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Saturday, June 17, 2006

Don't Use Wikipedia Warns Jimmy Wales

Wikipedia founder Jimmy 'Jimbo' Wales has warned students not to refer to Wikipedia. Wales said that he gets about 10 e-mail messages a week from students who complain that Wikipedia has earned them fail grades.

"They say, 'Please help me. I got an F on my paper because I cited Wikipedia'" and the information turned out to be wrong, he says. But he said he has no sympathy for their plight, noting that he thinks to himself: "For God sake, you're in college; don't cite the encyclopedia," the journal reports.

Wales didn't, alas, suggest renaming the project to something more appropriate, like "Jimbo's Big Bag of Trivia", as we've advised before. He put the blame squarely on the students. And while Wikipedians love to blame everyone but themselves for their predicament, in large part, he's correct.

What's more interesting is that Wikipedian's guardians see its new found infamy as an opportunity to forge a marketing strategy for the troubled project.

Read the rest here

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