(no subject)

[owlectomy]

While I'm at it, a moratorium on crowing "Look! Look! Wikipedia can be wrong!"

We know that Wikipedia can be wrong. We know, also, that reference databases can be wrong, that books can be wrong, that scholarly journals can be wrong, that the guy on the street you asked for directions can be wrong. Saying that Y is dead when he's very much alive is a bad mistake; is it worse than "Most Japanese people have the same opinions"? Is it worse than the Ku Klux Klan pamphlets I had to bind for my bindery job in grad school? (answer: NO.) Is it worse than "Someday, perhaps man will walk on the moon"?

When people assert the usefulness of Wikipedia -- it's not that Wikipedia is never wrong. It's that it's very often a useful place to start research. And if a student treats it as cross between the Pope and Deep Thought, that's not the fault of Wikipedia, that's the fault of the student.

Comments

[diceytillerman.livejournal.com]

THANK you. I wholeheartedly agree.

And even the person who was erroneously declared dead today (if we're thinking of the same person) didn't get all het up as if WP mistakenness was something new or shocking (or different from books or whatever). Zie just calmly let hir community know Hey, I'm not actually dead.

[wintersweet.livejournal.com]

Seriously. Most people never even see it when the local paper prints a correction...