Wikipedia talk:FAQ/Schools/Archive 1

message: 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)
thread_title:  Untitled 2 

message: 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)
thread_title:  Schools and wikipedia 

message: 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)
thread_title:  It's Informative 

message: 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)
thread_title:  Wikipedia in School Assignments 

message: 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)
replies: text: 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" ... Ojw 19:19, 20 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Schools should stay away from Wikipedia 

message: 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)
thread_title:  What does ''Wiki'' mean? 

message: 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)
thread_title:  wikipedia claim 

message: "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)
thread_title:  Most accurate articles

message: 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)
replies: text: No objection? In it goes. --Malthusian (talk) 09:18, 23 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: 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)
thread_title:  Proposed wording change re watchlists 

message: 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)
thread_title:  About reliability 

message: 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)
thread_title:  NPOV