Wikipedia For Schools DVD Released 132
David Gerard writes "SOS Children's Villages has released the 2008/9 Wikipedia Selection for Schools — 5500 checked and reviewed articles matching the English National Curriculum, produced by SOS for use in their own schools in developing countries. The 2007 edition was a huge success, with distributions to schools in four countries, use by the Hole in the Wall education project, thousands of downloads and disks and around 6000 unique IPs a day visiting the online version — the most successful end-user distribution version of Wikipedia to date."
14,000 not 6,000 (Score:5, Informative)
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Just after I submitted this, Andrew Cates from SOS Children's Villages corrected the hits on the site - it was actually 14,000 a day, not 6,000!
{{fact}}
Also, no original research, please.
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Re:14,000 not 6,000 (Score:5, Insightful)
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I've read this blog [livejournal.com]. I know how wikipedia works.
Or rather... how it doesn't work at all.
The worst thing you could do is feed the Wikipedia brand of nonsense to kids as "educational" material. Might as well give them a set of unshielded wires and an electric socket and tell them to learn about electricity. And it's not just the situations this Parker Peters describes above: you people fuck up [blogspot.com] on a pretty regular [wikitruth.info] basis.
Well? I'm not comfortable knowing an "encyclopedia" infested with this kind of behavior is
Re:14,000 not 6,000 (Score:5, Funny)
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Policy statements and guidelines are not subject to the rules you mention and are subject to IAL. Kiss it.
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You know, they actually did a study. There is a *far* lower error rate on wikipedia than, say, the encyclopedia brittanica. Odd, yes, but true.
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Truthy, not true. Odd no, manipulated yes. As pointed out above, two random anonymous guys from Wikipedia disproved the research. If you trust that, you are the wikipedia target market.
P.S. I have some amazing Nevada seafront property for sale at a bargain price, interested?
Re:14,000 not 6,000 (Score:5, Insightful)
you seem a little confused [slashdot.org].
there's nothing wrong with getting your info from Wikipedia if you understand the nature of your media source. there are several different approaches to Wikipedia info, but they primarily fall into 3 groups:
if you're not a discerning person, it doesn't matter whether you get your info from Britannica or Wikipedia, both have about the same level of accuracy, though Wikipedia generally has fewer errors by volume. despite the air of superiority they put on, group #2 is simply deluding themselves by attributing a false sense of accuracy to commercial publications while dismissing collaborative editing off-hand. group #3 is at least objective enough to recognize that all media sources have errors and biases because their authors are all human. by accessing a diverse range of media sources and verifying published information, they have an easier time obtaining accurate info and are less susceptible to misinformation.
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Get a grip. It's an encyclopedia.
Take it for what it's really worth.
This is like weenies that get disappointed with a Lucas sequel
because they start making his movies out to be something more
than what they are (well dressed B movies).
Read an older copy of Britannica. It will help put things into perspective.
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pointed out above, two random anonymous guys from Wikipedia disproved the research. If you trust that, you are the wikipedia target market.
No, I evaluate my trust based on the sources it links to. It's Wikipedia critics who seem to trust any old hearsay that someone randomly post on a blog/forum, or anything written in the mainstream media, whilst strangely distrusting everything they read in Wikipedia.
And the target market of "people who trust what they read" is, rightly or wrongly, just about everyone. Th
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Well, if any other encyclopedia had an entry on overstock.com, you might have a point here.
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It is interesting that you find blogs (which is what you used to back your claim) more accurate than the wikipedia.
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[citation needed]
Indeed... I took the time to read the blog he's pooh-poohing.
I don't care who wrote it and whether it's the same person or not, they have Gerard pegged - he knows his behavior is indefensible, so he's gone into [Personal Attack] mode right here on Slashdot.
This is of course the same David Gerard who's so "nice" that he regularly cusses people out [wikipedia.org]... even when they were right all along. [theregister.co.uk]
The evidence is ample. Rather than this mythical "horde" of people who are trying to "ruin" wikipedia while
Who mismodded this? (Score:1)
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From the http://schools-wikipedia.org/ [schools-wikipedia.org] home page:
This list of articles was then manually sorted for relevance to children, and adult topics were removed.
and
Wikipedia is not necessarily a childsafe environment, has "adult" content.
What exactly are the "adult" contents that were removed? Does this mean things like historical articles referencing war and dictators. I was half thinking about finding a copy for myself to download, but I don't know what the criteria is for censoring an encyclopedia.
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I find it interesting, (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I find it interesting, (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, when your choices are no education and free but perhaps not perfectly accurate education, I think most of the world's poor would choose the latter for their children.
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If the children are taught critical thinking, they will be aware that any source has the possibility of errors, just as any theory may be improved or disproved.
Re:I find it interesting, (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes. The scary thing about Wikipedia is that once you understand the process, and then start looking into what constitutes a "reliable source," you start realising how bad the other "reliable references" actually are.
The answer, of course, is: there is no substitute for thinking while reading, and nothing is safe to spoonfeed from.
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If the people who wrote Wikipedia were taught critical thinking, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
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"Well, when your choices are no education and free but perhaps not perfectly accurate education, I think most of the world's poor would choose the latter for their children."
Next step, Encyclopedia Dramatica for schools. :)
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Kid: "Today I learned that Hitler did it for the lulz"
MOD PARENT UP (Score:2)
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Re:I find it interesting, (Score:4, Informative)
Oh?
"Once the parents spend over $600, the students do slightly better,"
And their costs for home school versus public schooling are highly lop-sided, not taking into consideration the cost of parent's time donated, subsidized meals, etc., etc.
Not to mention that home schooled students is a naturally self-selecting group... It doesn't follow that forcing everyone else to home school their children would give everyone equally good performance.
That article is a very small step up from a biased opinion piece.
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Absolutely, once you take into account the potential loss of income for the parent who teaches the kids at home rather than works (hey, it works for the RIAA, MPAA, BSA, etc.), for smaller families, this makes homeschooling typically very expensive per child.
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Absolutely, once you take into account the potential loss of income for the parent who teaches the kids at home rather than works ... for smaller families, this makes homeschooling typically very expensive per child.
Citation needed.
Once you take into account costs for child care, transportion, business attire, dry cleaning, meals away from home, taxes, etc, the net gain of having a second income is typically very small.
!= a wonderful article (Score:2)
First, it's an article defending Home Schooling, written by the Home School Legal Defense Association, so it's already suspect.
Then, it talks about what scores home-schooled children "average" in national tests. Those tests show percentiles: only the mean of the children is meaningful. Just because the mean score of public school children (by definition) is 50% doesn't mean the average is 50%. I don't think averaging the mean of a bunch of individual students would even be meaningful.
So, the average of t
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Dude, on standardized tests, 50% is the mean, by definition. The test result is them telling you where you fall in the 100 control group students.
I have a BS in math. The mean score of public school children on standardized tests is 50%.
Or do you seriously believe that the article was trying to say that public school students average a 50% score on their schoolwork, thus the average student fails?
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Well, that is our #1 concern. We have two homeschool groups that we get together with on a regular basis, and they have several friends with whom they spend the night or have over several times a week.
In fact, my oldest is approaching 9th grade. I believe he should go to public school for high school, to prepare him to deal with other people more and so he can benefit on higher level topics from hopefully mostly learning from people who really care about their subject and can convey that interest.
I'm not
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Supporting your point, my wife and I started homeschooling our oldest two kids this year, and for one of them socialization is the reason we decided to homeschool.
My daughter started Junior High last year, and it was a complete fiasco. She made a couple of social miss-steps in the first few weeks, and got onto the bad list of some of the popular girls, who proceeded to make her life hell. At the same time, she became very sensitive and emotional (to put it less kindly, a touchy drama queen) and reacted
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What academic advantage?
Where did you go to school? Outer Siberia?
US schools are some of the worst rated in the civilized world. They
were an idiocracy 30 years ago and they haven't gotten any better.
They've actually gotten worse.
A motivated grandparent can get better results in 1/4th the time.
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Re:I find it interesting, (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, but who are SOS? They are a charity and an NGO. While I'm not accusing them of anything, generally speaking, charities and NGOs raise funds by pushing an agenda. Fear and/or guilt = cash. They are, generally speaking, not objective sources, and as such should not be trusted. If they verified the information, why are they not then publishing those sources with it? They've done all the work.
Sorry, but this does not seem to be all it appears to be.
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It's not so much "verified" as it is "cleaned up": "This list of articles was then manually sorted for relevance to children, and adult topics were removed... SOS Children volunteers then checked and tidied up the contents, first by selecting historical versions of articles free from vandalism and then by removing unsuitable sections" [schools-wikipedia.org]
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Re:I find it interesting, (Score:5, Informative)
when many schools wont allow research to be done on wikipedia itself which has the authority of the sources itself to back it
Actually, Wikipedia has:
- Cherry-picked sources
- Quotations taken out of context
- Redundantly sourced crap (sources that turn out later to have themselves been sourced from... wikipedia).
- NO way to fix any of these if an administrator or "consensus" of kooks sets up shop on a particular page and decides to edit-war en masse and proclaim that real, authoritative sources counter to their POV are "not reliable."
I encourage you to see how wikipedia really works [livejournal.com]. Spend a few hours reading the blog of a former Wikipedia administrator who saw how it was from the inside out.
Here's a great start [livejournal.com].
Go on. I dare you. Read about the REAL wikipedia. And then realize that this horribly written stuff is going to be fed to schoolkids as an example of "researched" material.
You scared yet? I certainly am.
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Suuuure. Lie some more please.
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This is your best defense?
You can't answer the questions that were posed, so instead you start accusing people of being trolls?
I would have thought a high-ranking member of Wikipedia could behave in better fashion. This kind of behavior shows us that Peters was right all along about you.
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Ordinarily I wouldn't bother with some of this.
However, I read the posts and then compared the behavior of David Gerard (on here) with the behavior reported by Parker Peters and the behavior of wikipedia administrators in the cases cited.
As far as I can tell, Peters is right. David Gerard and the rest of Wikipedia's crowd behave as a small-minded individuals who cannot carry on a discussion, can't actually hold an argument, but simply argue by way of accusing people of being "trolls" and make ridiculous acc
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Yes that's right. Let's believe that Wikipedia is flawed, based on a rant written by some random guy on his LiveJournal!
The fact that he insults with "their toady suck-ups" shows what his real agenda is. His points make no sense - are you seriously suggesting that allowing sockpuppets on Wikipedia is a good thing? It sounds like a classic case of someone whining because he didn't get his way. If you want somewhere to write your own stuff - get a blog. And then tell me how the accuracy and bias of random blo
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when many schools wont allow research to be done on wikipedia itself which has the authority of the sources itself to back it
Actually, Wikipedia has: - Cherry-picked sources - Quotations taken out of context - Redundantly sourced crap (sources that turn out later to have themselves been sourced from... wikipedia).
Ok, so fix that with better sources, that's how it's supposed to work. Nobody said it was perfect.
- NO way to fix any of these if an administrator or "consensus" of kooks sets up shop on a particular page and decides to edit-war en masse and proclaim that real, authoritative sources counter to their POV are "not reliable."
Well it's really easy to refute this since these types of things get fixed all the time. Certainly one admin cannot proclaim a source isn't good enough and keep it out and you know that, but you're choosing to distort the situation. If one admin acts against the consensus then others can easily come in and reverse that admin. Not that that needs to happen much since there isn't much that admins can do to enfor
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Ok, so fix that with better sources, that's how it's supposed to work. Nobody said it was perfect.
This is impossible when you have an organized "consensus" of people who coordinate their efforts to keep certain reliable sources that don't fit their particular bias out.
Well it's really easy to refute this since these types of things get fixed all the time.
Error: [Citation Needed]
Certainly one admin cannot proclaim a source isn't good enough and keep it out and you know that, but you're choosing to distort t
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If you see a lot of that kind of crap on Wikipedia, it's because you're looking at the pages that simply wouldn't be in a traditional encyclopedia at all.
If you confine your focus to topics that are in the traditional encyclopedic realm, where facts are abundant, easily supported and non-controversial, the Wikipedia articles are almost universally excellent from a factual perspective, and are usually reasonably well-written, too.
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This is impossible when you have an organized "consensus" of people who coordinate their efforts to keep certain reliable sources that don't fit their particular bias out.
If this happens most likely
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Have you looked at what's being discussed here? The Schools Wikipedia is a subset of the real Wikipedia, which has gone through a further level of vetting. This is all pretty basic stuff, and from what I've seen it's all reasonably accurate. I have it set as one of the 10 or so sites my elementary school-aged children can visit. Are there likely inaccuracies? Sure. Do I think that the positive aspects of having such an age appropriate resource easily available outweighs that? Most definitely. And the more t
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I agree. You rarely see that kind of bullshit on science/mathematics articles. Mostly because editors are passionate about the topic, but ultimately disinterested. Hell, my senior Mathematics thesis was cited by several articles (accurately, though they were eventually removed). I didn't mention that because I'm proud of it (though it is kind of neat), but because I don't particularly care that I'm not cited anymore. Big whoop, the article's tone/focus changed and my work became less relevant than othe
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From what many of the teachers and professors have posted here, I think it's probably more accurate to say that the publishing companies are the ones with the stranglehold. The good news is that we're beginning to see that stranglehold loosen with the adoption of MIT's Open Coursework initiative, California's move to online texts, etc.
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The schools that will be using this, in many cases, are operated by "the SOS peeps", which is why they put it together in the first place.
With that fact in mind, suddenly it becomes less surprising that those schools would use it based on the backing of "the SOS peeps".
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I find it interesting that schools will use this ... when many schools wont allow research to be done on wikipedia itself
Are you saying that you think schools which will not allow students to cite wikipedia as a primary reference are the very same schools which will allow students to cite the SOS distribution of wikipedia as a primary reference? On what basis do you make that claim?
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Out of interest, do schools require this information from all textbook publishers? Full list of sources, full list of authors who contributed?
I agree it's unclear why they chose to strip the sources - though I don't recall any school textbook I ever saw having references.
Shouldn't that be a Wikipedia link? (Score:2, Informative)
use by the Hole in the Wall education project [wikipedia.org]
There, fixed that for you. Now someone go write the article.
Wikipedia Validation Sites (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd love to see more sites online that do something like this SOS edition did. That is, a mirrored subset of Wikipedia, with every page in the mirror checked and maybe corrected by its host. That way, people can check with their preferred authority(ies) whether to accept what they see in "the" Wikipedia. While leaving Wikipedia itself standalone, "caveat emptor", for anyone to check on their own the usual ways.
A really good implementation would link from the "master" Wikipedia out to each "approving" site's copy of it. And a really good system would incorporate quality revisions in the downstream sites back upstream to the master Wikipedia.
This SOS edition is a step in that direction.
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wikislices on the XO -- how to choose the subset (Score:2, Informative)
It's an obvious win for OLPC's XO laptop to also have a standalone chunk of wikipedia that kids can browse offline. Their wiki has some discussion on different approaches [laptop.org] to selecting stuff for inclusion. One is to use article traffic statistics [stats.grok.se], but apparently that weighs too heavily toward pop-culture. Another method is to combine those stats with three other factors -- "Importance rating by WikiProject, Number of internal links into the page, Number of interwiki versions of the article (i.e., other la
Further reading (Score:4, Informative)
When is wikipedia going to stop being a cult of (Score:4, Interesting)
notabillity and actually include articles that people actually want. Wikipedia claims to be combatting systemic bias but deletes articles as "not notable" because their deletionists admins don't like it.
For example it has the South Park episode about Tourettes Syndrome [wikipedia.org] but does not have an article about Tourettes Guy despite having 221,000 hits on Google.
Also it censors fan's of YuGiOh the abridged series yet has has about 24 articles about the video games. Use Google Knol instead, it dosen't have notabillity policies.
Re:When is wikipedia going to stop being a cult of (Score:4, Insightful)
At any rate, I think we'll both agree that "it has a lot of google hits" is a moronic criterion for a subject's worthiness of mention, and moronic inclusion/exclusion criteria are what Wikipedia sorely needs to deal with. My rule of thumb is how much has been said about a subject. I mean, if there are 400 newspaper articles discussing the Humanist Alliance's bus advertisements, there's probably going to be more "meat" there to convey to the reader than 200,000 Youtube comments pages and web forum posts. However Wikipedia's policies have grown rather ad hoc rather than having any rules like this and it really needs a stronger, sent-from-above statement in terms of what it will include. It's sad but until someone says "Wikipedia will have articles that meet X, Y, and Z", everyone is going to argue it's unfair, and clearly (going by the sort of "Wikinazis" commentary on the go) nobody is actually willing to sit down and hammer out these rules as a community. (Arguably that last point stems from people's assumption that Wikipedia editing can be performed without engaging with debate with actual human beings, but that's a whole nother argument.)
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You are assuming that the content of an encyclopedia should be determined by popular demand, not reliable secondary sources.
It's funny how... (Score:2)
That's why we're giving it to developing countries. Hand-me-downs!
Hole in the Wall? (Score:2)
Hole in the Wall education project?
Nothing more I can say. That's pretty damn gay. Pretty damn gay...
The key phrase here being... (Score:2)
"checked and reviewed articles"
Wikipedia has ben criticized for many things, for being full of trivial minutiæ, to having more errors, to being a possible source of circular references. while you may, or may not agree with those claims, the fact is that the articles where "checked and reviewed" (one can only hope that the people who did the "checking and reviewing" were qualified).
If that is the case, then welcome, this is a GREAT tool for teaching at a low cost with very little overhead!
Kudos guys!
Where is the torrent? (Score:1)
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Download: a full download of the content should be available via BitTorrent by 23rd October. It is current being seeded.
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Wikipedia in academic writings (Score:3, Interesting)
Wikipedia is an excellent springboard for research. While citing Wikipedia itself is a major no-no for a few reasons (A, the content of the website can change, rendering your quotation non-existent, and B, you'll be laughed out of the room by your professor/review board/whatever), you can read Wikipedia's references, verify that they say what Wikipedia says they said, and then cite that source in your paper. Voila!
Wikipedia might not be a credible source, but it cites credible sources. Use Wikipedia to find credible sources, and then cite those.
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Note that you could say exactly the same thing with the word "Wikipedia" replaced with any encyclopedia.
the content of the website can change
No it can't, not if you cite properly and link to the static version.
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No it can't, not if you cite properly and link to the static version.
Good point. I forgot about that feature where Wikipedia keeps a history of all changes.
But is there any reason you'd want to? Having a long, nasty-looking URL on your works cited page doesn't really lend itself to a "professional appearance."
Better to use the internet to narrow down your in-print sources, and then cite the in-print version.
I am often amused by the image of one of my professors digging around in the library archives for s
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so if you don't list the ISBN because it looks "nasty", you can't complain that people don't know what version you mean.
Reference the edition.
You're right in saying that Wikipedia has the same issues as any other Encyclopedia. However, I criticize those sources equally.
Perhaps I should clarify something. The primary reason I devalue Wikipedia as a valid reference is that it's a secondary source. Generally speaking, when writing an academic paper, it is desirable to use mostly primary sources as opposed t
Evil purposes (Score:1)
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Intelligent design: a featured article on Wikipedi (Score:1)
Let me know what other encyclopedia has ID as a featured article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_article_review#Intelligent_design [wikipedia.org]
webserver for CDs could work for them.. (Score:1)
For those who want it... (Score:2)
the site has been updated and now has the torrent download link. [soschildre...ges.org.uk]
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It says the torrents are currently seeding.
What's the point of seeding when there are no leeches?
Now, maybe they are mirroring the files to hosts that will seed when the torrents open up... but as written it makes no sense to me.
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Right. So I'm going to put up the server a full day in advance, except nobody can look at it.
Then I'll tell everyone I did that.
To quote you: "Idiot. Eat a dick and choke and die, douche bag."
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Re:Wikipedia fact? (Score:5, Insightful)
SOS Children's Villages schools are not public schools nor are they, generally, America's.
Talk about "wildly inaccurate"!
Re:Wikipedia fact? (Score:5, Informative)
> Didn't wikipedia just take a hit for being wildly inaccurate?
"The result was that Wikipedia had about 4 errors per article, while Britannica had about 3. However, a pair of endevouring Wikipedians dug a little deeper and discovered that the Wikipedia articles in the sample were, on average, 2.6 times longer than Britannica's - meaning Wikipedia has an error rate far less than Britannica's."
http://science.slashdot.org/science/05/12/15/1352207.shtml?tid=95&tid=14 [slashdot.org]
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The Nature study is valid for scientific articles. Read an article about some pseudo-science, ranging from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_programming [wikipedia.org] to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_addiction [wikipedia.org] and ask yourself if some other encyclopedia would give the 90/10 pro/con coverage to such topics like Wikipedia does.
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Re:Wikipedia fact? (Score:4, Interesting)
> Didn't wikipedia just take a hit for being wildly inaccurate?
"Experts rate Wikipedia's accuracy higher than non-experts"
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061127-8296.html [arstechnica.com]
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1 error on average difference. Come on. We have non-professional people adding and editing on a whim averaging one error more than a group of educated researchers who's job requires they demonstrate reliability and trustworthiness. I'm going to go back to using it as an additional source, and aggregator of info, on top of other sources. Sheesh...
Oh I realise that errors are not all equal in consequence, but what makes you so sure that Wikipedia's one extra error is more significant than the other three? Con
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Oh... back with the "you have to let the bankers be grand wizards of the clan" nonsense again I see.
The current lending crisis has less to do with treating a black man as
a human being than it does with letting a bunch of rich white men borrow
without a downpayment or any real means to pay back the mortgage.
The industry decided to ignore well established race-independent lending guidelines.
Although even that wasn't the biggest problem. The biggest problem was the
shenanigans they pulled with the loans once the