On Thu, June 14, 2007 6:56 pm, DJA wrote: > Andrew Lentvorski wrote: >> 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 Of course dead tree books (more importantly, dead tree text books) tend to be out of date, or incorrect, or missing vital data, or all of that until/unless a new edition comes out correcting the error.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. >
You guys are all aware that high school history (and now science) texts are subjected to political scrutiny and dumbed down to the lowest common denominator, right? Actually, even lower. The native Americans quietly disappeared from the continent (except for some vicious savages who deserved what they got), and weren't subjected to mass deportations and genocide. Only a dozen or so Nisi Japanese were thrown in prison camps in WW II and only for a couple of weeks and everybody's real sorry. Evolution and heliocentricity along with carbon dating and gravity (13 - 15 billion years of expansion? Oh no, just 6,000 years) are "theories" (meaning, evidently, wild ass guesses of a bunch of atheistic pointy haired egg heads). My point is, it's absurd to think that Wikipedia is intrinsically less accurate than the texts the schools teach to. Actually Wikipedia, not having a financial dog in the fight, might be under less pressure. Some BCCs (my education friends and acquaintances). > Which makes it no better or worse than any other resource in those circumstances. > OK, Andrew said it quicker. > >> 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. > > There are endless instances of Wikipedia pages having to be locked down because of abuse. Obviously, there are never going to be enough ethical custodians to mind that all its data is either% [this stupid squirrelmail editor truncated again. I've GOT to get back on mutt ... right after I repair MythTV - lb] -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
