Wikipedia Breeds Unwitting Trust (Says IT Professor) 441
kingston writes ""As I say to my students 'if you had to have brain surgery would you prefer someone who has been through medical school, trained and researched in the field, or the student next to you who has read Wikipedia'?"
So says Deakin University associate professor of information systems, Sharman Lichtenstein, who believes Wikipedia, where anyone can edit a page entry, is fostering a climate of blind trust among people seeking information.
Professor Lichtenstein says the reliance by students on Wikipedia for finding information, and acceptance of the practice by teachers and academics, was "crowding out" valuable knowledge and creating a generation unable to source "credible expert" views even if desired.
"People are unwittingly trusting the information they find on Wikipedia, yet experience has shown it can be wrong, incomplete, biased, or misleading," she said. "Parents and teachers think it is [okay], but it is a light-weight model of knowledge and people don't know about the underlying model of how it operates.""
Brain still required. (Score:5, Funny)
Trust Wikipedia? (Score:3, Funny)
Sharman Lichtenstein
Uh-huh. Sounds like someone's already defaced the article...
Re:Wikipedia and research papers. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Brain still required. (Score:5, Funny)
No way would I let fellow students operate on me (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Yahoo answers is worse. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Yahoo answers is worse. (Score:5, Funny)
See, I use Yahoo Answers as a barometer for ignorance. I check it once every so often to see if the human race is still, collectively, an arse-scratching bunch of chimps.
So far, Yes.
Last week on yahoo answers:
Cud I B prgnent?
Did u do it standing up???
Re:Yahoo answers is worse. (Score:4, Funny)
Question:
"What is the meaningof "corrolary" in this sentence?
------------------
As a result, oil demand becomes less and less responsive to movements in international crude oil prices. The *corrolary* of this is that prices would fluctuate more than in the past in response to future short-term shifts in demand and supply."
Answer:
"Comparable to corollary in a heart, central blood vessel. Could say "heart of the matter" or point.
The (point) of this is that prices..."
I see people on /. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wikipedia and research papers. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Wikipedia hightlights pre-existing human issues (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wikipedia and research papers. (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah but after they told me that, I was able to find my way out of the building (only ran into one dead end), so they brought me back in for an interview.