DJA wrote:
Of course dead tree books (more importantly, dead tree text books) tend
to be out of date, or incorrect, or missing vital data, or all of that
until/unless a new edition comes out correcting the error. But then what
are the odds that errata gets passed on to students already exposed to
the bad data? While Wikipedia tends to be self-healing.
Okay, show me some data.
For low-traffic and uncontroversial topics wikipedia probably doesn't
need to be self-healing as only interested people are likely to write or
edit the entry.
For high-traffic and/or controversial topics, wikipedia has demonstrated
quite clearly that it is *not* self-healing. A few highly motivated
people can undo all of the healing. For example, most Congresscritters
now have their staff regularly patrol wikipedia and purge negative
information.
That's hardly self-healing.
Wikipedia is useful as a survey and pointer to more authoritative
references. Nothing more.
Of course, that's all an encyclopedia is really good for.
Consequently, I don't see much difference between the two. Of course,
my high school would never have accepted an encyclopedia as a primary
reference so I don't see why they should accept wikipedia either.
As for the ban, it's probably not unsurprising given that wikipedia
articles are open to giving links to all manner of external references.
It's not many steps from starting with something fairly innocuous on
wikipedia to winding up somewhere pretty explicit with very little
warning about that transition.
-a
--
[email protected]
http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
