Update: after rereading this some hours later, I realize it’s kind of random, baseless and snarky. I’m only leaving it up because I like the reference to professasaurs getting endothermic

There is an excellent blago a blago debate shaping up around the relationship between academia and wikipedia, starting with Why Wikipedia Must Jettison It’s Anti-Elitistism from Larry Sanger, which Clay Shirky responded to in K5 Article on Wikipedia Anti-elitism, to which Dana Boyd responded with Academia and Wikipedia, to which Clay Shirky has now responded with Wikipedia: Me on boyd on Sanger on Wales.

To which I will now briefly respond.

Some of the consternation the pro-academia side is expressing seems to have at it’s distant root the observation of undergraduates handing in papers which reference wikipedia. They are not worried, they claim, that Wikipedia exists and contains information of a different character than that of traditional reviewed and filtered encyclopedias. They are worried, they claim, that students aren’t capable of discerning the different character of that information and ingest and regurgitate that information as if it were the same thing.

To which I would add, that the students at the heart of this trouble probably would be able to discern the difference and treat it accordingly, if it actually mattered to them. But it probably isn’t worth their while to make the effort. All they want is a qoute to fill a space in their text and a reference to fill a space in their bibliography, and they want to get those things quickly because the damn thing is due and they have other priorities. They probably weren’t particularly critical about the material when they were forced to dig it out of Brittanica. It’s not suprising that they aren’t critical about it now when it’s coming from Wikipedia. I figure, wether they recognize it themselves or not, the professasaurs are getting endothermic about wikipedia-based hoop jumping because it’s not the proper proscribed hoop jumping, not because it’s mindless.

Since when did professors get upset when a student took in and spat out information mindlessly?

If academics want students to seriously consider the source of their material, be it wikipedia or any other, they should stop kidding themselves that students give a damn about the arbitrary carbon copy busy work students are required to do for most of their academic careers and try and find some vaguely relevant tasks for them.