[WikiEN-l] Why cutting'n'pasting from Wikipedia is not a good idea

[Daniel P. B. Smith]

While it's hysterically funny, and they deserved what they got for  
not reading what they copied, don't laugh too much.

As Wikipedia has become successful, the percentage of people who  
understand _anything_ about Wikipedia is declining.

_We need to educate them._ Somehow.

It would be interesting to have a poll of the people who used  
Wikipedia in the last week and see how many of them even noticed the  
the caption "edit this page" or the slogan "the free encyclopedia  
that anyone can edit." I'd bet that _the majority have not_.

Impossible, you say? Heck, everyone knows about Wikipedia, Colbert  
jokes about it, nobody would get the joke. Well, not everybody  
watches Colbert.

I suspect that at this point in time the vast majority of Wikipedia  
accesses are via Google. People just type something they want to  
know, Wikipedia comes up as one of the top links, they click it, they  
read the article. Many of them _may not even notice that it's in  
something called Wikipedia_ In some vague way an aura of authority is  
cast over the article simply by being endorsed, as it were, by  
Google. People don't consciously think "it must be true or it  
wouldn't be a high-ranking Google result." The authority is enhanced  
by Wikipedia's professional-looking appearance.

People don't _seriously link_ about Wikipedia's reliability any more  
than they think about the reliability of their newspaper. Either they  
blindly think it must be true because "they" said so, and because  
"they" are a source other people use. Or, alternatively, perhaps they  
blindly think their newspaper is a cesspool of political bias and/or  
that Wikipedia is unreliable, not because they've looked into how  
their newspaper or Wikipedia work, but because someone they trust  
told them so.

But the people who believe Wikipedia is unreliable don't use  
Wikipedia. The problem is with the people who do use Wikipedia.

The percentage of Wikipedia users who say "That sounds odd. Let me  
check this History just to make sure this isn't a bit of vandalism  
that hasn't been fixed yet" is probably negligible. (The percentage  
who even know what the History tab does is probably minuscule).