Scouring my feed subs last night, I found these new media/ Internet news tidbits:
Banning Wikipedia
When is a reference not a reference? When it comes from Wikipedia, apparently. A number of colleges, including Middlebury College in Vermont, are now banning use of Wikipedia references in student papers. This isn’t the first college to do so, and even some high schools are getting in on the act. Everyone is ganging up on Wikipedia all of a sudden.
Personally, I think it’s wrong to assume that all Wikipedia references are not professionally written. I’ve scoured hundreds of references and found that some seem to be written by insiders from one industry or another (and I can back that up with knowledge I may have of that industry). But where do you draw the line if you are a school teacher or college professor? An educator doesn’t have the time to go read and parse suspect references for each and every student. It’s a shame.
Bloggers Are Valuable Say Americans
Steve Rubel wrote on Micro Persuasion recently that a poll by iFOCOS and Zogby found that 55% of the Americans surveyed felt that bloggers are important to the future of journalism. Obviously, this can only be good news to bloggers who want to live the new (media) American dream.
Internet Voting In Estonia
Well if Estonia is going to vote for their next leader over the Internet using a chip-embedded national ID card (likely an RFID chip), why can’t we Digg the next President?
Originally posted on February 22, 2007 @ 6:30 am
You know I spent the last three years of my degree (part time, and took the better part of 10 years :-) ) quoting Wikipedia and myself as references on my academic papers…how I ever got away with quoting myself I don’t know, but when I was talking about the blog market place I didn’t know where else to turn to :-)
If we Digg our next President, does that mean teenagers will have the ‘deciding’ voice?;-)
There are some good reasons for banning it. First, since wikipedia content is dynamic and changing the reference may only be valid for a short period of time. There is no point quoting a “fact” in Wikipedia if you go there and the fact is gone.
Second most Wikipedia “facts” need to be cited so a more thorough citation is to find the true source of the information and not just take it from wikipedia.
Third, it will become increasingly hard to spot plagiarized papers if EVERYONE is quoting straight out of wikipedia.
I think Wikipedia can be a very good research tool but students should be finding something more authoritative when it comes to citations.