As an active Wikipedian with a yen for accuracy, I have to admit to
cautioning my students away from using Wikipedia as a source for their
research papers. What concerns me most is something that is not
discussed, but which I've noticed: correction speed. For "large"
subjects like British history or popular subjects like Madonna, mistakes
are quickly corrected in the much vaunted Wiki manner. But once you
start traveling the by-ways of knowledge it takes weeks, months, years
for a mistake to be corrected. The "minute particulars" are pretty
flimsy on the whole in Wikipedia. This is why I either ban Wiki
completely, or make sure my students supplement their on-line sources
with edited, hard-copy sources like the good old encyclopedia.
Terrible examples exist on Wikipedia: take a look at the Lautreamont
page, for instance. The article was reasonably written, the neutrality
was good, and then suddenly along came a writer whose command of English
is at that ESL level, who took it upon himsef to put his school essay on
line and wham! Where is the Wiki self-correcting mechanism? It's
there, but it's moving incredibly slowly and making many mistakes along
the way. Jess
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