I have heard many at teachers question the value and integrity of Wikipedia. Depending on the source you go to, independent studies have found Wikipedia to be 80-90 percent accurate. When we look at our students and they as individuals get 80-90 percent of the questions correct on a test, we praise them. Then as teachers we help them find and fix what was incorrect. How often do we really throw out something that is by majority still good? Why don’t we do the same with Wikipedia? At our school we have been talking about digital literacy and how important it is to teach our students critical thinking. Is Wikipedia not the perfect place to do this? In our classrooms we must be teaching our students to question.
Questioning is central to learning and growing.
-Jamie McKenzie
When our students write for us we always tell them to cite their sources. Wikipedia tells their authors the same thing. Any article is only as good as the sources of information that it is built upon. It does not matter if it comes from Wikipedia, someone’s blog, or a scholarly article, students should be encouraged to question it.
I would encourage all of us to use Wikipedia as a place for information. As always we need to be asking, where did this information come from? When students run across incorrect information, what a powerful teaching moment that we have. Teach them how to FIX the error and how to cite the source of their information. We need not ban what can be argued as the largest single repository of information, but we must use it wisely.
As for the question should students site Wikipedia in their formal research, I would have to defer to the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, for that answer. He was quoted in The Chronicle of Higher Education as saying, “For [goodness] sake, you’re in college; don’t cite the encyclopedia.”
I completely agree! I always tell my comp. science students to question everything they read on the Internet, no matter the source! I always tell them if they use Wikipedia that they should find another source that corroborates the information.
Simply removing Wikipedia from the equation is not the solution. As mentioned, a better idea is to teach students to THINK! This will undoubtedly lead to better research skills and improved learning in your classroom.
I always tell my students that I have no problem with them using Wikipedia to get a grasp of a topic. However, when they are doing a research project, I want them to recognize other valid sources. If I okay the use of wikipedia, that is the only source I will ever get. I want them to go find other sources and question whether those sources should be considered reputable or not.
O.K. let’s start questioning — why does the title of this blog entry say to “Stop Censoring”? Are we actually government officials — for the word ‘censor’ actually applies to government action. Are we seeking to suppress or delete information that is considered objectionable? That is what the action of censoring actually is. I doubt that any teacher tells the students that they cannot ever look at Wikipedia because it has objectionable material on it. I doubt any of us have ever tried to shut down Wikipedia, or have the site filtered on our intranet. What we do is to expect that our students seek more varifiable sources with more reliable standards of publication. Yes the Wikipedial articles have citations. However, who checks to the validity of those citations? Do the students who want to cite Wikipedia, have the freedom to cite paper encyclopedias? I expect then to go beyond those types of pre-digested information for research. General information is something different altogether.
As a different issue, how easy is it for other people to read the text of these replies? I know I’m getting old, but this level of contrast is EXTREMELY hard for me to read.
I encourage my students to go first to Wikipedia to get an overview of the subject matter. IT is a good place to start if you know very little about your subject. However, they are never allowed to cite it. They need to go far deeper into their subject than an encyclopedia for most things. I do not believe that can be called a ban. They are not allowed to cite any encyclopedia for me nor would they be encouraged to do so for most college classes. Otherwise, they will not go any further. It is merely a place to begin, not to end.
I agree with John. What is up with this grey on grey?
As a student, I have found that Wikipedia is, as you teachers have put it, a nice place “to get an overview of the subject matter,” and I don’t believe any censoring (perhaps discouraging or disallowing would be a better word) would help the matter at hand or stop students from trusting Wikipedia on any subject matter. However, the reliability of Wikipedia is something rightfully disputed. I myself have edited Wikipedia, and on a subject I knew little about (I posted a “stub” about a little-known author), and someone has gotten rid of all the information I posted since, thus showing how frequently and haphazardly Wikipedia is edited. Still, Wikipedia has appealed to many, many people, and for obvious reasons.
Rather than reading a detailed explanation on a subject in which the author of a web page specializes in, many people prefer to read an article that fits the “by the people, for the people” analogy. Those who study the unique phenomenon of the human mind seem to have concluded that as our society grows more and more advanced, technology-wise, that we become more and more lazy, but perhaps it’s not laziness, but simplicity, understanding, and a vastness of topics that draw so many people to Wikipedia, and rightfully so.
Virtually any well-known topic, no matter how controversial, has its place on Wikipedia, and the information is usually to-the-point and laid out in a way pleasing to the eyes and mind (speaking of things pleasing to the eyes, you teachers aren’t the only ones with a difficulty reading the grey-on-grey layout). Wikipedia is admired for its sheer convenience, as well as many other aspects, and while not a good place to go to get a thorough and concise look at a topic, it serves as a tool for information to manifest itself in the mind in a way simple compared to looking at giant chunks of tiny, detailed text. I agree that Wikipedia is a good starting point, but not a good place to end. Students should be able to use Wikipedia’s human-friendly layout to grasp the idea of a topic so they can then gain a better understanding of the topic through more detailed, professional information sources. Think of it as learning a very simple tune on an instrument and adding new notes and variations to embellish on that song to make improvements. Wikipedia’s information is the tune and the original sources of all this information and all those other professionally written online articles out there are the variations.
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