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

[K P]

On 7/2/07, Cheney Shill <halliburton_shill at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- 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--
>
>

 I don't know what article the questions are from, but only two are
actually trivial knowledge.  I've seen a lot of so-called measures of
people being misinformed where the measurement is itself misinformed.

American schools no longer teach reading comprehension, in fact they
are doing away with novels in high schools, so that the schools can
teach the kids how to pass tests.  Maybe it's part of this generation
that made this quiz.

KP