Wikipedia Breeds Unwitting Trust (Says IT Professor)
kingston writes “”As I say to my students ‘if you had to have brain surgery would you prefer someone who has been through medical school, trained and researched in the field, or the student next to you who has read Wikipedia’?” So says Deakin University associate professor of information systems, Sharman Lichtenstein, who believes Wikipedia, where anyone can edit a page entry, is fostering a climate of blind trust among people seeking information. Professor Lichtenstein says the reliance by students on Wikipedia for finding information, and acceptance of the practice by teachers and academics, was “crowding out″ valuable knowledge and creating a generation unable to source “credible expert″ views even if desired. “People are unwittingly trusting the information they find on Wikipedia, yet experience has shown it can be wrong, incomplete, biased, or misleading,” she said. “Parents and teachers think it is [okay], but it is a light-weight model of knowledge and people don′t know about the underlying model of how it operates.”"
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Original post by CmdrTaco