhosting