Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Taking the Opposite Side

You know, normally I'm the one to rally against school or teacher policies, but there's one thing that I've never understood why kids keep fighting for. Why exactly do high school students think they should be allowed to use Wikipedia as a source for research papers? Are they drunk or something?* They keep arguing how it's just the old teachers being afraid of modern technology, but if you think about it for more than two seconds, it actually makes a lot of sense.

It's not about whether or not Wikipedia is accurate. Aside from the occasional troll, it almost always is as truthful as it can be. It's because Wikipedia is constantly changing. You can't cite it as a source because by the time the source is checked, the page could say something completely different, and your quote is immediately rendered incorrect, or at least inaccurate.

It basically boils down to teenagers just being lazy. We want to be able to use Wikipedia because it's easy. And you know what? I get that. I get that almost all of the work you do for school is complete useless crap. But if you're going to play the BS game, you got to play by the BS rules, and that means doing it right and pretending you're actually writing a serious, legitimate, professional essay. Y'know, because there are so many articles published on the Civil War these days, containing nothing but information people already had.

Yeah, it's still stupid.

*Probably.

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