Wikipedia talk:Schools' FAQ

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The following content is related to the conduct of User:Bird and his or her alternate logins. Please see User talk:Bird/Brain and stuff for more details on this affair. - Fennec 14:06, 9 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Wikipedia Considered Not School-Safe

Wikipedia shouldn't be cited in a bibliography, but it is acceptable to use for school research projects as a starting point. Most schools assign non-controversial topics for research, so reading an article for a school report shouldn't be a problem, if you are concerned about inappropriate subject matter. And if kids do use Wikipedia for reading noneducational material, you really can't stop them. But the point is, Wikipedia is definitely school safe.Osbus 20:21, 21 January 2006 (UTC) To Whom it may concern:

I wrote this FAQ under the user name "bird" but after posting it, I continued to research the matter and realized Wikipedia is not an appropriate resource for schools. By the time I tried to correct my errant opinion, other people an wikipedia were attempting to stop me from commenting on the very articles I had written but about which I later had questions concerning the accuracy.

It now appears to me Wikipedia can not be relied upon to be a reliable resource, and that the social environment of Wikipedia can be emotionally dangerous for adolescents. The administrators here are not trained educators and often lack the psychological savy to protect young contributors. Even when there is the savy to protect the interests of youth, the site is not here to protect their interests, but to promote its own growth. Blind ambition for growth is dangerous and I want that to be as much an answer to any question as any other on the FAQ page.

I removed the FAQ from places where I have posted links and asked other wikipedians to recognize the better understanding I now have of the matter by not attempting to publish work that has been discredited by the original author.

When you clicked "save page" you released your contribution under the GNU Free Documentation License and agreed to have it "edited mercilessly and redistributed at will." That release is irrevocable; you have no authority to stop us from publishing it, even if it "has been discredited by the original author."
If in fact "other people an [sic] wikipedia [are] attempting to stop me from commenting," please give details and request mediation, or if mediation fails, arbitration. No one is allowed to stop anyone else from commenting so long as those comments are pertinent.
I hear and understand your request that Wikipedians "recognize the better understanding [you] now have of the matter" and, speaking for myself only, deny your request. The understanding that produced the FAQ was superior; your current understanding is flawed.
--the Epopt 20:14, 8 Mar 2004 (UTC)

unfortunately, your attachment to my first naive understanding is flawed and my more mature understanding of the matter now offers better guidance. I propose you are attached to the content not for its accuracy nor for its false assurance that this is an appropriate and safe place for young people to interact, but for your romantic attachment to an ideal, and purely because you are agressive and you want to win.

I have observed several matters since I wrote this that appear to render this site unsuitable, and my earlier information incorrect. I will continue to improve my effort by correcting my earlier work to the best of my current understanding.

[edit] Forget "safe", the FAQ is still wrong

Whether or not Wikipedia is school-safe, this page does contain technical, factual inaccuracies. Wikipedia is not public domain, for instance, though the text of the meta page at least implies that it is. -- your local Fennec 06:39, 13 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Yeah, it's not accuarate. I added a bit about how it wasn't "kid safe" but I left all the technical stuff in there. Perhaps someone will rewrite it here on the talk page (since it's now protected), because things like the implication everything is in the PD really have to go. fabiform | talk 07:50, 13 Mar 2004 (UTC)
I'll put it here: Wikipedia:Schools FAQ/Draft. - Fennec 13:42, 17 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I learned about this page on a cult awareness site. It is now widely watched by cult awareness experts and pundits as an example of how high-pressure groups are forming within Wiki projects. What is interesting about this latest move is that , contrary to stated Wikipedia policy, administrators are now attempting to establish themselves as an elite tier of editors who have exclusive access to the article, which in itself has been exposed as an experiment to see just how much patently ridiculous self-promotion Wiki addicts would embrace. Nothing links to it, so somebody might as well put it on vFd. If anyone has any inspiration to do anything besides edit war, they might dream up some original questions and create an original FAQ that is not tainted by an intentional experiment in misinformation.

You are a reincarnation of user:Bird and you're not fooling anyone. Why don't you go bother some of those cultists. →Raul654 00:25, Mar 29, 2004 (UTC)
You are defending an article nobody cares about for no other reason than to gratify your fat ass. Why don't you go quit this cult and go get some exercise. There is a broad, loosely organized opposition to this site that intentionally obfuscates our IP#, fighting style and user names to confound inflated egos such as yours that spend your family fortune earning an education while attempting to foist upon public school students un-peer-reviewed information as valid. Better yet, go stuff yourself in a beer glass and lets all talk about how it is funny. Very funny. Pussy.
Gee thanks, Bird. I'm glad someone with your obvious maturity and wisdom has finally come along to set all of us straight. Since you're so concerned with factual accuracy, though, you might want to stop making the claim that there's anyone involved in your crusade but you. Isomorphic 07:15, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)
Dream on, Middle Finger, but you are lucky some dissidents at this site bother to explain why they contribute, rather than joining the majority trend by contributing nonsense intended only to inform visitors this site cannot be trusted.
Bird, purely out of curiousity, have you ever heard of a cult centering around the Birth Water of LeAnn Rimes? Such as demonstrated in these logs? -- Fennec 15:18, 30 Mar 2004 (UTC)

My questions about the usefulness of this page, which I originally posed on the CP talk page when Bird reappeared there: 1)Do we need to proliferate FAQs? 2)How many of these questions are actually, or conceivably, frequently asked? 3)Can't most of the content be found in, or incorporated into, our existing FAQs? 4)How much of the content is really specific to schools? 5)Wouldn't Student FAQ be a better name, anyway? 6)Do we need to perpetuate this page, considering that it will probably serve as a magnet for Bird in the future? --Michael Snow 03:40, 4 Apr 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Schools and wikipedia

however much we may hate the idea, WP would NOT be considerd a good place to let kids go. teachers like to be able to have a few small, or reliable sources of infomation, eg BBC.co.uk where they know that you wount get realy ofensive stuf. the good thing about those sites in a teachers point of view is that they are "child safe" meaning that they can set us a task, and not have to worrey about us for the restof the lesson (don't beleve me, you havent been to school lately). they dont whant to have to teach us how to tell if somthings true or not, they dont want to have to be responsible at looking at what the children are looking at - they just want to set up a filter to do that. if a site has a diclamer as big as ours, they wont touch it (or at least recomend it) becuse theres no way of telling whats on here. tooto 16:18, 12 Sep 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Is Wikipedia accurate and reliable?

Should this section also link to the Wikipedia:General disclaimer? just so a teachers know where we stand.

[edit] It's Informative

Personally, I think that the schools' FAQ should stay. I understand how you think that Wikipedia is not an appropriate place for schools but I think that it's important that the teachers can look at the pros and cons of Wikipedia so that they can decide for themselves if and how Wikipedia is used.

Plus, if the school does decide to use Wikipedia, it's important that they still have access to the information, despite other schools choosing not to use Wikipedia. Tra (Talk) 23:07, 9 Nov 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Wikipedia in School Assignments

Back in those not-so-hallowed days of Middle School, when I was first being taught to write a "research paper", our teachers gave us strict guidelines for the types of works we could use when we wrote our highly derivative little essays. Frequently, we were told that we had to have at least N sources, where N is approximately five, only one of which could be an encyclopedia. This was when Encyclopedia Britannica was everybody's idea of an encyclopedia, when the Web was just getting started and even CD-ROMs seemed pretty darn cool. According to our shriveled hags — er, I mean, our educators, we could use one and only one article from Britannica or (groan) Encarta, and all the rest had to be from elsewhere, usually culled out of the Periodical Literature archives.

This requirement seemed pretty irritating at the time, but then again, most rules for writing assignments are invented so that the teachers have something to grade. You have five works? Good. You get a check. Uh-oh, two of them are encyclopedias — make that a check-minus. The only rationale I can find plausible for this requirement is that encyclopedias are "quaternary sources", written by the people who base them on the books which are based upon the primary material.

In the spirit of those venerable, old, chalk-dusted English teachers, I suggest the following rule:

Your paper must have at least N sources, only one of which can be a Wikipedia article.

Another variant, which you might prefer:

Your paper must have at least N sources, only one of which can be from an encyclopedia, which includes Compton's, Britannica, the Wikipedia, and so forth.

This requirement could be relaxed for longer papers, or tweaked at the teacher's discretion.

It's not as if I thought all those essays I had to write were good things. Almost all of the papers I cranked out, beginning in seventh grade and continuing up through twelfth, were double-spaced, spellchecked, carefully outlined collections of useless dreck. In an ideal world, we could use Wiki to open up entirely new avenues of education. However, back here, in the American public school system, the best tactic might be to win over whatever teachers we can, hoping that a few individuals in the next wave of students will pick up the idea.

Anville 19:39, 16 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Schools should stay away from Wikipedia

School teachers should stay well clear of Wikipedia and prevent their students from ever seeing it. In the FreeCountryTM, all information should only be written by for-profit corporations and be viewable only for a price. All this "open source" and "collaborative" stuff leads to the innocent little children being corrupted into pinko communist atheist bastard Europeans! — JIP | Talk 10:35, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

lol. I'm tempted to create a pinko communist page to explain the joke, but can't remember where the quote was from. Was it originally McCarthyism? I remember Jon Snow talking about "bloody public-school pinko liberal" [1]... Ojw 19:19, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] What does Wiki mean?

This section reads in part...

"WikiWiki" is a Hawaiian word for quick. Some educators ask if Wiki has anything to do with the Wiccan religion. It does not. You and your students can rest assured that Wikipedia does not condone Wicca, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Shintoism, atheism or any other form of satanism. We are a decent, God-fearing Christian encyclopedia...

I don't think this is acceptable, and it is certainly not NPOV! I'll put my cards on the table, I am a Christian and quite serious about my belief. But the Wikipedia articles on all religions should (and mostly do) simply provide information. They do not, and must not make claims about one religion being right and another wrong. And the Wikipedia community contains good, hard-working authors of many faiths and also of no faith at all, they are all appreciated and welcomed, certainly by me.

I propose the following text as a replacement.

"WikiWiki" is a Hawaiian word for quick. Some educators ask if Wiki has anything to do with the Wiccan religion. It does not. The word "Wiki" was adopted as the name of the type of software Wikipedia runs on, a Web-based, open collaboration platform known as a wiki.

Wikipedia describes religions just as it describes anything else, as far as possible without bias. Wikipedia neither condones nor condemns any religion, it simply defines and describes them as clearly as possible.

While I'd be happy with the text above, I'd also be happy to leave the second paragraph out. The first one answers the question "What does Wiki mean?" perfectly on its own. Chris Jefferies 18:54, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

D'OH! Now I feel stupid, I see I was 'taken in'. Why, oh why, didn't I check the article's history and just revert it? Thanks Bobo192! Chris Jefferies 21:33, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] wikipedia claim

On this page the claim is made, "As the world's most widely used online encyclopedia", where is that claim coming from? what data has been included to show that this webiste is the most widely used encyclopedia?

According to alexa, wikipedia is the 38th most visited site on the web, and the 2nd most visited reference site. I believe this was mentioned in some news articles a while ago, which might have been where the writer of this article got the idea from.
Incidentally, I think it's also the largest encyclopedia, although that's a different claim. Ojw 19:01, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Most accurate articles

"In general, popular articles are more accurate because they are read more often and therefore any errors are corrected in a more timely fashion."

Seems a bit odd - aren't the most popular articles more likely to be vandalised, even if that gets reverted quickly, the sheer amount of vandalism in pages like George W. Bush means that you're more likely to see inacccurate text there for any given page-refresh? Ojw 19:01, 20 November 2005 (UTC)

Totally agree with above sentiment, Also I find that unsupported personal opinions are put forward as facts on some pages. Even after asking what facts they can put forward to support their reasoning the reply is 'well that is what I think it is so thats the fact'!! 217.43.200.177 12:13, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Proposed wording change re watchlists

The "What keeps someone from contributing false or misleading information?" section says: "Major articles are usually on several individuals' personal watch lists as well". Surely it's more like hundreds, if not thousands of editors for major articles?

How about the following sentence instead: "Almost all articles will be on one or more editors' personal watch lists, and they will undo any obvious vandalism they see. Major articles will be on hundreds of watchlists, so that whenever vandalism is performed, it will be seen and undone in a matter of minutes or less." --Malthusian (talk) 01:32, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

No objection? In it goes. --Malthusian (talk) 09:18, 23 February 2006 (UTC)
I'd be interested to know what % of articles have 0, 1, .. 5-10, 10-20, .. 100-150, etc. watchers. I appreciate that making a list saying which articles had 0 watchers would be a bad idea {boon for vandals}, and the watchers would have to remain anonymous, but (considering that there are >1m articles), I'd be surprised if the majority were watched, let alone 'almost all'. Can anyone verify this atatement? --Squiddy | (squirt ink?) 14:34, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] About reliability

It's a mistake to make blanket statements about whether Wikipedia is reliable or not. Simply saying our problems exist for other publications is a cop out. The true mark of failure, is constant citation of the failure of others (e.g. "yeah, we suck, but so does everybody"). What needs to be explained, is we are as reliable as our sources. No more, no less. Unsourced articles are *not* reliable. Well sourced articles are as reliable as the sources, but no more. Students using Wikipedia must check those sources, before using information for any school project. We shouldn't suggest we're more reliable then we are. If tried to improve the wording, but more improvement is needed. --Rob 03:36, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] NPOV

This reads like an article in Pravda - let's have a bit less pro-WP propaganda, please. 84.9.83.105 16:48, 9 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Vandals

The FAQ here would have me wondering, if I were a newbie, if there are just controvertial edit wars against vandals. I have added that blocking is a possibility, if it is obvious vandalism, and not mistakes. I think this is relevant. Remove if you disagree.martianlostinspace 12:05, 26 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] "Free content", not "open source"

The page uses the term "open source" in reference to Wikipedia content; while this is arguably true, a better term is "free content". "Open source" is more appropriately applied to software, and free content is more easily explained in an information context. 81.156.126.223 18:08, 20 January 2007 (UTC)

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