Wikipedia Ate My Homework

Campus Report ^ | August 11, 2008 | Deborah Lambert

[bs9021]

Wikipedia Ate My Homework

by: Deborah Lambert, August 11, 2008

Wikipedia, the much-ballyhooed online information source, was recently blamed, along with other online research sites, “for Scotland’s falling exam pass rates,” according to Martyn McLaughlin in the NewsScotsman.com. To the dismay of students, this cut-and-paste info source has also caught the attention of eagle-eyed American professors. Some have decided to eliminate it from their classes altogether.

Wikipedia itself reported that “Neil Walters, a history professor at Middlebury College in Vermont,” claimed that “vandalism of Wikipedia was used as a source in reports submitted to him.” Walters’ department adopted a policy banning the use of Wikipedia as a primary source, while allowing it to be used for background information. Profs at other schools, “including UCLA and the University of Pennsylvania, have taken up this policy.”

Human Events recently noted that although Wikipedia is “all too convenient,” what use is the material if it’s “unreliable and incorrect?”

The Wikipedia concept was launched in 2001. Last year, in its attempt to “summarize all human knowledge,” it reached the “10 million article mark over a spectrum of 20 different languages.”

Responding to ongoing charges that it is “dumbing down the culture” with inaccurate information, Wikipedia Foundation communications chief, Jay Walsh says that users are warned in no uncertain terms that they should be wary of a “source with unknown authorship,” . . . and advises people to “independently verify the accuracy of Wikipedia information, if possible.”...

[Crazieman]

Idiots. Wikipedia is good for information compilation. Roll through the reference links, wealth of information.

Everything else might as well be the written works of Obama.

[AndyJackson]

This is utter nonsense. None of the college courses that I ever took would have been affected by whether I had had access to Wikipedia. Papers required reading and thinking deeply and interpreting a particular issue about a book. The veracity of facts in an encyclopaedia article would have been completely and utterly irrelevant.

The problem isn't the idiot students. It is the idiot teachers.

[weegee]

Human Events recently noted that although Wikipedia Newsweak/The NYet Times/USA Ptooey/SeeBS-Viacommie/Time-Lies is “all too convenient,” what use is the material if it’s “unreliable and incorrect?”

FAKE BUT ACCURATE BUMP.

[weegee]

Wikipedia offers a bare outline and possibly hyperlinks or names/links to other entries or articles online.

Any paper sourced only from Wiki will be less than 2 pages long.

[the_devils_advocate_666]

Everything I needed to know I learned on the Internet.