Does the hunt on piracy piss off anyone else here?

[Limewater]

Luke,
You certainly aren't stupid, your great posts show that. But please don't refer to Wikipedia as "wiki".

FYP

You are soooo close to me posting the laughing emoticon.

Good. That was part of my goal. The other part was that you'd stop doing it.

[AppleQueso]

Hail,
You certainly aren't stupid, your great mods show that. But please don't cite wiki as a valid source.

So please don't be stupid yourself Luke.

Never called you stupid, and never meant to insult you.
That said, people shouldn't cite wiki as a valid source. Elementary school teachers won't accept it as a valid source, I don't either.

For extremely general information such as in this situation, I'd say Wikipedia is a perfectly fine source. It's not like we were having a debate or he was trying to back up his claim with any sort of detailed information.

[Luke]

It's not like we were having a debate or he was trying to back up his claim with any sort of detailed information.

I thought that was exactly what he was trying to do. Using wiki (sorry limewater) as a source is about as lazy as you can get.

Good. That was part of my goal. The other part was that you'd stop doing it.

You succeeded half of your goal.

[Hatta]

Increasingly off topic, but Wikipedia is roughly as accurate as Encyclopedia Britannica. As the saying goes, many eyes make all bugs shallow.

[Luke]

Increasingly off topic, but Wikipedia is roughly as accurate as Encyclopedia Britannica. As the saying goes, many eyes make all bugs shallow.

I'll be the first to say I'm a stickler when it comes to using wiki as a source, and I'm probably in the minority. It's just when someone cites wiki as a source, the first thing I wonder is "Who entered the information?".

Might just be programmed to think that way too. In post grad, if you got caught using wiki, or the hotlinks provided by wiki in a project, your project would receive a zero. Zip. Null and void.

[Limewater]

Using "wiki" to refer to Wikipedia is about as lazy, misleading and ignorant as you can get.

FYP.

[Luke]

Wow. Abbreviations are now ignorant.
There is a new movement of internet snark, and it's anti-abbreviations.

You've been warned humanity. No more abbreviations, the snark monster is loose.

[Hatta]

Might just be programmed to think that way too. In post grad, if you got caught using wiki, or the hotlinks provided by wiki in a project, your project would receive a zero. Zip. Null and void.

That's pretty awful. Sure, don't cite wikipedia in a research paper that's supposed to be drawn from primary sources. You wouldn't cite Britannica either. But if wikipedia cites a paper in Nature, and I cite the same paper in Nature that's a fail? That's just awful.

If the Wikipedia article is well researched and well sourced, a paper on the same topic would cite a lot of the same articles just by chance. I can think of a few times I wrote a paper for a class, then a few months later a review article was published and there was a lot of overlap between my sources and theirs. Sources are sources, where you get them is irrelevant.

[Luke]

That's pretty awful.

Most projects were done in groups, and I would have to check to make sure the sources didn't show up as a link from www.wikipedia.org/- Some students would try to change the url, but the professors were on that as well.

But, that may have passed in undergrad. My last classes were researched based, and wiki just doesn't fly for that. You had to do days of digging for research, mostly numbers and tracking trends.

Not saying wiki isn't useful for finding facts, it's that I don't always trust the info some people edit. It's the lcd for information.

[Limewater]

Wow. Abbreviations are now ignorant.
There is a new movement of internet snark, and it's anti-abbreviations.

You've been warned humanity. No more abbreviations, the snark monster is loose.

No, the problem isn't abbreviations. It's that Wikipedia is a wiki, and it's far from the only one. There are thousands of wikis out there. Some are broad in scope, like wikipedia, some are very narrow, like the Math Jobs wiki. Some are publicly accessible and editable, like LyricWiki, while some are used by private companies to organize internal knowledge.

Wikipedia is simply one example of a wiki.

And, hey, there actually is a Wikipedia entry telling users not to abbreviate "Wikipedia" as "wiki" and why:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia: ... ia_as_Wiki

The suggested abbreviation is "WP".