I'm at the first Swedish Wikipedia Academy conference in Lund. Yesterday I did a talk on inclusionism vs. deletionism (vs. mergism) on the online encyclopedia (text available on-line in Swedish). Above is my audience who asked a lot of questions and were nice & friendly. Most participants are not themselves Wikipedians, they're largely librarians and teachers. I've chatted with a lot of people, notably Mathias Klang and Lennart Guldbrandsson and Lars Aronsson, and I look forward to future collaborations.
[More blog entries about wikipedia, Sweden; wikipedia, Lund.]
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Good to see the large interest for learning more about the Wikipedia tool from the educational system. I must admit that I thought the participants would mainly be university students and the odd scientist, like you :)
We had presentations by one guy who had fooled his law students by writing a hoax entry about something and then assigning the kids the task of writing about this very thing. They fell for it. (-;
And two guys who let their students (islamology and astronomy) write Wikipedia entries as a kind of exam.
Maybe you could give a conference on why Wikipedia is a joke:
The Anti Wikipedia Resource
The list Poptech linked to was interesting and I am sure has lots of completely true material, but it's not altogether trustworthy. Just a quick read-thru revealed links to a blog which tried to claim that Erik Möller, the vice ED of the Wikimedia Foundation, was a pedophile by twisting his words and citing him out of context. Especially in that area it is very easy to get misquoted, but the blog goes out of its way to try to pin something bad to Möller. I get that the writer doesn't like Wikipedia, but this is Reductio ad Hitlerum (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_Hitlerum).
This is a picture of Martin taking this picture, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:LA2_Wikipedia_Academy_2008_lect…
Haha, Lars, well done!
Right it is not trust worthy because these sources are obviously bogus where Wikipedia is completely accurate!
BBC
CBS News
CNET
Financial Post
Information Week
Los Angeles Times
The Daily Telegraph
The Guardian
The New York Times
The Times
The Washington Post
USA Today
Wired
Reuters
ect...
LMAO!
Was that what I wrote? That Wikipedia is completely true in every aspect? No, I wrote that "The list Poptech linked to was interesting and I am sure has lots of completely true material, but it's not altogether trustworthy." And I gave one example which was untrue. I could of course give lots of examples where Wikipedia fails. But that is not the point here. What I really *was* saying was that Wikipedia is not nescessarily as bad as a site called the Anti Wikipedia Resource paints it out to be. Just like you wouldn't go to a right wing party to hear the objective view on the left wing party, and vice versa. You go to someone who is neutral.