Quote:
Originally Posted by dippin
Most books by good publishers and refereed articles have to go through an anonymous review process by other specialists.
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That doesn't matter in this case. The way students have traditionally learned has long been reliant on simply learning what has gone before and parroting it back to the teachers. The same people go on to write the high school and college text books, and simply write what they had learned 20 years before (often in very narrow fields of endeavour, without understanding other fields that may impact their work) with only minor tweaks that don't reflect true original ideas or new concepts. Most such texts are actually long out of date by the time they are written and published as most fields are incredibly resistant to new theories and change.
The use of the Internet for research allows for the exploration and consideration of a far greater data set than you'll find in a text book - and even if some of the information on various sites is not always 100% proven, it can open the mind to far greater learning than what is contained a text book.
Unfortunately, Wikipedia is now so mainstream it is falling into the same trap!