My mother is a high school history teacher, and if you breathe the word Wikipedia to her she will give you an earful about students and plagiarizing. And about how peer-edited history articles are rife with errors. So if she got an eyeful of this service I think her head would explode.
Yes, now you can save yourself the trouble of cutting and pasting into word, printing out your paper, and finding a nice plastic sheet for a report you’ve lifted from Wikipedia. Instead, for the starting price of $8.90, AND they’ll ship within two days!
Tongue in cheek jokes about forging your thesis aside, by itself this is a bit bizarre. Is there really a large market to printed copies of Wikipedia articles? But this idea of large-scale printing of peer-written articles is an interesting one for universities, especially with a quick printing turnaround like that. It could bridge the gap between online-only textbooks and the need to highlight and take notes on physical books. Plus, this could be similar to GMail going to college; it leverages an infrastructure students already know, and offers the professors a chance to draw in resources from multiple areas.
Or it’s just a way to resurrect the lowly encyclopedia…what do you think?
Via Techcrunch