Don’t believe everything you read.
A History Department Bans Citing Wikipedia as a Research SourceÂ
When half a dozen students in Neil Waters’s Japanese history class at Middlebury College asserted on exams that the Jesuits supported the Shimabara Rebellion in 17th-century Japan, he knew something was wrong. The Jesuits were in “no position to aid a revolution,†he said; the few of them in Japan were in hiding.
He figured out the problem soon enough. The obscure, though incorrect, information was from Wikipedia, the collaborative online encyclopedia, and the students had picked it up cramming for his exam…
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
February 24th, 2007 at 01:27
I’ve always thought that Wikipedia entries should be taken with a grain of salt…
February 24th, 2007 at 10:36
In these days where the task of carrying encyclopedia volumes back and forth to the study table have been replaced by cut-and-paste “research”, it has become commonplace for just about every student use Wikipedia as the easier yet mistaken option to “cut down” on research time.
But in some parts of our country where library facilities are either decrepit and filled with outdated texts, or worse, virtually non-existent (no thanks to those narrow-minded, concrete-pavement politicians), yet where Internet access is plentiful, most (misguided) students of provincial state universities end up grabbing info from Wikipedia and slapping them onto Word without even a citation or a footnote.
February 24th, 2007 at 12:17
hay salamat for pointing out wiki is creaky.
February 25th, 2007 at 09:11
Don’t believe everything you read: a lesson best learned not only about internet sources but also about printed ones.
February 26th, 2007 at 10:33
Wikipedia is democracy in action. It’s self-correcting, but like a real democracy, it could take time.
As for the Jesuits not being in ‘no position to aid a revolution’, how did the prof know that? He’s probably just regurgitating ‘accepted’ research from experts imprimatured and nihil obstated by the Establishment. Besides ‘supporting’ is not the same as ‘aiding’. I woudnt ban wikipedia if I were the school, but I would require other sources that corroborate the Wikipedia article..
February 27th, 2007 at 04:54
love wiki. even though i know half the sh*t there is bullsh*t. but it’s the concept of wiki that i love. like communism, or utopia. here, read this writeup from the newyorker.