Original Research

Today's mini-crisis almost made me forget about this paragraph (courtesy of Sage Ross). From the The Chronicle of Higher Education website:

I also find that my book purchasing has probably increased threefold because of Wikipedia. I am often engaged by an entry, then I go to the discussion pages, and then I find myself caught up in debate among contributors. Pretty soon I am locating articles via Project Muse and 1-Click shopping for books on Amazon. Why not teach that way of using the resource to our students? Why rush to ban the single most impressive collaborative intellectual tool produced at least since the Oxford English Dictionary, which started when a nonacademic organization, the Philological Society, decided to enlist hundreds of volunteer readers to copy down unusual usages of so-called unregistered words.

So, in response to those people who criticize me and my fellow Wikipedians for contributing content -- you want us to be ashamed of encouraging people to read and buy more books?

Geoff

P.S. -- I'm also surprised that I still get a lot of hits on this post, "When to cite from an encyclopedia -- even though you're not supposed to." I'm glad I remembered to include the words "ask your professor first."

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Labels: wikipedia