The Conservative Cave
Current Events => General Discussion => Topic started by: MrsSmith on June 22, 2008, 08:31:06 PM
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Falling exam passes blamed on Wikipedia
'littered with inaccuracies'
Published Date: 21 June 2008
By MARTYN McLAUGHLIN (http://news.scotsman.com/education/Falling-exam--passes-blamed.4209408.jp)
WIKIPEDIA and other online research sources were yesterday blamed for Scotland's falling exam pass rates.
The Scottish Parent Teacher Council (SPTC) said pupils are turning to websites and internet resources that contain inaccurate or deliberately misleading information before passing it off as their own work.
The group singled out online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which allows entries to be logged or updated by anyone and is not verified by researchers, as the main source of information.
:evillaugh:
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O M G!!!
Writing theses based on Wikepedia is like writing a biography based on The World News Weekly.
More confirmation that, as a world, we are becoming stupider and stupider.
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Wikipedia is modeled after liberalism itself. If the truth is convenient, change it.
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Wikipedia is modeled after liberalism itself. If the truth is convenient, change it.
My friend, you and I both know that when the current vestigial professots who actually fact-check pass on and the current Internet generation supplants them, Wikipedia and its contemporaries WILL be considered valid sources.
Mankind is going nuts, and the USA is leading. But clearly the EU is on our heels.
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I know this guy who has a wiki page on him. Only one bit of all of the information is true. There are HUGE mistakes on there. He likes to read about all of the things he has done and who his parents are and blah blah blah and laugh.
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I got into a major row with some liberal editors over there about a completely phony quote attributed to an Intelligent Design proponent. According to Wikipedia policies regarding articles or parts of articles about living persons, blatantly and obviously false information can be removed without discussion. I did so with this quote and the anti-ID forces threw a fit even though I provided absolute proof (including an admission by one of their favorite bloggers) that the quote was fake. There was, as I said, a major row with vicious accusations leveled at me and attempts to permanently shut me up. I prevailed, however, and while the phony quote wasn't entirely removed, it was taken out of sections of direct quotes and clarified that it was one person's paraphrase. Still, this paraphrase was falsely presented as a direct quote for YEARS - all the way back to April and June of 2005. That's completely shocking. Not one person questioned it during all this time (or they did and were shouted down and didn't fight back as I did).
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Well this falls under the DUH! Bin. Using Wikipedia to cite things is really a bad idea. I use Wikipedia just to look up video games and movies, which it does best. I remember a student once plagiarized a whole Wikipedia article for a term paper and got kicked out for it.
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Wikipedia is a great tool, despite all the haughty disdain for it here, but it is a roughing-out tool, not a finishing one.