[WikiEN-l] Fwd: Wikipedia is fun, but credibility varies a lot

Wed Jul 20 17:27:44 UTC 2005

Out of curiosity, did you get a response?

--gkhan

On 7/20/05, Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Below is an email I sent to the author of an article that was semi-critical of
> Wikipedia. I think it illustrates the way many in academia don't get it and how
> many of those are polluting the critical thinking skills of students.
> 
> --- Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> > Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2005 06:45:27 -0700 (PDT)
> > From: Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com>
> > Subject: Wikipedia is fun, but credibility varies a lot
> > To: Susan.Barnes at rit.edu
> > CC: maveric149 at yahoo.com
> >
> > Just a note about this article
> >
> http://www.democratandchronicle.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050717/BUSINESS0105/507170321/1001/BUSINESS
> >
> >
> > First, the English Wikipedia had about 640,000 articles at the time your
> > article was published. Not 444,000. Second, Jimmy Wales started Wikipedia
> > under the ownership of Bomis in 2001 - The Wikimedia Foundation was not
> > formed until June of 2003.
> >
> > If your article had been published on Wikinews, then these errors would have
> > been very quickly corrected before being marked for publication.
> >
> > This just goes to show that *all* forms of media have reliability issues.
> > This also shows that media published on paper with a PhD as an author is also
> > prone to obvious errors. Giving students the impression that they can trust
> > that by focusing on the unreliability of web resources like Wikipedia is a
> > great disservice to them. All media needs to be scrutinized by students.
> >
> > It is true that we sometimes discount what an expert says ; the reason is
> > that we value getting it right vs blindly accepting what an expert says
> > without checking.
> >
> > Daniel Mayer,
> > A Wikipedian
> >
> >
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> 
> 
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