I think the wikipedia clones are there for the adverts on the page. It
gets pretty amazing when you start to look into the clickthroughs,
adsense, and other revenue producing programs out there. One of the
factors is designing the pages so results come up high on the search
results (search engine optmimizing). Especially since there is a lot of
research showing that most users don't look past the first few results,
much less the second page. And that most people think they are pretty
good at determining if information is accurate or not.... So those site
have done their job, pulling you into them, hopefully to click on
something along the side.
However, a search for Peshtigo Fire is pretty productive in databases
(ebsco, proquest, and elibrary all provide magazine, book, and newspaper
articles. How about American Memory (LOC), local historical orgs, etc
If you do 'Peshtigo Fire' or use double quotes in Google or Yahoo, the
list of hits shows what looks like pretty good sites, .peshtigotimes.com
, wisconsinhistory.org , library.wisc.edu , idbsu.edu .
Robert Eiffert
Librarian, Pacific MS Vancouver WA
pac.egreen.wednet.edu/library beiffert@egreen.wednet.edu
Librarian in the Middle Blog: beiffert.net robert@beiffert.net
Darlene Yasick wrote:
>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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