Comments on Open IT Strategies: We deserve better commodity information

If kid is asked "who was president between Ja...

2009-12-07T21:04:47.152-08:00

If kid is asked "who was president between James Buchanan" or "what is the capital of North Dakota," then spending 10 seconds with Google or Wikipedia makes sense.

If a high school or college student has been given a graded research assignment, then it is relevant to expect students to distinguish between reliable and unreliable information.

My concern is not that students take the easy way out — my concern is that students don’t know how to do it the right way, and many don’t even realize the limitations of the GIGO they are consuming.

Enlightenment is in the person, not the texts. La...

2009-12-07T15:08:57.150-08:00

Enlightenment is in the person, not the texts.

Laziness is such a loaded word in our culture, that I try to avoid it myself.

Perhaps we might agree that people who don't want to know are lazy*; after that we're just arguing about the quality of the information that those that do want to know can access at this point in history.

*even this is highly problematic: if my 11 year old self would rather play football than swot the encyclopedia--does that mean I was lazy? Or just had other priorities?

I agree with your point about inherent student laz...

2009-11-28T10:49:45.055-08:00

I agree with your point about inherent student laziness, but not the others.

Wikipedia does not nor (as currently constituted will it ever) provide anything resembling "universal human enlightenment." At best, it will have the world's biggest collection of factoids.

The people who criticize Wikipedia are not "the dark force," but realists who would like to see it better and at this point have given up.

As I have said many, many times, choice is good. Competitors are forces for good, not evil. Have a viable alternative to Wikipedia will be good for everyone — including Wikipedia.

Re: school students who researched using Google an...

2009-11-28T06:15:23.343-08:00

Re: school students who researched using Google and wikipedia, what this is telling us is humans prefer ease of access over quality. Particularly when we know nothing, something that is good enough, is a lot better than something that is hard to get hold of. You were fortunate, in global terms, to be so well-endowed with booktexts as a fifth-grader.

As for your struggles in the edit wars, I sympathise. The struggle for universal human enlightenment is not an easy one. Take a break, come back refreshed. Wikipedia's competitors are using the dark force to sap your morale. They don't like a free site being 3x more popular than the lot of them put together, but they are dinosaurs.

I agree with you about a multiplicity of sources though. Citizendium's real world authoring approach is the one that interests me most, but it's only at 12,000 articles, last I read.