wikipedia, while entertaining and useful for trivia, is also actually a fantastic knowledge building tool. It gets slammed all too often for not being a legitimate encyclopedia, but for technical learning, you don't care about accuracy of dates or whether a source is cited correctly, you just want to learn how things work. Use some common sense. If you need to write a report about the life of barack obama, do not use wikipedia. but in my experience, no prankster will ever get his jollies by modifying the entry for Wheatstone bridge to make it look like an actual bridge. also the moderators are not stupid, and they are aware of all changes. if a change is obviously wrong they fix it quickly. if anybody believes that it is easy to fabricate facts on wikipedia, i dare you to try it ;-)
when i first started my professional career, i had much to learn that school could not have prepared me for, and wikipedia was the biggest helper in teaching me what i needed to know. so for this, i plan to repay wikipedia with a donation of $100, and even that i consider to be a steal, as the information i learned on the site would have cost thousands in tuition. The founder has already thanked the world for donating enough to run wikipedia through mid 2009, but any extra can't hurt :)
No comments:
Post a Comment