Sunday's Washington Post is running a version of the mainstream media "concern troll" article about Wikipedia. Parents and teachers are dismayed that kids are plagiarizing homework assignments from Wikipedia. The answer comes from a new product from AOL, called "Study Buddy", which, er, contains authorized material for kids to plagiarize from? The answer, of course, that kids are supposed to be learning critical thinking skills. They're not supposed to be plagiarizing articles from the World Book Encyclopedia either. They are supposed to be learning to look up more than one source.
The article sniffs that "User-created content, such as entries found in Wikipedia, the open-to-most online encyclopedia, comes with varying degrees of trustworthiness." Of course, and human-created content comes with varying degrees of trustworthiness.
Posted by alevin at September 9, 2006 10:30 PM | TrackBack