Comment Hopefully, this is not important... (Score 1) 869
When I was in school, using any encyclopedia as a source was frowned upon or entirely disallowed. I think the author of this article has too high of an opinion of the value of his own work. Neither Wikipedia nor Britannica is valuable for meaningful research of a specific topic. Rather, their strength lies in their broad coverage of nearly every available topic.
Of course, this article is really just a meta process of Wikipedia itself, and as such, should really only be viewed within that context. He's simply taking the editing and discussion process out of the builtin Wikipedia forum, bringing it before the eyes of a wider audience that probably isn't and shouldn't be concerned.
However, the one valuable aspect of his article outside the context of Wikipedia culture is his reference to poor standards in public school education. This is the real issue that the author should have been dealing with. Rather than critiquing the Wikipedia process, he could have been suggesting that more emphasis be put on teaching children how to evaluate the reliability of reference material in general or how to go to first sources as much as possible to find the best sources of information on a topic. Instead, he seems to be implying that a paper encyclopedia is better than Wikipedia, when he should be quite aware that both are actually very shallow sources of information.
Of course, this article is really just a meta process of Wikipedia itself, and as such, should really only be viewed within that context. He's simply taking the editing and discussion process out of the builtin Wikipedia forum, bringing it before the eyes of a wider audience that probably isn't and shouldn't be concerned.
However, the one valuable aspect of his article outside the context of Wikipedia culture is his reference to poor standards in public school education. This is the real issue that the author should have been dealing with. Rather than critiquing the Wikipedia process, he could have been suggesting that more emphasis be put on teaching children how to evaluate the reliability of reference material in general or how to go to first sources as much as possible to find the best sources of information on a topic. Instead, he seems to be implying that a paper encyclopedia is better than Wikipedia, when he should be quite aware that both are actually very shallow sources of information.
