Wikipedia
Mar 23, 2008 Sources, Teaching, digital media
Like most TAs, I tell my students to stay away from Wikipedia when writing their essays. To be fair, I don’t simply condemn it as the source of all evil, I merely point out how problematic it is to rely on information posted anonymously unless it can be checked elsewhere and that encyclopedias and dictionaries, while very useful to get started, do not provide enough information to support the kind of essays they need to write in history courses.
A friend of mine argues that better than blankly forbidding the use of Wikipedia, we would do the students a better service by teaching them how to use Wikipedia effectively. She talks about creating an assignment that would require the students to do extensive research on a given topic and either create a Wikipedia entry for it, if that doesn’t exist, or edit the existing entry with the information they gathered. That would teach them that anybody can create a Wikipedia entry and perhaps help them use it more critically in the future.
While Wikipedia has a big no-no in many academic circles – and historians are perhaps the most critical of it – some articles suggest it’s not all bad:
David Parry, “Wikipedia and the new curriculum: digital literacy is knowing how we store what we know” in Science Progress, 11 Feb 2008.
Nicholson Baker, “The Charms of Wikipedia,” review of Wikipedia: The Missing Journal by John Broughton, in The New York Review of Books, 55 (4), published 20 March 2008.
Michael Booth, “Grading Wikipedia“, in The Dever Post, 30 March 2007.
All the articles above suggest we need not dismiss Wikipedia completely, that it can be very useful and its dynamic nature means that many subjects in it reflect some of the latest developments in a given field. An example is the entry on global warming, considered by specialists in the field to be “a great primer on the subject, suitable for just the kinds of use one might put to a traditional encyclopedia. Following the links takes the interested reader into greater and greater depth, probably further than any traditional encyclopedia…”(Scott Denning, Monfort Professor of Atomespheric Science).
I confess I have no prejudice against Wikipedia as I often find myself using it for general information and if I tell my students no to use it, it is simply because I don’t want them relying on either encyclopedias or textbooks to write their essays. But maybe we need to discuss more the reasons behind that.
Tags: Wikipedia
March 24th, 2008 at 4:11 am
I have more or less banned Wikipedia because the information is so unreliable and my students have no way of discerning its reliability. Instead I point my students to the Encyclopedia Britannica (also on-line) as a place to start looking for information on a topic. I actually have them do a research project where they start with a general encyclopedia, then move to a more specialized one, then use JSTOR to search for articles and book reviews and then finally search for monographs. It basically teaches them how to take a specific topic and research it using a variety of materials. At some point I’ve revise it to look at more web-based material.
March 25th, 2008 at 11:28 pm
I’m honoured that my advocacy for Wikipedia has made your blog! It’s also interesting to know that there are other folks out there who feel similarly.
To add a few comments…
My boyfriend tells me that Wikipedia is particularly good for mathematical and scientific concepts. Entries often go into substantial detail, but since they’re written for a non-specialist audience, they don’t use jargon or make assumptions about prior knowledge. Plus, you can click on terms you don’t know to look at their entries. In fact, in cutting-edge areas, Wikipedia is often more accurate than traditional encyclopedia which take years to publish. I suppose the parallel for history would be cases such as the online version of the DNB (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography) is more current and more frequently updated than the published version.
A strategy I’d recommend is to keep Wikipedia open when reading, and look up locations or people mentioned in the text. It’s great to be able to glance at a map of Florence or a portrait of Pope Pius IV as one reads about them.
Another perk of Wikipedia is that when you encounter a typo, you can just correct it!