anyone been crazy enough to mirror wikipedia?

[Chad Perrin]

On Sun, Jul 06, 2008 at 05:05:27PM -0700, perryh at pluto.rain.com wrote:
> > In my house, we had an encyclopedia because I was in school ...
> 
> > it was useful for research papers.
> 
> I suspect the usefulness would depend on what one's teachers meant
> by "research", which tends to change with grade level.
> 
> In elementary and middle school, certainly.  In high school, maybe.
> In college, probably not.  Postgraduate, almost certainly not; at
> that level one should be using primary sources (and likely know
> enough to be writing articles *for* an encyclopedia :)

It was "useful" in grade school because teachers didn't actually believe
anyone at that age would ever go beyond the encyclopedia except in the
case of token satisfaction of assignment requirements.

It was "useful" in middle school and beyond the same way Wikipedia is
now: it gave me ideas of the sorts of directions to take my research when
I sought out more rigorously researched sources of information.  I
certainly never cited an encyclopedia in any research paper after sixth
grade -- because I wasn't an idiot.

-- 
Chad Perrin [ content licensed PDL: http://pdl.apotheon.org ]
Larry Wall: "You can never entirely stop being what you once were.
That's why it's important to be the right person today, and not put it
off till tomorrow."
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