Is the internet destroying academic skills?

When I was in college and graduate school, I remember going to the library, doing research and carrying home massive amounts of books for every major paper I had to do.  Every research paper was a significant effort and I was often proud of what I had finished when I was done with the paper.

Now, students, apparently, tend to rely almost exclusively on the internet to do their research.

This article points out that, these days, because of the internet, American students are having a more difficult time reading longer passages or books and that their writing skills are diminishing (decreasing, dropping) compared to students of previous generations.

Indeed, in this article it seems that students regularly just cut and paste from a site like Wikipedia to do their papers.  What's the problem? First of all, that is plagiarism (the stealing of text from another source); second of all, if you are plagiarizing from Wikipedia, that probably means it's the second time material has been plagiarized since most of Wikipedia is badly written and plagiarized material itself. 

Finally, the 'authors' of Wikipedia articles (as was reported here:
http://convostartersenglish.blogspot.com/2013/07/further-proof-that-wikipedia-is-garbage.html ) are anonymous and potentially lacking (lacking - not having something) in any academic skills.  As you can see from the article just cited, there is a core group of 500 - 1,500 people who dominate Wikipedia (some folks have lots of time on their hands) and nobody knows whether they have adequate academic backgrounds (the article mentions two mass-murderers who loved contributing to Wikipedia).

So the following article seems to imply that students are becoming lazier and less critical about their sources.  After all, if you do a search engine search for anything, it immediately presents a Wikipedia article and most people seem too lazy to even scroll down a little bit and find a REAL article written by someone who actually has spent a significant amount of time researching the subject.

The article:

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2013/07/internet-making-writing-worse/67297/

Vocabulary to help you understand the article:

teens and 'tweens - a teenager is someone between 13 and 19 - a 'tween is someone between childhood and teenage years...so a 'tween (short for 'between') might be 11 or 12 years old.

a survey - a number of teachers were contacted and asked questions and their answers were recorded and analyzed.

an atrocity - something terrible

to plagiarize - to steal text or ideas

facilitating personal expression - making it easier for teens to express themselves

collaboration - working together.

citation - properly indicating where you got your research from.

copyright infringement - stealing material from books or magazines etc.

to digest - this usually means 'to eat' but here it means to read and understand

mediocre - not good and not bad; plain,

symbolism - when a term or object represents something that is not easily spoken about.  For instance if we say that the moon is a symbol in a poem, it might symbolize some deeper concept.

silly-putty -  a type of clay that can be used by children to make things; he is saying that the brains of young Americans are being turned into clay.

that doesn't gel with - that doesn't follow or make sense compared to what they were complaining about.

but w/e - with eraser?

a temptation - a feeling that you want to do something that you know you shouldn't.
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Writing/discussion:

Do you feel that the internet has been a blessing or a curse in regard to education?

Further proof that Wikipedia is garbage: mass-murderer editors (and 524 'core' editors)

Vocabulary and definitions are under the text...

In America, no teacher and no professor ever allows any student to use 'Wikipedia' as a source in a research paper.

Today we can see one of the reasons why.  The article I am including is called: Adam Lanza, Wikipedia Author.

Did you ever wonder who the people are who write or edit Wikipedia articles?  Now you have a better idea.  Adam Lanza was the young person who shot 20 children and 6 adults at a Connecticut school last year.  It turns out that Anders Breivik - the mass murderer from Norway - was an obsessive Wikipedia contributor as well.

So one big point I want to make is that you really have no idea who the people are who are writing or editing the articles.  The articles are also often of truly poor quality and plagiarism seems rampant.

Indeed, here is a link which states that, basically, Jimmy Wales, the Wikipedia founder, admits that most of the content on Wikipedia has been written by a core group who are referred to as 'freaks' in this article:

 http://www.businessinsider.com/2009/1/who-the-hell-writes-wikipedia-anyway

The article is titled: Who the hell writes Wikipedia anyway?

Wales writes: "...it turns out over 50% of all the edits are done by just .7% of the users ... 524 people. ... And in fact the most active 2%, which is 1400 people, have done 73.4% of all the edits."

Other than mass killers, who are these 524 Wikipedia writers/editors?  Are they scholars? Teachers? Professors? Unemployed alcoholics with lots of time on their hands? High school graduates? College graduates?  Adam Lanza was a high school student when he was editing Wikipedia. The writers and editors of Wikipedia are definitely not of the caliber of the writers and editors who work at real encyclopedias. 

Then there is the censorship and the biases.  Indeed, if you have a core group of editors, they are going to be continually changing what they don't like and continually promoting their own biases. They are the experts and know how to dominate the system.  Biases permeate Wikipedia articles.  As the above article mentions, there is a group of 'insiders' who are obsessed about Wikipedia.  They feel that they need to control the site and promote their opinions. 

There have been many complaints that if a person places content on an article that an 'insider' doesn't like, the insider can file a complaint to Wikipedia and have the person suspended or banned from posting on Wikipedia. 

Furthermore, articles about political figures or celebrities are often 'guarded' and censored by 'fans' or employees of the figures involved.  If a celebrity or political figure has had a scandal, ooops, the scandal sometimes doesn't appear on the Wikipedia page.  So, basically, Wikipedia pages are just another form of Facebook fan page for most politicians and celebrities.

What really bothers me though is that any time anyone enters a term into a search engine, a Wikipedia article is the first thing we see.  This is really why the site has become so popular.  Basically people are lazy and they click on the first link offered to them.  If people scrolled down just a few links they would probably find a more trustworthy article about the topic. Indeed, they might find the original topic that the Wikipedia article was plagiarized from.

The article about Lanza:

http://dailycaller.com/2013/07/02/adam-lanza-wikipedia-author-2/

Vocabulary to help you understand the intro and article:

proof - proof is different from evidence.  If you have evidence that something happened, you have some clues or hints that something happened.  If you have proof that something happened, you know for certain that it happened.  So evidence suggests that something is true, but proof forces you to realize that something is true.

an editor - someone who works for a newspaper or magazine or publishing company and who changes an authors text to make it better.  In the case of Wikipedia, anyone can edit anything. It looks as if there is just a 'core group' of anonymous (we don't know their names) editors, though, who control and dominate the site.

a source for research - some academic material from which you obtain information for a research paper

Connecticut - pronounced: cuh NET ih KIT.  This is a small state in the USA. 

mass murderer - someone who kills many people.

plagiarism - when text is stolen from a source and used elsewhere.  Pronounced: PLAY jer IS um

to boycott something - if you boycott something, you deliberately choose not to use it because you do not believe it is useful or good.  The opposite of 'deliberately' is 'accidentally.'

rampant -  all over the place

a core group - a basic group; a group that does most of the work.  A core is a center of something.

a freak - a weird or strange person who makes you feel uncomfortable. A person who doesn't fit in.

of the caliber - of the quality

censorship - when material is deliberately removed from a text because someone disagrees with an idea or doesn't like the idea.  Some governments censor material in newspapers or online.

a bias - a prejudice.  If a person has a bias, it means the person likes or doesn't like something.  If something is biased, it isn't 'objective.'

to promote - to push forward, to present to people.

to permeate - to fill, to be found all over the place.

guarded here means that people watch what other people place on the Wikipedia page and instantly remove it or censor it if they don't like it.  There is a feature on Wikipedia that will send you email if a person makes a change to an article you are 'guarding.'

a scandal - this is when something happens to make a celebrity look bad.

trustworthy - more reliable, something you can trust more.  Something you know is true and which was written by an educated person.

staffers - please notice that there is no such words as 'staffs.'  You have 'staff' - non-countable, or 'staffers.'

an elementary school is a school for children from about 5 to 10 years old.

prolific - if someone is prolific at something, he does it a lot

to be obsessed - if you are obsessed about something, you can't stop thinking about it

to link someone to something - to tie the person to something, to discover that the person has been involved in something

illustrious - famous

a fixation - this is like an obsession; if someone is fixated on something, he can't stop thinking about it

a chatty personality - if you are chatty you like to talk a lot

differs markedly - differs noticeably, you can see the difference

creepy, shunned loner - a creepy person is a kind of sinister or threatening person...a scary person or a person who makes you feel uncomfortable.  to be shunned means to be avoided.  A loner is someone who spends time by himself.

portrayed - shown, presented as

a cold-blooded killer - someone who does not feel emotion as he kills

painstakingly - if someone does something in a painstaking way, he takes a great deal of time and effort to do something

a massacre - this is when innocent people are killed at one time. Pronounced: MASS uh kur

anemic - if a person suffers from anemia, this means that he feels very weak.  So lanza was saying, "Some people say a 9mm bullet is very weak, I disagree."

conspicuous - obvious, readily apparent, noticeable

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Discussion/writing:

Do you think Wikipedia is popular because it is useful or because it is the first link that always pops up when we search for anything?

Does it bother you to know that mass-murderers edit Wikipedia?

Does it bother you that you really do not know the educational level of the person posting on Wikipedia?

Is Wikipedia Total Garbage?

Here is a story about how someone or some people deliberately created a fake historical event on Wikipedia, and how it lasted for five complete years.  Indeed, many people believed the event to be true and cross-referenced it.

Not one teacher and not one professor in the USA allows students to use Wikipedia as a resource in a research paper.  Indeed, it is generally found that the information on Wikipedia can be found in more reliable and reputable sources and that the writing quality and, indeed, overall quality of Wikipedia is substandard.  It seems that serious scholars consider Wikipedia to be a joke.

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/war-over-imaginary-bicholim-conflict-page-removed-wikipedia-234717353.html

1)  Given the fact that anyone can add anything, either true or false, to Wikipedia, can you really trust this source of information?  Should a person just dig a bit deeper and find a more reliable web site?

2)  Does it bother you that any time you type anything into a Google search engine, a potentially unreliable Wikipedia link pops up?

3)  Given that not one teacher or university professor in the world will allow a Wikipedia citation, does this affect your impression of this site?

4)  Jimmy Wales, the creator of the site, claims that he has a small paid staff and that most of the work on the site is by volunteers.  Yet, volunteer editors deliberately promoted false information for many years and openly laughed at the internet users who believed the lies.  Would you ever support or donate to this type of organization?

5)  Have to ever added anything to Wikipedia?  What types of people do you think control this site?

6)  From now on I intend to look for other sources of information than Wikipedia.  It is just too unreliable and I have no idea who is adding or changing information.  Many sites concerning celebrities and politicians, for instance, seem openly biased and controlled by fans or employees of the celebrities or politicians.  Do you think my attitude is justified?

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Yes, I'm the guy who caused the "scandal" in Asia two years ago http://www.shoutcastblog.com/2010/05/11/wondergirls-were-mistreated-by-jyp-entertainment/

Yes, I'm also the guy who wrote the very funny ESL book: New York City Sucks, But You'll Wanna Live Here Anyway http://www.amazon.com/Sucks-Youll-Wanna-Anyway-ebook/dp/B004TSPAQS