Philosophy
The taller of the short people is working on a research project on Ruth Wakefield, the accidental inventor of the chocolate chip cookie. She's finding few resources in the public library, so we did a web search and pointing to the results, she tells me that her teacher has told her that ask.com is to be considered a reliable source, but not wikipedia.
I, too, tell my students not to go to wikipedia as an academic source, but then a college class in philosophy is in part an experience in learning how to be a scholar, how to find and interpret texts. Encyclopedias of any sort are fine for factual purposes, but when you are working through complex arguments and living debates, you need to engage the participants, working through the primary and secondary literature.
But wikipedia is coming to be the icon for untrustworthiness, the used car salesman of the knowledge world. The internet is the intellectual version of the wild West, anyone can say anything and they do. Then it's out there. Wikipedia, because it is a wiki, is employed as the symbol of this factual lawlessness of this opposition to intellectual authoritarianism where the sun never sets on the Encyclopedia Britannica, despite having in place safeguards to avoid as many problematic changes as possible.
I've found it very useful for acquaintance type fact searching, for giving a context to something I had a vague sense of, in other words, exactly the sort of thing you go to an encyclopedia for. So, the question is whether it is deserved or a bum rap. How reliable is wikipedia?
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Philosophy
How Reliable is Wikipedia?
The taller of the short people is working on a research project on Ruth Wakefield, the accidental inventor of the chocolate chip cookie. She's finding few resources in the public library, so we did a web search and pointing to the results, she tells me that her teacher has told her that ask.com is to be considered a reliable source, but not wikipedia.
I, too, tell my students not to go to wikipedia as an academic source, but then a college class in philosophy is in part an experience in learning how to be a scholar, how to find and interpret texts. Encyclopedias of any sort are fine for factual purposes, but when you are working through complex arguments and living debates, you need to engage the participants, working through the primary and secondary literature.
But wikipedia is coming to be the icon for untrustworthiness, the used car salesman of the knowledge world. The internet is the intellectual version of the wild West, anyone can say anything and they do. Then it's out there. Wikipedia, because it is a wiki, is employed as the symbol of this factual lawlessness of this opposition to intellectual authoritarianism where the sun never sets on the Encyclopedia Britannica, despite having in place safeguards to avoid as many problematic changes as possible.
I've found it very useful for acquaintance type fact searching, for giving a context to something I had a vague sense of, in other words, exactly the sort of thing you go to an encyclopedia for. So, the question is whether it is deserved or a bum rap. How reliable is wikipedia?
- Food Facts
General Tso's chicken is named after Zuo Zontang, a Chinese commander who put down the Taipeng rebellion in 1860. The dish is most likely North American in origin, since such a dish is not part of traditional Chinese cuisine. It is hypothesized that...
- Wikimedia Uk Vs Wikimedia Foundation And, John Duns Scotus
"Wikimedia UK stonewalling effort to see documents" by Gregory Kohs Examiner A few weeks ago, a new organization identifying itself as a "charity" appeared in Great Britain. It calls itself "Wikimedia UK", and its purported purpose is to "help collect,...
- Wikipedia's Birthday--10 Years
Much maligned but making improvements. "Wikipedia Marks 10 Years of Edit-It-Yourself" by Verne G. Kopytoff January 13th, 2011 The New York Times An untested idea — allowing regular people to create an online encyclopedia — went live on Jan. 15, 2001,...
- Encyclopedia Of Life, Fossil Mysteries, Natureserve Explorer
International Year of Biodiversity In a few words from Wikipedia..."The Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) is a free, online collaborative encyclopedia intended to document all of the 1.8 million living species known to science." Encyclopedia of Life [Wikipedia]...
- Surf Canyon Browser Plugin--tested
This morning I did some further testing of the Surf Canyon browser plugin to enhance search results on the Internet. I entered "mercury" looking for information on the element and a Google search yielded, in part,... # Mercury Vehicles 2009: View Mercury...