(no subject)
Sep. 2nd, 2012 06:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tylikThere is an awful lot of really bad information on the net (and elsewhere) about the making tea from a tea plant. (As opposed to making tea from, say, a box or cannister.)
Generally speaking, a pox on content farms, such as about.com and ehow. Ye gods. This is hardly the first time I've noticed this, but who the heck writes for these things? I am really tired of seeing random lore passed along by people who don't understand it, haven't tried it themselves, have no knowledge of the subject and apparently don't even realize they don't know.*
Actually, this is really generically the case. Folks, if you haven't done it, please don't write article about how to do it, repeating information you've run across on mailing lists, newsgroups, or vague memories of something you read when you were a child. Please. It becomes one vast game of telephone, where mistakes and misunderstandings are propagated ad nauseum.
While we're at it - if you see an article posted about some health study, especially if the findings are controversial, and especially if it's posted on a non-standard news site (not that standard ones are *that* much better, really do this anyway) for heavens sake take a peek at least at the abstract of the original study before you link to it and pass it all around as fact.
It's not hard. Really it's not. Notice I limited this to health related studies, because that's the easiest one. Go to Pub Med. Brought to you by our tax payer dollars, and more and more of the articles published there are required to be made freely available. But the abstracts are almost all freely available. It's wonderful. Do a search. Find the article. Read at least the abstract. Better yet, read the whole thing, and then look for review articles on the same subject so you'll have some context.
* And I like lore. I'm interested in lore. But this is so much bullshit.
Generally speaking, a pox on content farms, such as about.com and ehow. Ye gods. This is hardly the first time I've noticed this, but who the heck writes for these things? I am really tired of seeing random lore passed along by people who don't understand it, haven't tried it themselves, have no knowledge of the subject and apparently don't even realize they don't know.*
Actually, this is really generically the case. Folks, if you haven't done it, please don't write article about how to do it, repeating information you've run across on mailing lists, newsgroups, or vague memories of something you read when you were a child. Please. It becomes one vast game of telephone, where mistakes and misunderstandings are propagated ad nauseum.
While we're at it - if you see an article posted about some health study, especially if the findings are controversial, and especially if it's posted on a non-standard news site (not that standard ones are *that* much better, really do this anyway) for heavens sake take a peek at least at the abstract of the original study before you link to it and pass it all around as fact.
It's not hard. Really it's not. Notice I limited this to health related studies, because that's the easiest one. Go to Pub Med. Brought to you by our tax payer dollars, and more and more of the articles published there are required to be made freely available. But the abstracts are almost all freely available. It's wonderful. Do a search. Find the article. Read at least the abstract. Better yet, read the whole thing, and then look for review articles on the same subject so you'll have some context.
* And I like lore. I'm interested in lore. But this is so much bullshit.
