[WikiEN-l] A danger of massive homework and research requests

Thu Jan 29 09:14:21 UTC 2004

KNOTT, T wrote:

>As the Guilty party who answered the question. I have to say that I checked out the wikipedia article on the Gulf stream and found it to be rather lacking. There were no details such as flow rate, average temp, etc. No false colour maps. No history of who discovered it etc.
>
>As a result of answering the child's HW question I've added gulf stream and all the other ocean currents to my to do list and will be improving them shortly. The thing is, has the question not been asked I probably would never have looked at the page. SO although I agree that there is a danger of setting a precedent and I do see your point I have to disagree that allowing HW questions on this list is necessarily a bad thing. 
>  
>
Perhaps we ought to have some sort of a requests list we could 
specifically direct these requests to?  That'd probably encourage many 
more such requests, but they'd be unobtrusive, in a place where we could 
go to find out what sorts of things people are looking for and not finding.

-Mark