This is the reason why I don’t recommend Wikipedia as primary source of information, especially with its appeal to the culture of the lazy. Wikipedia is openly editable by just about anyone. Combine this with the amount of pseudo-scholars who often take what the wiki says as fact. A cycle of misinformation goes another round. Or, a cycle of political spin and red herring advocacies.
This comes from the Inquirer (and I applaud Alexander Villafania for getting this scoop), Senatorial aspirants make a splash in Wikipedia.
Just this morning, I was listening to the Inquirer.net Eleksyon 2007 podcast featuring Aquilino Pimentel III. There Pimentel that he’s all for new media. Apparently so does other candidates.
Villafania cites:
Among the bets with Wikipedia entries are Francis Escudero, Loren Legarda, Edgardo Angara, Manuel Villar Jr, Benigno Aquino III, Ralph Recto, Michael Defensor, Vicente Sotto III, Francis Pangilinan, Panfilo Lacson and Juan Miguel Zubiri.
Most of those with Wikipedia entries already have their own websites highlighting the same biographies, political careers and platforms for the upcoming May election. Likewise, most of the incumbent politicians have their biographies uploaded in the official Senate website ( www.senate.gov.ph).
This is what you get when you have tech savvy people in your staff. Let’s face it, these people don’t have enough time to check Friendster accounts so they’d have someone in their staff to add friends for them. Whew, the luxury of having other people, huh?
But hey, we’re reading too much about politicians’ own campaign driven initiatives on the Web, how about we, members of the Pinoy blogosphere, share our two centavos worth to the whole discourse of Pinoy politics on the Web!
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No serious researcher uses an encyclopedia — any encyclopedia, not just Wikipedia — as his/her main source of information. Researchers are expected to go for the primary (eyewitness) and secondary (press) sources. Encyclopedias are just convenient repositories of credible information and are not meant to be *the* authoritative sources of facts. That’s also why encyclopedia articles have bibliographies.
I agree (though with the exception of people doing research on the encyclopedia). People in the academe hate seeing Wikipedia in the “Works Cited” and “Bibliographies” of papers.
Web sources (save for university and academic journals) are mostly unrefereed. However, common tao “research” will initially (and most of the time, ultimately) resort to encyclopedia (and Wikipedia, for that matter) for information.
I don’t believe that schools are teaching research nowadays. Even colleges and universities are starting to fail in equipping students with proper research skills.
But hey, let’s admit it, the culture of the lazy is beginning to prevail.