[Air-l] Wikipedia warning -- Wikipedia is not a reliable information source

Peter Timusk ptimusk at sympatico.ca
Sun Dec 4 12:01:30 PST 2005


I have a professor of legal studies this term who used some wikipedia  
pages for teaching about war crimes. This was the first I had seen of  
wikipedia in school. Many of my professors will not allow Internet  
references at all. Others instruct us how to do bibliographic cites  
for the internet. Large parts of our studies come from on-line legal  
databases and government web sites publishing the latest laws. This  
professor is not knowledgeable about internet issues. The articles  
concerned war crimes. I would suggest based on this study that a  
reference like Wikipedia will defeat euro-centrism or American  
centric references. I can study statistics or physics from America  
books. But law needs to have a local context and Canadian Law is not  
Australian law nor American law even if all three are common law. I  
look forward to writing more for wikopedia even though as I write  
this my first article for wikepedia is marked for deletion because of  
its quality.

Did the academy study rock music in the 1970s? No that was an elitism  
that has since been regretted. Quality v. everyone having a right to  
speak?





More information about the Air-L mailing list