The Swiss Are Not to Blame

Have you ever had a teacher or professor who proclaimed that Wikipedia articles would not be accepted as sources for your term paper?

Here’s one example why: On a cursory online search for the history of snow tubing, the sentence, “Snow tubing is rumored to have begun as far back as the 1820s in the Alpine Mountains,” can be found, verbatim, in quite a number of articles, most attached to hills and mountains that offer tubing as part of their winter fun. The culprit, in our estimation? The Wikipedia article “Tubing (recreation),” subsection “Snow.” We suspect that the PR people employed by many ski-and-ride (and tube) operations are guilty of the kind of research that would furrow a classroom educator’s brow.