Ten years after founding, Wikipedia helps, hinders students

MSU State News
Most students with a computer have used Wikipedia. The website, famous for its user-based, easily accessed information, celebrated its 10-year anniversary ...

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One of the lessons that my teachers impressed on my mind throughout my extended career as a student was that learning static facts is never enough, and even potentially misleading, if one fails to learn the dynamics of inquiry, the means by which that knowledge is produced.

Maybe it didn't have to be, but the way it's turned out in practice, the culture of those who promote Wikipedia is antithetical to everything I learned about learning.

To make matters worse, the media commentary that makes its half-hearted attempts to evaluate Wikipedia focuses almost exclusively on the content, with no appreciation of just how badly participants in Wikipedia culture are being mis-educated about the means that real knowledge-workers use to discover and validate knowledge.

This is a critical failure for any enterprise that claims to be in the business of collecting the sum total of human knowledge.

They do not know the first thing about it.

Jon Awbrey
MSU (B.A. Justin Morrill '76, M.A. Math '80, M.A. Psych '89)