And when you look at my own area of educational sociology, it’s shocking.
I think WP's inattentiveness to education fields like ed soc is more due to the field's lack of coherence and clarity than a dearth of editors. czar⨹13:53, 20 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
For those interested, the study has been accepted for publication but not yet published:
Based on a survey of over 1,650 students at two unnamed Australian universities, the study found that students generally viewed Wikipedia only as an "'introductory and/or supplementary source of information' [...] of limited usefulness compared with university library resources, e-books, lecture recordings and academic literature databases".
Am I the only one who thinks this finding is reassuring? This is exactly how "an encyclopedia that anyone can edit" should be used. I would have been deeply worried if students instead thought of Wikipedia as an "authoritative resource" that discouraged them from consulting alternate sources. Diego (talk) 16:18, 20 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Indeed, university students should not be using any encyclopedia as a primary source for their research (unless the encyclopedia itself, regarded as a cultural artifact, is a subject of their research). The widespread angst about academic misuse Wikipedia is attributable to two factors: (1) its unprecedented popularity, and (2) failure in higher education to adequately teach students how to use an encyclopedia. The latter is certainly not a new problem, and the former only makes it more important to get it right. ~ Ningauble (talk) 16:25, 21 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Re: the Pakistan-government-is-PoV-pushing-articles-about-it story – I've been warning about this for years (not just with regard to Pakistan, though I did in fact expect foreign governments in particular to be among the first to do this programmatically). Sad be proven right. This is one reason that wikiprojects need to be reigned in and their increasing "you're not one of us regulars, so you have no right to edit our articles" WP:OWN behavior brought to an end, firmly. WP:LOCALCONSENSUS policy is being ignored by these increasingly insular editorial fiefdoms with near impunity. It's getting worse and worse by the month. — SMcCandlish ☺☏¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 16:56, 12 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
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