Saturday, May 23, 2009

Look Askance at Info Sources

Interesting article on Health Beat about a study indicating that doctors--like many of us, no doubt--use Wikipedia quite a bit to locate medical information.

This is of course news of some potential concern to those of us interested in the authority of information sources.

As we tell the students where I work, it's not that the information on Wikipedia is necessarily bad. Often it's pretty good. It's just that it might be bad, and you wouldn't know it, since you or anyone else can change it anytime you want.

You can't completely trust it, is the thing. Not the way you can trust journals from reputable sources like Elsevier, right? Ha ha.

Guess we'd better do a better job of playing up our preferred information resources!

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