>Why would I be? Do you have some prejudices that are acting up?
lol, I was just curious. Partially by the way you wrote, and partially because I was wondering if you had any prejudices that were acting up.
(Most Teachers that I've known or talked to usually talk about the trend of more and more students using Wikipedia and a source on papers, and how they don't like it for pretty much the same reasons.)
>When discussing an encyclopedia, that's usually what you are talking about. It's not like an encyclopedia can sing, or fix a car. It is nothing but knowledge.
...yeah, encyclopedias can't sing or fix a car, but they can't do Physics, build a plane, or launch a Space Shuttle either.
You can write about all that stuff, though. Including singing and car repair. And you can't say that people don't need knowledge for singing and car repair, or that those people couldn't write their knowledge down for others. Do you have some prejudices that are acting up?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto_mechanic
>You'd have a pretty hard time trying to prove that any large fraction of Wikipedia editors without formal degrees are actually secretly self-taught experts in their fields. It's really not a very common thing.
Not necessarily experts, but they must be pretty sure about what it is they do write, and hold some kind of interest in it.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there are people that contribute wrong information thinking that it's right or without checking the facts beforehand. But I would like to think that most people like that wouldn't be able to figure out how to edit the wiki page in the first place, and probably won't return if they did re-edit it wrongly if they somehow did.
Thus far in my wikipedia experience, I haven't seen many entries that were wrong by my knowledge (unless my knowledge is wrong as well, haha), but have ran more into entries that were lacking important facts and information.
>>117
Lot's of valid arguements here.
>The problem comes when you try to use the airplane. If the engineering is off, you crash.
Wikipedia-wise, if it was something as important as engineering, somewhere along the lines one of those J. Random Citizens would raise the question of if the engineering was safe. If would then either be checked against blueprints, or at least have a warning that it may not be safe to actually fly.
>The only way to check to see if your Karate school is taught by someone who knows Karate is to check credentials -- Who taught him, what style did he learn, what year did he earn the Shodan rank? Then you can contact his master, and see if the sensei is who he says he is.
The school he went to might be unknown (which might be good or bad), fake (which still might not necessarily be bad), or he might have went to school, and was taught by a relative that was better than most teachers.
So yeah, you can check credentials... but you can really only tell if they're good.