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Wow! Wiki really is shut down!

ecofarm said:
I dunno if anyone has posted an update, but this keeps it as 'breaking news'.



We win, they can eat a crap.
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Crap! Just when I thought it was going to get easier to teach my students to do ACTUAL research. Oh well.
 
I don't see the problem with using Wiki as research begins, just to provide the big picture. First, you teach your students the differences between primary, secondary, and tertiary resources and between "popular" and scholarly sources, and all they have to do is Google to hit any number of university libraries that explain these and also how to evaluate sources and describe the research process itself.

Then, you let them Wiki and read up, including following hyperlinked refs in the bibliography. Finally, they use whatever databases are subscribed to by the school and any nearby college/university libraries. You just don't let them count Wiki as a legit scholarly source.
 
nota bene said:
I don't see the problem with using Wiki as research begins, just to provide the big picture. First, you teach your students the differences between primary, secondary, and tertiary resources and between "popular" and scholarly sources, and all they have to do is Google to hit any number of university libraries that explain these and also how to evaluate sources and describe the research process itself.

Then, you let them Wiki and read up, including following hyperlinked refs in the bibliography. Finally, they use whatever databases are subscribed to by the school and any nearby college/university libraries. You just don't let them count Wiki as a legit scholarly source.
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Yes, thank you. I already do all of this...........but it's just the idea that I MUST do all of this. Fact-checking all of Wiki's resources is simply redundancy that I and my students could live without. There are too many other, more credible and less subjective "launching pads" on the web for good peer-reviewed historical research to waste too much time filtering through Wiki ads............IMHO of course. :shrug:
 
I don't see what the legitimacy of Wikipedia as primary source material has to do with censoring the internet. There is no pre-requisite for putting a website online, none at all. And it should stay that way. If you don't like it, then don't use the internet for your research, or go to another site. The internet must remain free to universally access.
 
Temporal said:
I don't see what the legitimacy of Wikipedia as primary source material has to do with censoring the internet. There is no pre-requisite for putting a website online, none at all. And it should stay that way. If you don't like it, then don't use the internet for your research, or go to another site. The internet must remain free to universally access.
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God help us if the whole interwebz ever crashes. I suppose that those of us who actually remember how to communicate face-to-face and read the dewey decimal system will become important again. *sighs*
 
Ockham said:
No, yours is the appeal to authority. See when you make an accusation you need to say what it is and why. Just making a counter accusation without anything is sort of ... banal.
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[/QUOTE]

If you edit out my post you certainly won't see what my accusation is. Appeal to authority of encyclopedia britannica and guilt by association fallacy (you dismissed the research pertaining to wiki's accuracy because you find an article on the benefits of eating dirt ridiculous, you didn't offer criticism of what was wong in the methodology of either study).
 
FluffyNinja said:
Yes, thank you. I already do all of this...........but it's just the idea that I MUST do all of this. Fact-checking all of Wiki's resources is simply redundancy that I and my students could live without. There are too many other, more credible and less subjective "launching pads" on the web for good peer-reviewed historical research to waste too much time filtering through Wiki ads............IMHO of course. :shrug:
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Unfortunately, the Internet has made bibliographic analysis more challenging (and tempting too, LOL).

What about requiring that a majority of resources be from juried scholarly journals? You establish the research parameter, so maybe narrowing these will help?

It's not just the quality of the sources; equally problematic is plagiarism, so you're going to be checking references constantly anyway. Maybe Turnitin.com is a solution?
 
Sunbelt said:
Does anyone have an idea on how the government plans to take control of the Internet? (Libs, you should be loving this prospect, by-the-way)
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... I don't know, how IS the government planning to do that thing you just made up?

Why are people discussing the merits of using wikipedia as a research tool? Kinda missing the point...
 
FluffyNinja said:
God help us if the whole interwebz ever crashes. I suppose that those of us who actually remember how to communicate face-to-face and read the dewey decimal system will become important again. *sighs*
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Unfortunately, lots of stuff is online only these days.
 
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