The recent plagiarism conversations wandered periodically to the topic of the validity of Wikipedia as a source in the first place. They popped into my head when I found this (arguably below) Wikipedia level source upon Googling something.
I'm avoiding a huge pile of grading by reading fiction (which I never ever do, so before any Humanities personalities dump on my choice... yes, it is middle school stuff. But I bet half of you can't do middle school science, so we're even). I picked up Nine Stories again and then Googled J. D. Salinger hoping to get a quick Wikipedia summary of which of them go with Glass Family characters.
I found this. And you must must must look at the photograph.
It's so bad it's got to be deliberate, no? Is this something an English professor planted to catch students using crap sources?
I got the thought in my head that it would be great fun to plant misinformation in places I've specifically told my students to avoid to see if they go there anyway.
Q1: What's the best shit information you've found your students using on the internet.
Q2: How much fun would it be to make this crap up? and where could we post similarly crappy information?
One of my students wrote a paper on genetics and X-Men and claimed that the genetics were flawed because the X-Men mythology claims that the X-gene comes from the father's side, while "everyone knows" that the X comes from the mother and the Y from the father. He got that from some blog post and refused to change it no matter what I said.
ReplyDeleteI'm also fairly sure that they've included a picture of Larry David as J.D. Salinger...
ReplyDeleteWell Snark, the student is correct for X *men*...
ReplyDeleteI had a student try to use the "Canadian Free Press" which is an anti-Semitic & racist conspiracy site.
ReplyDeleteMy students actually cite GradeSaver.com and other plagiarism sites.
ReplyDelete@ F&T, At some level, you have to respect their committment to transparency, though aybe not at a level that would allow them to pass the class.
ReplyDelete@Faris: Except that he got genes and chromosomes mixed up. . . .
ReplyDelete@Snarky: ah...
ReplyDeleteNo, that's a real photo. By a famous photographer, too: Lotte Jacobi. It appeared on the back of the dust jacket of _Catcher in the Rye_ (absent after the 1st ed.).
ReplyDeleteWikipedia says as much, and it's confirmed in a few minutes of searching.
But then it's only the students who are incapable or lazy researchers, right?
@Anonymous - I'm going to assume (and this may be a big leap) that you're not just trolling. But, you did mention being an incapable / lazy researcher, presumably in response to my comment about the Larry David Photo.
ReplyDeleteIt took a lot of work, but after scrolling down the very same SchoolWorkHelper page, I found this:
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Alice says:
June 17, 2011 at 9:13 pm
Why do you have a picture of Larry David in an article about JD Salinger? And if there is some good reason to include it, why not label it “Larry David” instead of putting Salinger’s name on it? It gives the impression that you Googled it and stole it without properly citing it and without even realizing it wasn’t even the photo you’d really wanted.
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XingT says:
June 17, 2011 at 9:21 pm
The wrong gallery was imported for this article; this occurs on rare occasion. The problem has been corrected and thank you very much for bringing it to our attention Alice.
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Queen of Hearts says:
June 17, 2011 at 10:05 pm
Darn, I really wanted to see the picture of Larry David. Thanks, Alice. ...
@J. Harker: apologies--I saw the site with a photo of Salinger--though sort of fuzzy--and didn't scroll too far down the page of the site. Again, my apologies for _my_ lazy research.
ReplyDeleteAh, a great place to post a link to this wonderful XKCD cartoon..
ReplyDeletehttp://xkcd.com/386/
MA&M - I want the t-shirt!
ReplyDeleteQ2: Very fun. I have a hunch that "Yahoo Answers" would be a good place to plant nonsense, including but not limited to the plot summaries that our snowflakes read in place of real books.
ReplyDeleteQ: "What's the theme of Anna Karenina in 300 words or less?"
A: A boy befriends dragon whom no one else can see. They have many adventures and escape from evil hobos. The dragon saves Helen Reddy, who sings a song about it, and then escapes. All of these things symbolize SOCIETY, and the social effects of SOCIETY on the socialized individual in society.
Sorry, I'm exhausted and just got my first grade complaint of the summer. I am not to be paid attention.
Also, I once saw a Wikipedia entry on Dante that said something like, "Dante Alighieri was a giant boiled onion." (I'm probably misremembering slightly...but not by much.)
ReplyDeleteNot an onion, a potato! A lovely, crunchy potato!
ReplyDeletehttps://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/w/index.php?title=Dante_Alighieri&oldid=22718789
(OK, I'm done.)
Lex, I like your idea; it reminds of something I did about 5 years ago. During the last week or so of classes, I edited Shakespeare's wikipedia entry by adding that his work was greatly influenced by his love of badgers as they so reminded him of his mother. I'm guessing there may have been more than one English prof who was shaking his/her head in bemusement and irritation.
ReplyDeleteWhen in disgrace with badgers and men's eyes. . .
ReplyDeleteOne of my essay topics did show up word-for-word as a question on Yahoo Answers. My TAs found it and had a lot of fun answering it, I gather.
ReplyDeleteBadgers? badgers? Shakespeare didn't have no badgers! Shakespeare didn't need no stinkin' badgers!
ReplyDeleteI've had at least one student cite echeat.com. This was after a library workshop on research and an in-class lecture on research and academic sources. I've also had a few students cite the Bible for "factual," incontrovertible information about morality and ethics.
ReplyDeleteThen, of course, there are the many many students who pull incorrect information out of the air and state it as fact. Did you know, for example, that in the 19th century, American women were placed in arranged marriages and executed if they committed adultery? Did you also know that an African-American woman living in the early 1970s would not only have been a slave but was also an immigrant from Africa?
One Freshman Comp. paper contained only two citations, both from The Onion, which the student thought was a serious news source.
ReplyDeleteAnother cited the online, 1911 edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia, which is full of very outdated sociology and anthropology (references to "savages" and "primitive peoples," etc.), even though the much more reliable modern New Catholic Encyclopedia was available (in dead-tree mode) in the college's library.
Then there was the paper taking as fact the existence of a vast conspiracy between doctors and pharmaceutical companies to addict the American people to carbohydrates. The main source was a book co-written by some conspiracy theorist with no scientific training and a washed-up former movie star.
An acquaintance set this website up about ten years ago to help the hapless and trap the unwary:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.helpfulresearch.com/
My favourite piece on it is the collection of trivia about the presidency of William Howard Taft, who "Cut the number of hobos in half during his presidency by leaving poisoned cans of beans in open cargo cars. Also, he opened a series of hobo death camps where, 'the lazy and the shiftless are free to spend their final days having knife fights for the amusement of the wealthy.'"