The debate about whether digital universe is better than wikipedia is better than britannica is better than my mom?
Irrelevant. There are no gatekeepers protecting knowledge. Or at least, the gatekeepers are very difficult to find and/or they can’t do their jobs very well anymore. What we have now are salespeople, they are selling particular brands of knowledge and we need to teach our students to be good consumers.
I was sent this little article this morning with one of those open mouthed smilies… It seems, at least according to The Register, which has been trashing wikipedia for months and months, that Nature did bad things with its data… That its research was bogus. Brittannica wrote a response to the Nature article that condemns their research practices and suggests things like – Nature sent parts of articles – Nature sent the childrens version.
Damning information for Nature. If they did it, they deserve a kick in the head. They’ve got one of those names you don’t like to be able to refute, like “my mom told me that”.
Damning for wikipedia? No. Not at all. It proves the point we’ve been making all along. Truth is a matter of perspective. Even the best research can be cooked (assuming Nature did that, which I’m not, I haven’t the foggiest idea if they have or not) and biases enter into every discussion.
The quest for ‘Truth’ in its capital T sense, is one best left for comparitive religion classes. What we need to teach students today is how to assess the ‘truths’ they are being presented with. This makes a perfect example…
- Look at the register article
- Look at the ‘related links’ on the bottom
- Notice that they are all ‘anti-wikipedia’
- Read the Britannica article
- Read the Nature article
- Draw your own conclusions
- Wikipedia isn’t perfect
- Britannica isn’t perfect
- The Register isn’t perfect
- Nature isn’t perfect
Add them together and you get a picture not only of what the ‘truth’ might be, but also of how biases affect knowledge, of how the corporate and tradition affect the way people see certain issues, and you do some solid research along the way. This is what our students need to learn how to do.
I think that Wikipedia is beautiful 🙂
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
(Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn)
Exactly – this flushes out the debvate on how to teach those higher order research skills. In fact this kind of thing is a gift to the educational community and acts as a good model of its kind. 🙂