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Wackypedia gets professor's blessing

12 May 2008 | 07:54 BST

By Nick Farrell

Who is the Everywhere Girl?

INTERNET encyclopaedia, Wackypedia is starting to get street cred among university professors.

The encyclopaedia, which is mostly controlled by a bunch of mates with chips on their shoulders the size of Texas, is banned from many universities because it is about as reliable as a British Leyland car.

However, one University professor has hit on a wizard wheeze to make the situation a bit better. According to the Sydney Morning Herald Professor Jon Beasley-Murray is telling students to write up entries in the encyclopaedia instead of penning term papers.

Beasley-Murray, who teaches Latin American literature at the University of British Columbia said that most Wackypedia entries were pants and it was challenging for students to write better ones.

Beasley-Murray says if his students get their article accepted as a " Wikipedia Featured Article" he will give them an A+. So far three entries have made it.

Some pages took four months to create and one was revised 1,000 times.

However the site, which is famous for declaring people it does not like as not notable, had a knack of wiping some entries. Its team of fake penis experts and kids who made up their degrees apparently decided that specialists did not know as much as they did on Latin American literature. µ

L'Inq
Sydney Morning Herald

© 2007 Incisive Media Investments Ltd. 2007

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