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E-PrinceI’d imagine the discussion about Wikipedia has to be one of the more memorable ones in every writing seminar. When our professor and a librarian broached the topic, we had a student defend — partly in jest — the reliability of ...(back to the article)
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As a Ph.D. who frequently edits Wikipedia, allow me to be the first to add one thousand {{citation needed}} tags to this article's dubious, vague, arbitrary, and nonsensical generalizations. This kind of generation-tagging is the province of lazy thinkers and TIME magazine writers, not people who actually want to know things (this includes things about Wikipedia, and claims written on it).
Who would not put their complete faith in a source edited by WikiPhD? I certainly believe anything that a Ph.D tells me. Or Stephen Colbert.
WTF? The point of my comment was not that you should believe everything I say because I claim to have a Ph.D. in an anonymous Internet forum. Duh. It was that you should not believe this column, since it is a thin stew of dubious generalizations and unsubstantiated hand-waving. But enjoy your anticredentialism anyway.
Any article that seeks to characterize the habits of an entire generation must of necessity rely on generalizations. As someone who studies how people of all ages use the Internet, I think this column was a fair effort at capturing how the Web is used by those who are at the top of their generation in terms of intelligence, ambition and educational experience. But far too many members of the WikiGeneration do a Google search, find the Wikipedia entry and consider their research done; one student spoke of being "addicted" to Wikipedia. If students do move beyond the Wikipedia result at the top, they rarely review more than six links and virtually never venture to the second page of search results. They don't need to do so to get a passing grade from a professor who refuses to challenge them. That task will fall to their eventual employer, who will refuse to pay money for mediocre work. Students everywhere need to be challenged to conduct online research in the same methodical, rigorous manner in which their parents were taught to research in the library. And yet many students will never develop the "intuitioon and grounding" of which the article speaks that is necessary to search through pages of search results and figure out which ones are worth their attention. Curation Web sites such as www.FindingDulcinea.com that point students to the best online information resources will in time prove indispensable to this generation of young learners.
this was a waste of space, about a topic that could have been interesting.