MasterP said:
I missed nothing, what you’re quoting is someone trying to explain why it’s good to teach students to question sources of information that contain accurate information just because it’s on the internet and instead of taking that accurate information and acting on it, to intentionally search for information that contradicts it.
And what does he mean by “Wikipedia and similar sites”? Similar “untrustworthy” sites such as the IEEE journal archive? Britanica Online? Dictionary.com? Conference proceedings? There are VERY few thorough online reference sources and fewer still that are actually free. It’s that free and open part that’s the real deal killer for librarians like the one you keep quoting. School librarians, since day one, have been against FREE reference material of any kind. To them, anything that didn’t cost money isn’t a credible source, regardless of how accurate the information is. Don’t take my word for it though, go look at any accuracy or comparative study done on Wikipedia and what you’ll find is that librarians, in every study they’re involved in, have given Wikipedia a bad review. You’ll also find that science-related reviewers generally find Wiki to be as accurate, if not moreso, than Britanica and w/e the big German one is and give it praise despite the noted layout issues some articles have.
So like I said earlier, the science-related majors generally love it and liberal arts hate it. It’s curious that you’d choose to quote from an article titled “A Stand Against Wikipedia” when there are more than enough neutral articles you could have quoted from. Are those the kind of articles you read when you were forming your opinion of Wikipedia or did you pick articles that weren’t completely negative?
Do you take everything I say negatively? No I don’t only read negative articles about Wikipedia, I even went and wasted my time looking at your retarded accuracy studies for Wikipedia. Just so you know I chose that article because I was curious what they had to say about it, I referenced it because even though the title of the article is negative it is more of a fight for the USE of Wikipedia than against it. If you would take your head out of your *edited* for two seconds you would see that I personally am agreeing with you that Wiki is a great source for most information finding, especially in quick reference.
I don’t understand how you take ‘Students face “an ocean of information” today, much of it of poor quality, so a better approach would be to teach students how to “triangulate” a source like Wikipedia, so they could use other sources to tell whether a given entry could be trusted. “I think our goal should be to equip students with the critical thinking skills to judge.”‘ as a negative action against Wikipedia, as far as I can tell the person is saying to USE Wikipedia, break it apart and reference other proven sources to check its validity, just like you should do for anything you find anywhere, whether it be a scholarly resource or Wikipedia, you should never go one place, do a search, find what you want and then immediately reference it as the one source, researching 101? Hence why I have no issue with what this person says, I think it should begin to be used as a source, but it isn’t and never should or will be the end all source for researching, no one source ever should be.
So please do me a favor and take your head out of your *edited*, so I don’t have to break this stuff down for you, STOP BEING NEGATIVE, not everyone agrees with your world view and just because I disagree with you that Wikipedia is not the second coming of Christ does not mean that I am immediately wrong.
tl;dr I agree with MasterP, Wikipedia is a great source for quick reference and beginning research, but it should be checked like all other sources when you research, he needs to stop taking what I say negatively.