Byron Clark ([info]lossenelin) wrote,
@ 2007-07-30 18:56:00
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Entry tags:copyright, university, wikipedia

No recreational learning allowed
"Wikipedia is entirely free. And that freedom includes not just the ability of anyone to read it (a freedom denied by the scholarly journals in, say, jstor, which requires an expensive institutional subscription) but also—more remarkably—their freedom to use it."

From Roy Rosenzweig's "Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the future of the past"

I hadn't used jstor, but as I've mentioned citing Wikipedia in anything for my current history class is an automatic fail, so I went to check out jstor. I was naive enough to think that the the only restiction on jstor would be the fact that only academic institutions can afford subscriptions, making it only available to students, but they've decided thats not restrictive enough, heres the other restrictions:

"Access to this resource is restricted to staff and students at the University of Canterbury, using their University usercode and password.
It may be searched and accessed only for the purpose of University teaching, study or research. A reasonable quantity of excerpts may be downloaded for this purpose.
Substantial subsets of data may not be created. Data may not be copied, sold or provided for any other commercial purpose. Data may not be provided to anyone who is not an authorized user.
" (from here)

Forget reseach for blog posts, writing Wikipedia articles or even just getting some information for interested non-student friends. While we've come along way from just having the slogan "information wants to be free" we're still not there yet.




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[info]nefarious_deeds
2007-07-30 01:02 pm UTC (link)
JSTOR sucks nads. If you sit idle for a while it signs you out and then you gotta go through an elaborate process to sign back in. And its search engine is crap, I can never find what I want without sifting through shit for half an hour!

Anyway found this article online
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/01/26/wiki
...and I pretty much agree with it. As a historian, I am a firm believer in getting as close to primary material as possible...after all, history is about the study of primary material, secondary material is only to get you thinking along lines you otherwise wouldn't have thought (IMHO). Tertiary education especially should not allowed unauthenticated and poorly researched material to be cited. While this does include Wiki, it also includes 95% of the internet. That's just the way the cookie crumbles.

However, my love of Wikipedia grows by the day. I've literally spent two hours trawling through Conservopedia, Wikipedia and a few other similar sites, comparing criticism (political flame war anyone?) and reading up on the whole phenomenon. Nearly every day I check Wiki when something piques my interest and I go and learn all about that subject, and use Wiki as a springboard for further research. It's fantastic!

I really hope the criticism isn't right, and Wiki lasts beyond 2010. Imagine how many articles there would be! I do find it supremely ironic that Conservopedia criticises Wiki's "liberal bias" particularly about anti-American topics...when will Republican USA wake up and realise the rest of the world DOESN'T think like them? Fuck you, America, fuck you!

And in terms of information being free...I think Wiki's the closest thing we've got. And I think it's doing a damn good job.

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[info]lossenelin
2007-07-30 09:19 pm UTC (link)
That was a good article, I liked the way it actually looked at what Wikipedia is rather tham just saying its bad because anyone can edit it.

I agree that in general encyclopedias shouldn't be used for university research, though I think exceptions should be made for stuff thats not quite "general knowledge" enough to not need citations, I often need some basic facts in an essay and get annoyed because they're RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME on Wikipedia, but I can't cite them, usually though I can find them in general text-book style histories so its not a huge issue. (though of course text books can be incrediably bias, as historians like Michael Parenti have pointed out)

Why reinvent the wheel and do research thats already been done and made public? Wikipedia should be a starting point that gives people the basics and gives them time to go out in to HUGE world of information beyond Wikipedia.

Really though this post isn't about any students choice of sources though, its about the right (or lack there of) of people to information, and JSTORs restictions seem like nothing more than academic elitism.
(I think the no-commerical use ones are fair, but deffinatly not the ones on what you can use the information for and who you can share it with)

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