With all the discussion on Wikipedia lately, I found it rather serendipitous
that today's Fort Worth Star Telegram had an article on it. It does say
that there are editors who check material on the site. Here is a link to
the page with the article. http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/living/ It is
interesting reading and answers some questions that have been raised.
Carl Seale, Librarian -- Retired
cbseale@sbcglobal.net
http://www.antiquesnthings.net
If you're going to do something tonight that you'll be sorry for tomorrow
morning - sleep late.
Henny Youngman
----- Original Message -----
From: "Darlene Yasick" <lib027yas@SBCGLOBAL.NET>
To: <LM_NET@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU>
Sent: Thursday, July 14, 2005 6:46 PM
Subject: Re: [LM_NET] Turning Wikipedia into an Asset for Schools
> I've only looked at Wikipedia briefly but after the discussion I thought I
would check it out so I used a little know historical event that I am
somewhat familiar with - the Peshtigo Fire ( same day as the Chicago Fire
but much more devastating in lives lost and property destroyed-- fi you are
looking for an interesting non- fiction book on the subject check out
"Firestorm at Peshtigo". Most of the info is correct but there is something
hauntingly familiar about some of the text. (I know I have read it before
but can't find the source at this point.) I also includes a "controversial"
idea that the fire was started by a comet. There are no sources for any of
the information.
>
> What I found most interesting was that when I put a sentence from the page
into Google, I got a page of hits ( 41) from different websites. They are
all word for word from the Wiki site-- or where ever they got the info from.
They have names like Onpedia, Fixed Reference, Free Dictionary, Absolute
astronomy, Academickids. encyclopedia laborlaw talk and answers.Some of the
sites at the very bottom in tiny letters say that the information came from
Wikipedia some just say that it was acquired under GNU Free Documented
License. Some don't say anything about where their info came from. So if a
student does a Google search, the likelihood is that they could find many
sites that will verify the information from the Wikipedia site by repeating
the exact same content information in sort of a world wide web mobius strip!
This sort of thing makes it evenmore imperative that we teach kids how to
research and evaluate. (I'm going to go and change the one glaring mistake
I found and th!
> en check
> in a bit to see if the other sites get changed too.
>
>
> Darlene Yasick
> Media Specialist
> Hopkins (MI) High School
> lib027yas@global.net
>
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