School officials unite in banning Wikipedia | Hacker News Reader

School officials unite in banning Wikipedia

seattletimes.nwsource.com

10 pointsnickb10 comments

What a cop-out. Those teachers are banning one of the greatest sources of information on the Web today just so they don't have to teach their students the concept of 'caveat emptor' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caveat_emptor). All sources have some error and bias, not just Wikipedia. You want to deal with that, teach? Require more sources.

How much you want to bet those same teachers go home and watch Fox News at night?

Being used to a life of consumer goods, 'caveat venditor', and hordes of ambulance chasers, maybe each passing generation forgets how to practice 'caveat emptor'. It's probably called 'critical thinking' in the educational circles.

A lot of students no longer use the index, or table of contents. Or at least http://scholar.google.com/ if they don't have access to the LexisNexis, or something similar. Or maybe they are just going through the motion, practicing being a mindless drone.

But that just points out the failing of the teachers, not the students. Warren Buffett has an interesting perspective on this: http://mba.tuck.dartmouth.edu/pages/clubs/investment/WarrenB...

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Q: What is your view on education?

A: Bill Gates thinks we're [America] falling behind. [Mr. Buffett speaks with Bill Gates frequently]. I had a great advantage when I went to public school compared with kids today. When I was in school there were very few career opportunities for women, so an enormous number of very talented women became teachers, and I benefited from their instruction. Today there are many more career opportunities, and as a result the pool of potential teachers has shrunk.

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Change the assignment to include identifying Wikipedia discrepancies, fixing them, and tracking the changes for a period of time.

This is a really good idea.

I remember reading about an university professor assigning a paper that had to be published on Wikipedia. I don't think the professor made the students track the changes though.

Peer-reviewed academic books and papers can be inaccurate and/or biased in some way. (Hopefully ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer-review#Criticisms_of_peer_... ) less so than Wikipedia.) That doesn't mean they should be 'banned', only that there is no way to avoid critical, reflective reading whenever it matters to you that the information and arguments you are putting together are right.

There should be a way for the readers of wiki to know which sections have been there for a while (therefore probably more accurate), and which parts are frequently changed (therefore more debatable), so that they can get a better picture of the reliability of those information.

I've often thought that certain revisions should be marked as "more-or-less correct" meaning that there is no vandalism or any obvious mistakes. A cookie could be placed for readers who only want to read such versions. This might mean that there's one-more-damn-thing to constantly administer, but it would keep cross dressing pictures off the GWB page. (Oh, wait, that really happened...)

Or at the very least citations should include a specific revision. When citing from a journal or a book, you always include the revision image (publisher, edition, year-published). The idea is to allow the reader to check up on your sources rather than fulfilling some arbitrary administrative requirement (homework). As I mentioned above, that points out the teachers' rather than the students' competence.

We could compile together the list of suggestions generated here in this discussion, open up a new Wikipedia page on how to actually cite and use Wikipedia. Then get the word out.

Life before Wikipedia was alright. Banning shouldn't really matter much.

Life before the web was alright, but I would be unhappy if it went away.

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