Template talk:Dyoh

Misleading sentence

This sentence in Template:Dyoh ends with a claim that overstates the truth a bit:

Letting someone else do your homework makes you learn nothing in the process, nor does it allow Wikipedians to fulfill their mission of ensuring that every person on Earth – including you – has access to the total sum of human knowledge.

In fact, Wikipedia only wants to publish a relatively tiny subset of human knowledge, excluding breathtakingly vast categories (see: WP:NOT). A factually correct wording would be:

Letting someone else do your homework makes you learn nothing in the process, nor does it allow Wikipedians to fulfill their mission of ensuring that every person on Earth – including you – has access to an absolutely large but proportionately tiny subset of the total sum of human knowledge.

As an example, articles about software purposely exclude the kind of detailed information that enables a person to actually use a piece of software: program manuals and extensive collections of examples. This is unfortunate, because the software manuals available elsewhere are typically short on examples of how to use a software program, and a wiki is an excellent tool to allow a user community to aggregate useful examples from their personal experience (which would amount to original research, but is directly verifiable just by running the examples through the software in question). That sort of content is appearing and will continue to appear on other wikis, but not on Wikipedia under its current policies. For an example of an organization which does aim to index all human knowledge, see Google. --Teratornis 19:08, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

Version by Lambiam

This version seems to say it properly. - hydnjo talk 01:21, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

Thank you

Can we get rid of the "Thank you." at the end please? Zain Ebrahim (talk) 12:19, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

I'm going to remove it. Please discuss here before reverting. Zain Ebrahim (talk) 08:12, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

Minor change

I have added a minor parse because it can sometimes be confusing when this template in its former state, which referred to the reference desk, was used on the help desk. This parse allows the template to detect if it was being used on a reference desk, help desk, or somewhere else. This will hopefully make it easier for users to quickly give a DYOH response on any desk, without having to hunt for the template specifically for that desk. If my changes cause problems, please revert. Intelligentsium 17:17, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

More re the above

I see that one sentence I just corrected has been discussed above many times. If someone else does your homework, you can in fact still learn semantic knowledge from it, just as if you were reading question and answer sets from a textbook. However, the goal of homework assignments is tacit procedural knowledge which you can not obtain when someone else does your homework for you. Ginger Conspiracy (talk) 00:44, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

Proposed as policy

Please see Wikipedia talk:Do your own homework regarding a policy proposal. -- œ^™ 15:42, 14 May 2011 (UTC)