User talk:Mkg2008

Thanks for the message on my talk page. To answer your questions:

1) Why not? Don't you think that that is a pretty important thing for students to know, especially if the lesson is geared, in the end, towards making them productive users of Wikipedia?

Wikipedia is used by millions of users every day. We are an encyclopedia and our purpose is to present accurate information to all users. Your use of the encyclopedia as a tool for teaching your class about the process isn't appropriate. How large is your class? Why do their needs trump the needs of all the other users of the encyclopedia?

And, 2. Is there anywhere else I can tell them to do that? I remember hearing something about an educational wikipedia site . . . but even if I were to use that for the lesson, using it for this would be nearly as powerful as changing wikipedia itself.

It really isn't appropriate to encourage your students to vandalize Wikipedia by adding false information to it, even if they intend to remove them later. Again, how do you justify giving false information to other users of the page? There are other Wiki sites out there. One obvious one to use would be the Uncyclopedia which encourages non-factual data.

Thanks for understanding, Gwernol 22:57, 6 March 2008 (UTC)