In The Wiki Room
Interesting piece in The New York Times about courts citing Wikipedia. It quotes two old law professors and friends, Richard Posner and Cass Sunstein. Posner thinks it's fine, but not for critical issues. I guess that's about right.
I go to Wikipedia every now and then. It pops up on Google searches pretty regularly. And they tend to have reasonably good information. But it also features a lot of questionable stuff. (Judge Posner's article claimed Ann Coulter was a former clerk until a friend fixed it).
Though it wasn't my intention, I've written the lion's share of about about 20 articles in the Wikipedia. I read something and felt it was so poorly done it needed to be fixed. This is obviously not a source you want to rely on for anything important.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:33 AM
6 Comments:
I guess the question is what percentage of time are the entries ones that people like you have put in, and what percentage of time are the entries like the ones that motivated you to put them in. Supposedly, studies show that Wikipedia has no higher incidence of error than professionally edited encyclopedias.
Luckily, since I know you, LAGuy, I can skip Wikipedia all together and just call you which I've found to be the most reliable source of all.
As a teacher and adjunct professor, I have found Wikipedia to be the #1 source of cut-and-paste plagiarism for student research papers. It's especially easy to catch when the student doesn't remove the blue, underlined links, and then prints out their paper on a colored printer (duh!). This shows that they're lazy AND of below-average intelligence.
Lynette, I wonder if you would be kind enough to offer a few more observations on student plagiarism. ColumbusGal is also a teacher and has observed otherwise good students casually plagiarizing. Of course it's easy to say they haven't been taught correctly not to do so and that institutions are failing to instill an important standard, but our question was, is something more fundamental happening? Has plagiarism become societally unimportant?
ColumbusGuy, you can share these further thoughts of mine about plagiarism with ColumbusGal. Although I teach science, I have found that I get my best results (i.e. best papers with least amount of plagiarism) if I distribute a clear instruction sheet and spend a lesson or two talking about how to write a paper, including a lengthy discussion about plagiarism. This indicates to me that either students haven't been taught this before, or that they won't try to get away with it as much when they know the teacher will be looking for it. I also subscribe to an online service called "TurnItIn.com" that will scan papers and highlight plagiarized passages, even telling me from where they were copied. I tell my students up front that I will submit their papers if I sense plagiarism. The success of this service is indicative of the prevalence of the problem. Perhaps the research paper is evolving by default in our high-speed, A.D.D. society, to become nothing more than a mosaic of other peoples' work. If so, this would be one more indicator of the decline of civilization.
Well, I certainly agree with you, but that probably only marks me as old. I won't include you; you strike me as young and fresh as a peach. Muchas gracias.
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