Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

How Students Use Wikipedia

Posted by kdawson on from the must-be-true dept.

crazybilly writes "First Monday recently released a study about how college students actually use Wikipedia. Not surprisingly, they found, 'Overall, college students use Wikipedia. But, they do so knowing its limitation. They use Wikipedia just as most of us do — because it is a quick way to get started and it has some, but not deep, credibility.' The study offers some initial data to help settle the often heated controversy over Wikipedia's usefulness as a research tool and how it affects students' research."

3 of 170 comments (clear)

  1. Procrastination tool by Rijnzael · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I use it as a means to quickly learn the essence of a chapter whose homework problems are due in only hours, the subject matter of which I haven't yet learned (e.g., due to skipping class). It's a quick and easy way to cut through a lot of a textbook's fluff and get to concrete examples of common problems and have the critical formulas for solving these problems displayed clearly.

    As an aside, when I had a class freshman year on electrical engineering, the chair of the department actually suggested we heavily use wikipedia to improve our understanding of the topics at hand.

  2. The China Problem by BlueBoxSW.com · · Score: 4, Interesting

    My issue as of late with Wikipedia is the infiltration of Chinese history into the pages.

    Most major inventions are credited to first being invented by the Chinese, regardless how little evidence there is, or whether the invention was anything more than a dream, drawing, or element in a painting.

    Moveable type? Invented by the Chinese.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moveable_type

    The automobile? Invented for a Chinese emperor.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automobile

    The Roman Abacus? "May have been inspired by" the Chinese.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abacus

    In fact there's a whole list of claims of Chinese "inventions" on Wikipedia that I kind of find dubious, since most of the reference don't exist or suggest otherwise.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_inventions

    If our students are using Wikipedia as a basis for papers, they are likely just repeating subtle propaganda without knowing it.

    Try looking up the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Did you mean the "Tiananmen Square protests of 1989"?

    1. Re:The China Problem by furbyhater · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Movable type: Definitely first invented by the Chinese, see sources.

      Automobile: A (western) jesuit designed a steam-powered vessel for the emperor, nobody knows if it has ever been built (clearly stated in the article).

      Abacus: What should I say? Seems like the Chinses were first.

      Do you have a problem admitting that the Chinese made some inventions before the west?
      Let's just give credit where credit is due.
      Just because your history class told you otherwise because it ignored inventions made by other civilisations than the "west" doesn't mean that the wiki articles aren't true.
      You call it "infiltration of Chinsese history", I call it "accurate and complete information".