Wikiplagia

I tried to be punny (and combine "Wikipedia" with a disease-sounding thing), but oh well. Moving right along ...

In our microbiology course, we currently have a new instructor who essentially copies and pastes the text from the textbook and the tables from the textbook and uses them as her lecture notes. As if this wasn't bad enough, today she made a claim in class that I disagreed with and, when I backed up my claim using the textbook, she went online (I could not see where), found something that backed up HER claim, and told me that this was the way things were.

So I decided to do some Internet hunting myself. After all, maybe our textbook made a mistake? Who knows. So where did I go to first? Why, Wikipedia, of course! And what did I find but ... aha, here it is! Wikipedia makes the exact claim my teacher does. Hmm.

Well, because I already don't trust this teacher's plagiarism policy as far as I can throw her, I formed the assumption that she just looked at Wiki when making her lecture notes and got the (mis)information from there. But upon taking a closer look, I was convinced of it when I saw ...

that the source listed for the erroneous claim was none other than my textbook!

Discussion page on Wikipedia - click for further details

I looked at the page number that the guy who used my textbook claimed was his source for the misinformation, and lo and behold the misinformation was not there. Nowhere to be found. Instead, what I found staring at me on Page 700 was the exact same thing I'd read for my homework assignment on page 551.

Whether or not what I'm reading in the textbook is true is irrelevant to this blog update; what matters is:
1- a Wikipedia contributor either LIED or MISTAKENLY CITED a reference for a claim he made. Even if his claim is correct (which I do not believe it is), the reference he cited DISAGREES with him.

2- My professor is CLEARLY using Wikipedia, i.e. people bitch and nag all the time that Wikipedia is not a proper academic resource and here's a medical school education which is in part coming out of Wikipedia. Make of that what you will.