OB RANT

I ended yesterday's blog with "Google it".  The rant is that people who are connected have access to the greatest library and resource in the history of humanity, and most of you use it to read blogs.

Oops.  Well, onward.

My nieces get this from me all the time.  "Auntie, I have a question."  Once I hear the question, I give an answer and then I say "Google it".  Because Auntie is not going to high school or college with them and there are educational opportunities everywhere but if you don't take advantage of them you won't ever know anything but what you regurgitated on the test.

Which is far from everything there is to know on the subject.

OTOH, my nieces also take random walks through Wikipedia.  They know the information isn't reliable, but they're creating their own form of an old TV show called Connections which used to start on one side of the world and walk through the intellectual or historical or genetic relationships all over the rest of the world and find out how people and their deeds gelled.

So since the info on  Wiki articles isn't reliable, what do you do?  You use the external links at the bottom of the page.  You google the subject and when you find official or scholarly information that disagrees with the article, you go to the Talk page and give the link to it.  Then if you're really serious, you go back and use the Wiki template messages to point out that there's a possible POV issue with the article, if the author hasn't acknowledged that this other information casts serious doubt on what they wrote. 

You can even become a subject matter expert yourself and publish on a blog so that the Wiki author knows somebody is looking over their shoulder and they need to clean up their act.

But it all starts with doing the homework. 

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