Wikipedia admin here.
But you know that, school, you know books are on their way out.
Hmm I'm not sure thats refected in sales figures. The role of books is changing perhaps.
But you know that, school, you know books are on their way out. So you guys gave us access to a database! It has MLA citations on every article! Wow how convenient! It would be awesome if it didn't take an hour to load and the first thing that comes up when I search "Tet Offensive" is an article about Marilyn Monroe
Wait are things still that bad? I mean sure back when I was uni there was stuff like that but well that was quite some time ago. Really bad search systems are inexcusable these days. For comparison the non profit journal PLOS one has a fairly good search system:
Won't help you with the TET offensive but that's because its mostly a biology journal.
Face it. Just fucking face it. Research is easy now. Research projects and papers don't take weeks anymore.
I think the problem is that you are failing to consider the different types of research. School/college/first year uni report? Yeah few hours but there were always students doing them the night before. Nailing down the parameters of the higgs boson? Will take a bit longer.
It's 2015 and you can be an expert on anything in an hour.
Expert here. No you can't. Something like say gauge theory takes years to master.
Do you know jack shit about wikipedia? No you don't. Because if you did, you'd know that anyone CAN'T edit pages on wikipedia. And the people who CAN are experts.
While of course wikipedia has experts it also has a lot of non experts and even the experts frequently write about areas outside their expertise. Eh I almost never edit articles that directly relate to my degree.
Its ALL OF THE DOCUMENTED KNOWLEDGE IN HISTORY. Nothing can beat that.
It isn't. Well it isn't yet anyway. For example it contains less information on third century roman rings than the book sitting next to me (because I haven't got around to writing about the third century yet). Its likely that the majority of the 100K+ articles published in PLOS one contain information that will never be published in wikipedia (the same is true for most scientific journals. PLOS one just happens to be more accessible than most)
I understand that you're mad that students aren't toiling for hours on research projects, but you're going to have to get used to that.
The problem is not the time students are taking but the skills they are meant to be learning. Your ability to write a paper on the tet offensive is only of limited interest. Your ability to dig through various information stores (online databases, books, journals, reports etc) asses them for credibility and bias and then parse them into something readable is the key skill here.