I ran across this parody of Wikipedia from somethingawful.com today. It pretty much encapsulates many of the problems faced by "the wikipedia problem" with SA's typical humorous bent.

A few examples include the lack of an entry for the term "girlfriend," "citation needed" for common knowledge (i.e. Cat babies are also known as kittens), edit wars, personal attacks, blatant inaccuracies and irrelevant commentary. Of course, the sources are none other than the SA forum goons.

This article from The Register is more evidence of the necessity for serious HUMAN control over at Wikipedia. After I checked out all the links from the article to wikipedia, I was dumbfounded.

Wikipedia is supposed to be a collectivist repository of knowledge, but the moderators have become so overwhelmed with duties and power that they are regulating their daily activities to the machines themselves...thereby alleviating themselves from a primary function, to think. In fact, the bot that Betacommand created on Wikipedia utilized the files created by humans to restrict human thought and behavior, the total antithesis of Wikipedia and academia.The sysop bot was editing Wikipedia and deleting members at breakneck rates. Their monitoring system did work to catch and eliminate the bot, but what is being done to correct any errors in judgment it may have had? Can they even determine what errors were made?

In the midst of all this, we are being repeatedly told by Jimmy Wales that academia NEEDS wikipedia, much like the military was told they NEEDED Skynet in the Terminator trilogy. I'm sorry, but I believe that people should think and computers should simply be tools.

I have one question for Tango.....if I write a bot, and that  bot creates a script to create another bot, can the bot implement the new bot? And can you have Essjay [or the resident Essjay bot] get back to me on that?

LINK: http://politicstalk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@424.c9CMbu8k7E9.5@.775e9244/48

Tessa Jowell, the UK secretary of state for culture, media and sport, has weighed in on the blogging code of conduct debate from a few weeks back, stating that she welcomes and supports the initiative. From her article "Civility in 'Ourspace' " on The Guardian's website: "The wonderful, anarchic, creative world of the blogosphere shouldn't be a licence for abuse, bullying and threats as it has been in some disturbing cases...There is a need for serious discussion about maintaining civilised parameters for debate, so that more people - and women and older people in particular - feel comfortable to participate."

The results from this somewhat biased study are promising in that it appears that students who utilize educational podcasts feel that they are helpful.

 But are recordings of lectures really podcasts?


 

While focusing on financial aspects of implementing new technology  in higher education, this CNNMoney article contains some interesting statistics regarding the relevance of podcasting and "web 2.0" in higher education. In particular, it illustrates the increasing demand for access to "a next-generation learning environment" from incoming students (something I have personally predicted over the past several years).