The Scottish Parent Teacher Council blasted Wikipedia, and other internet sources for providing inaccurate information to students. Article. Link from Drudge.

I remember in graduate school that someone kept a list on the bulletin board of the Religion faculty mailroom of errors in Wikipedia entries concerning history and religion. When I worked in the Baylor library we tried to steer students toward scholarly material, both on and off line. My advice to my students for their writing is: don't use Wikipedia as your sole source. And don't believe everything you read.

A former British prime minister once said that the primary purpose of an education was to enable one to tell when the other fellow was talking rot. You need your own base of good, reliable information to make that judgment.

One of the major problems I have noted with student use of the internet for research is a lack of digestion. Back in the day (I was in college in the mid-70s) when we did library research we read books and periodicals. Since photcopiers were in their infancy, expensive and poor qualitity, we took notes of what we read. The process of reading and then writing summaries required us to digest the material. Now, students too often skim an internet source, then copy and paste into a paper, perhaps changing a few words in the hope of avoiding plagurism. Pages of books and periodicals, if consulted, tend to be scanned and used the same way.

The papers too often read like undigested material thrown together.