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

Andy Williamson andy at wairua.co.nz
Sun Dec 4 12:12:42 PST 2005


>There are now enough serious incidents of false and defamatory information
in Wikipedia biographies 
>to warrant prohibiting this as a reference source in universities and
university-level 
>professional schools. The same is true of inaccurate or false assertions in
many articles.

I'm not so sure this is a problem. If you want students to start thinking
critically then what better way to do it? The problem here seems to be that
students accept a single reference as fact rather than go about confirming
their facts through multiple sources. That's a not a problem with Wikipedia,
that's a problem with pedagogy.

Andy





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